Margaret Somerville, AM, FRSC is an Australian/Canadian ethicist and academic. She is the Samuel Gale Professor of Law, Professor in the Faculty of Medicine, and the Founding Director of the Faculty of Law's Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law at McGill University. She is the author of The Ethical Imagination: CBC Massey Lectures, Death Talk: The Case Against Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide, The Ethical Canary: Science, Society, and the Human Spirit, and Do We Care?.
There are deeply-rooted cultural reasons why the Western world returns again and again to euthanasia as a solution to the problems of suffering and death.
Date posted: 2009-10-31
Should adopted children have the right to be connected in some way to their biological parents?
Date posted: 2009-10-31
Euthanasia is back in the news with the Quebec College of Physicians "tentatively proposing" legalized euthanasia. The college says that it could be seen "as part of appropriate care in certain particular circumstances." An Ottawa Citizen editorial interprets this to say: "Terminally ill patients sometimes require increased dosages of painkillers to alleviate their pain although that can prove fatal. It certainly happens across the country that terminally ill patients are sometimes quietly given more painkillers despite the risk that they could die as a result. Many people would conclude that is the most humane course of action." We can all endorse the last sentence: People in pain have a right to fully adequate pain- relief treatment. But that does not entail endorsing euthanasia, as pro-euthanasia advocates propose.
Date posted: 2009-09-16
Knowing who our close biological relatives are and relating to them is central to how we form our human identity, relate to others and the world, and find meaning in life. Children - and their descendants - who don't know their genetic origins cannot sense themselves as embedded in a web of people, past, present and future, through whom they can trace the thread of life's passage down the generations to them. As far as we know, humans are the only animals who experience genetic relationships as integral to their sense of themselves.
Date posted: 2009-07-18
Michael Cook reports that new legislation in Victoria, Australia, "decriminalises abortion and forces doctors with a conscientious objection to refer a woman to a doctor who will do an abortion. In the event of an 'emergency' abortion . . . regardless of their moral qualms, doctors must do [an abortion] themselves. Victorian nurses will be in an even worse predicament. They must participate in an abortion if ordered by their boss." The same scenario, in a somewhat softer version, is being played out in the United States and Canada. Here, codes of professional conduct or regulations, rather than legislation, are being proposed to limit freedom of conscience rights with respect to abortion.
Date posted: 2009-06-19
Euthanasia and assisted suicide involve extinguishing human life. Research shows that humans have a basic instinct against killing other humans, which might be a source of the widely shared moral intuition that it's wrong to do so. People who oppose euthanasia and assisted-suicide believe these interventions are inherently wrong - they can't be morally justified, and that even compassionate motives do not make them ethically acceptable - the ends do not justify the means.
Date posted: 2009-06-03