When Death Becomes Therapy (for Mental Illness): Canada’s Rapid Normalization of Health Care Provider Ending of Life
- Date
- February 15, 2024
- Time
- 12:00 PM EST - 1:00 PM EST
- Location
- POD-457 | Lunch will be provided
- Open To
- Lincoln Alexander School of Law Community
In this presentation, Professor Trudo Lemmens will explain how and why Canada’s MAiD practice has, in a very short period of time, gone beyond the most liberal euthanasia regimes in the world, in terms of numbers and scope of practice. He will discuss how the flawed rhetoric of a constitutional right to MAiD has contributed to an over-emphasis in law, professional guidance, and in practice, on the right to access death as therapy, rather than the right to protection against premature death. He will also reflect on what we can learn from how Canada’s law and health professional practice has embraced death as medical therapy.
Speaker
Trudo Lemmens is Professor and Scholl Chair in Health Law and Policy at the Faculty of Law and the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. He has co-authored and co-edited a variety of publications, and contributed numerous chapters and articles to leading national and international law, policy, science, medicine, and bioethics journals.
Lemmens was a member of the Council of Canadian Academies’ expert panel on Medical Assistance in Dying, testified as an expert witness for the federal Attorney General in the Truchon and Lamb cases, and has appeared before Canadian Parliamentary committees mandated to discuss draft legislation and the review of the practice, and has also been consulted as an expert on these issues internationally. As a member of an expert committee for the Jersey Government, he co-authored a report on legal and ethical issues for different options of legalized Assisted Dying.
Lemmens is currently a member of a MAiD Death Review Panel of Ontario’s Coroner Office and a member of an academic content committee for a Nuffield Council Project on Assisted Dying.