When seeking to convince a wary public to legalize assisted suicide, euthanasia pushers ooze with promises and assurances that it will only be a last resort — never actually a legal requirement — and that doctors and religious facilities can always opt out. But once euthanasia consciousness is widely accepted by a population, we find that these promises were made to be broken.

In Oregon, doctors are protected in law if they don’t wish to assist suicides, and religious medical institutions can legally opt out — which many do. That doesn’t sit well with David Grube, a national medical director for Compassion and Choices — the George Soros-funded organization that promotes assisted suicide and facilitated death. Writing an op-ed in the Eugene, Oregon, Register Guard, he says he wants religious medical facilities forced into cooperation. From the article:

However, some dying and suffering Oregonians are still not allowed the choice of a death with dignity as they would define it. Some private institutions, particularly those owned and operated by religious institutions, do not allow their employed staff (physicians, hospice workers, etc.) to participate in the process.

You see, there can never be enough assisted suicides. Actually, Compassion and Choices has a list of death doctors ideologically predisposed to lethally prescribe. Indeed, the majority of Oregon’s assisted suicides have the hemlockers’ fingerprints on them.

What to do? Coerce, of course.

No physician who is personally opposed to helping her or his competent and dying patients end their suffering is obliged to participate. But all physicians should consider referring their patients when the occasion arises — and, in my opinion, no institution should prevent their medical providers from considering legal medical decisions. The state of Oregon, not the church, licenses physicians and determines their competencies and privileges.

Institutions have the right to choose who can be on their medical staffs. Forcing a Catholic hospital (say) to employ or give staffing privileges to death doctors would violate the free exercise of religion, the right to free association, and all the (false) assurances made by the right-to-die crowd when they cajole people into legalizing prescribed death.

Lest you think religious institutions will never be forced to act lethally, they already are in Quebec, where euthanasia is euphemistically called “aid in dying.” From all appearances, that’s an approach that will be taken throughout Canada when the euthanasia-is-a-right Supreme Court decision goes into effect nationally. This despite the Canadian Charter’s guarantee of “freedom of conscience and religion.”

Image: Catholic Medical Center, Manchester, NH, by John Phelan (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Cross-posted at The Corner.