CLC Blog

CLC Blog

Here again

HERE AGAIN.

Over the course of the last several years, the pro-life movement has predicted today’s battle against euthanasia and assisted suicide.  We’ve had many opposed to our work. We’ve also had many allies in this battle of ideas. Some columnists, media, jurists and Senators have been with us and only six years ago, almost 80% of Members of Parliament voted against the last euthanasia bill. But that was then. This is now.

Today, Canadians seem to be for ‘medical aid in dying’, that beautiful new euphemism for killing. They are wielding the longer sword in this battle. The tip of that sword will be the medical practitioners themselves.

Conscience Rights are being denied to doctors, registered nurses, registered nurse practitioners and probably many others in healthcare who can’t imagine what will be asked of them one day. I don’t think most Canadians can imagine what will be asked of them one day either.

With this in mind, I’ve dug up an old quote. We have found ourselves back here again. God help us.

Rather than compromise their profession and co-operate with Hitler’s “Physician’s Bureau” the “Dutch Physician’s resistance” placed themselves at risk, some were tortured, some killed and some just disappeared, but they would not bow to the Nazi euthanasia juggernaut.

When we discontinued our membership in our Dutch Medical Society last September it was our intention, as you are undoubtedly aware, to express our conviction that the function of the physician is born of his own high moral and spiritual norms, and therefore should be free from political control.

 No matter how much the ideas of constitutions and nations have changed over the course of time, the physician has always remained the undisputed protector of two holy and precious values; the respect for life and charity toward the sick human being. From time immemorial until the present the vocation of the physician has been a vocation of confidence, indeed a priestly vocation………

…If you now put us, physicians under the discipline of a civil service body endowed with authoritarian power, we have every reason to fear that its officials to whom our ideas and sensibilities are utterly foreign, will meddle with the treatment of our sick, and will demand our direct or indirect co-operation in the taking of measures, which are in conflict with our conscience as well as our professional views….

Knowing ourselves bound by the oath or solemn vow of acceptance of our task as physicians, we consider it our duty to inform you that we shall remain faithful to our high standards which have been the foundation of our profession since time immemorial, and that in the exercise of our profession we shall only be motivated by considerations which are justified by our conscience, our sense of duty and our medical science."

- “Repression and Resistance – The Netherlands in Time of War,” Vol.2p352. Translated by Conrad W. Baars, M.D.

 

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