Thursday, August 10, 2023

Catholic hospital hires euthanasia doctor as director of palliative care.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Providence Hospital Kingston
The Catholic Register reported on August 10, 2023 that a Catholic hospital, Providence Hospital in Kingston, Ont., has hired a euthanasia providing doctor to be its Director of Palliative Care. This doctor has stated that every healthcare institution should provide euthanasia and she opposes conscience rights for medical professionals.

Anna Farrow from the Catholic Register reported:

Dr. Danielle Kain is a palliative care specialist who is Associate Professor and Division Co-Chair of Palliative Medicine at Queen’s University. She was appointed to the directorship of palliative care at Providence Hospital in Kingston, Ont., July 1.

The Kingston hospital is one of 22 health care institutions in Ontario under the sponsorship of Catholic Health Sponsors of Ontario (CHSO). The CHSO was formed in 1998 to assume responsibility for institutions formerly under the guidance and management of Congregations of religious Sisters.

Kain is both a staunch proponent and practitioner of euthanasia.

In a 2018 Canadian Medical Association Journal article, Kain and a colleague published a personal reflection on MAID, citing two individual cases in which they were involved.

“At the ensuing team debrief,” Kain wrote, “I was struck by how rare it is for health care providers to be so deeply moved together; we realized that a medically assisted death could be both poignant and peaceful.”

On social media Kain has argued that all publicly funded institutions, including Catholic hospitals, should be compelled to offer MAiD. She has also expressed support for the Effective Referral Policy: doctors who have conscientious objections to euthanasia must refer patients to MAiD-offering doctors. In a 2016 Twitter post, Kain wrote, “making an effective referral is not an infringement of rights.” In Catholic ethics, a MAiD referral would constitute a proximate material cooperation with an immoral act.

A variety of professional associations of Canadian Catholic health care providers, including the Canadian Federation of Catholic Physicians, have made appeals to both the CHSO and the local ordinary, Archbishop Michael Mulhall, to intervene.

Here is the link to the Catholic Register article.

Contact Archbishop Michael Mulhall at: archbishop@archkingston.ca or leave a message at: 613-548-4461


On June 14, 2023 I published the article: Québec forces palliative care homes to provide euthanasia. This article outlines how Québec's expanded euthanasia legislation (Bill 11) requires that all palliative care institutions provide euthanasia.

On June 27, 2023 I published the article: Euthanasia lobby pressures BC government to force Catholic hospitals to provide euthanasiaThe euthanasia lobby concerned has a campaign to force St Paul's Hospital in Vancouver to provide euthanasia. This is not the first attempt by the euthanasia lobby to force Catholic hospitals to kill by euthanasia.

The decision to hire Dr. Kain as the Director of Palliative Care at Providence Hospital in Kingston Ontario is particularly concerning considering the pressure that the euthanasia lobby is placing on provincial governments to force religiously affiliated hospitals to provide euthanasia.


Dr. Kain stated in the past that all publicly funded medical institutions should provide euthanasia.

 

3 comments:

SB from Friends For Life Alliance said...

The archbishop should direct the hospital to let this person go or stop holding itself out as Catholic. The public should not be misled.

gordon friesen said...

One concern has been religious institutions being pressured to accommodate MAID. Apparently we are now beyond that. Religious institutions are proactively getting with the program.

In a way, we should take this as a benefit. By realizing that we would be making a terrible mistake to pin our hopes on the religious exemption.

A little off-topic but still relevant is our experience in Quebec with Catholic schools. first the bulk of these schools (virtually all schools at the time) were appropriated as public schools. Then the hold-outs were increasingly held hostage to funding grants. I will not detail the ways in which those schools now violate Catholic doctrine. Suffice it to say that the assimilation to progressive culture is pretty well complete. It is therefore not surprising to see hospitals, also, well along on that trajectory.

Quite clearly, our only hope of direct action in this field lies through purely private initiatives. Any reliance upon public funds and the game is over. Nor can philanthropy alone suffice. It is my belief that we must embrace for-profit initiatives which will at least offer life-centered medicine to those willing and able to pay for it.

Artificial equity must not be allowed to stand in the way. Extending access must come in two steps: first the establishment of a viable life-centered model which demonstrates majority patient demand; second, a political operation aimed at shaming the government into providing that care to everyone --to the extent possible-- and incidentally backing-off the death-medicine paradigm, which is currently dominating the public space.

Quite a program for the younger generation!

Anonymous said...

Tolerance is not the same as acquiescence.One is bravery, the other is cowardice.

Dcn Bill Gallerizzo