A couple of days ago, someone sent me a friend request on Facebook. After I accepted, we exchanged a few pleasantries and info – and then he mentioned something about a blog. I’m always happy to find other thinkers and writers on the net that I can read and that I can point others to. I’m happy to say that my newest Facebook friend Adrian Rhodes is also the newest of those bloggers I can point to – and read for myself. Adrian describes himself as a social commentator/researcher/person of hidden disabilities – and his blog covers a fairly wide range of topics. Two recent ones are centered on the assisted suicide/euthanasia debate in Canada. The full title of his blog is “Flanoor blog: observations on life.”
Just yesterday, Adrian posted a response to an op-ed that appeared in the Toronto Star earlier this summer. Here’s an excerpt:
Last week, I wrote about Gifford-Jones’ piece in the Toronto Sun extolling the virtues of assisted suicide/euthanasia. I pointed out that there were problems with his position: namely, lack of real-world connections, saying there were no problems with medically provided death.In this post, I point out there is an alternative way of looking at the issue: cost savings. It is said that our medical system is broke. So when Thomas Walkom ran a column in the Toronto Star on Saturday June 15, 2013, he made some good points no-one else ever seemed to make: it’s all about the money. Walkom provides a more cogent argument than Jones: he does not resort to name-calling or ad hominem attacks in his piece. This apparent distance makes the tone of his article a little easier to take.For example, Walkom points out that “Quebec, however, is talking about more than assisted suicide. Its Bill 52 would allow doctors to administer the lethal dose.” [A8] This is different than standing by while an infant is starved to death over a course of days or weeks. It is this activity that some doctors find unpalatable: the notion that killing has become part of curing. And that is how Bill 52 is stated: euthanasia is now considered part of palliative care in Quebec’s Bill.
This was a difficult review to write, not because of the topic of bioethics, nor because of the potential emotional impact of the subject, but because this book is hard to categorize. Is it history, ethics, anthropology or philosophy? It is in fact all this, because Tom Koch, a gerontologist and ethicist, is so far-ranging over this topic at hand.His basic thesis is simple: the promises of professional ethicists have not come true. The reason is also simple: ethicists convinced us that traditional ethics of care first for patients has been hijacked in the favour of money and research. This is a theme to which Koch returns time and again in his book.For anyone interested in ethics, medical care, life issues or the patient experience in a theoretical perspective, this is a good book. It helps that Koch is Canadian, because he has a Canadian awareness that is sometimes lacking in books of this type. Koch takes us through a potted philosophy course, highlighting Kant and Mill, showing how these philosophers were misinterpreted to suit the ideology of ethicists in favour of research and money.