BURST
A woman whose daughter was moved from the Catholic St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver to have an assisted death in a hospice testified that the experience made her feel like she could do nothing to help as someone beat her daughter.
“It makes me feel like her morality was attacked,” Gaye O’Neill told the B.C. Supreme Court hearing for the lawsuit she filed against the hospital, its operator, Providence Health Care, and the B.C. government.
Her daughter, Samantha (Sam) O’Neill, died at age 34 from terminal cancer after spending a year after her diagnosis at the downtown Vancouver hospital.
When she chose assisted dying, Providence, which is exempt from providing the procedure at its facilities because of a constitutionally protected religious freedom, had her transferred to a hospice.
Testifying at Day 2 of the trial before Chief Justice Ronald Skolrood, O’Neill was asked by her lawyer how the transfer made her feel.
“We believe our God is all loving and choosing to die from MAID isn’t a sin,” she said. “It makes us feel that she was made to feel less than she is.”
She likened it to watching a child being pushed down in the playground and seeking help from the principal and “they come over and kick them,” she said.
“That’s how appalling it is to me. And I’ve got to watch them beat them up. That’s how I feel.”
She also described how “horrible” it was to walk into Sam’s room at St. Paul’s the last time she spoke to her, just before her transfer to the hospice on April 4, 2023, the same day a doctor there helped her die.
When O’Neill saw her sitting on a commode in her room, “I was absolutely appalled and horrified and embarrassed for her,” she said.
She and Sam’s father, Jim, filed the lawsuit, along with pro-assisted-dying Dying with Dignity and a former Providence palliative care doctor, to challenge the exemption under Canada’s Charter of Rights that allows Providence to ban assisted dying in their facilities because of the belief that it’s morally wrong.
Under cross-examination by a Providence lawyer, O’Neill agreed that she had never heard any hospital staff disrespect her daughter and she said Sam liked them and the feeling was mutual.
Despite her testimony that she felt the ban on assisted dying was an attack on Sam’s morality, “Nobody at the staff of Providence ever said anything that was disrespectful of your daughter’s morality, did they?” he asked.
“The doctors and the nurses were wonderful,” said O’Neill.
She had also said the transfer was harmful to her daughter and cut short the time she had to say goodbye to family and friends before being sedated before for the trip to the hospice.
But the lawyer suggested to her in questioning that Sam’s care was agreed upon by her and staff and that she wanted to keep short her visits with them until just before the transfer.
“Everything you saw, you understood to be the result of choices Sam had made?” he asked.
“I can’t answer that,” said O’Neill, who said Sam had chosen not to see her mother for the year before her death, until the last day.
Also on Monday, a lawyer acting for the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority, which is among the defendants, had asked the court to limit any evidence from the doctors expected to testify for Dying with Dignity to observations and to exclude opinions.
Skolrood said he would rule on that application, opposed by the plaintiffs, on Wednesday.
The trial continues.