Seriously ill children under 16 may be forced to take life-saving medical treatment against their wishes - but only after their maturity and viewpoint have been carefully considered, the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled.
OTTAWA — A Supreme Court ruling placing much of Canada's burgeoning fertility industry under provincial control leaves an enormous gap in the regulation of artificial procreation and exposes women who use the technologies and the children born from them to potential harm, critics say. A sharply divided court struck down key federal powers to regulate assisted human reproduction Wednesday, concluding that several parts of a new law fall under provincial jurisdiction over health care. The ruling effectively stops a federal move toward national standards and guts Assisted Human Reproduction Canada — an embattled federal agency that was struck four years ago to monitor how assisted procreation is carried out at more than two dozen fertility clinics across the country.
The Supreme Court of Canada will go ahead later this year and set a legal framework for when patients in a vegetative state can be withdrawn from life support. The court rejected a request this morning from the family of a severely ill Toronto man, Hassan Rasouli, to withdraw the case from its docket on the grounds that Mr. Rasouli recently passed into a higher degree of consciousness.
The Supreme Court of Canada heard the case of Toronto patient Hassan Rasouli Monday, which centres on the complex and often deeply painful issue of who should decide end-of-life care. With an aging demographic, increased life expectancy and ever more sophisticated technological interventions, these kinds of cases will almost certainly become more frequent. This is a welcome chance for the country’s highest court to clarify how end-of-life treatment should proceed when a physician and a patient’s family disagree.