This week a judge of the B.C. Supreme Court (reminder: that’s a superior trial court, not an appellate court) heard a case that has the potential to further expand the Canadian empire of assisted suicide. The new battleground is “institutional religious objections,” or IROs, which is what the pro-euthanasia forces call them because they love acronyms so much. Most Catholic hospitals (and some hospices) have rules against administering euthanasia on the premises, which sometimes leads to very sick people undergoing what Dying with Dignity calls “forced transfers” to other facilities at the eleventh hour. The parents of one such patient are now suing B.C.’s Providence Health Care, the umbrella agency that operates the province’s legacy Catholic health institutions. Read More