Samantha O’Neill wanted to die with dignity. A taxpayer-funded Catholic hospital wouldn't let her.

Jun 19, 2024

Samantha O’Neill died of cervical cancer last year at the age of 34.

Despite chemotherapy and radiation, her disease was terminal, and the pain quickly became overwhelming. She ended up going to the closest hospital for treatment and soon decided to make use of Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) law, which has been legal since 2016. She wanted to end life on her own terms instead of letting the disease have the final say.

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Unfortunately, the taxpayer-funded hospital she was at to treat her cancer, St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver, was run by a Catholic organization called Providence Health Care. The Catholic Church, of course, opposes the practice of euthanasia and would rather see patients suffer from incurable diseases than allow them to seek peace. They also won’t allow outside physicians to come into the hospital to do that work—which suggests the hospital itself has the legal right to refuse to provide certain types of care. (In Canada, individual physicians have conscientious objection rights.)

So the hospital told O’Neill she would have to go somewhere else to get the treatment she wanted. But by that point, movement was all but impossible.

It made the final hours of her life even worse than they already were:

O’Neill was in excruciating pain — her lumbar ribs had fractured, a side-effect of the osteoporosis caused by the chemotherapy.

So she was medicated to unconsciousness before being lifted onto a gurney and driven by ambulance to St. John Hospice. She did not regain consciousness again before she was given the life-ending medication, [cousin Taryn] Bodrug said, so the transfer robbed her of her final hours with her parents, siblings and friends.

“Instead of having a goodbye, where she could just say goodbye to friends and family, she had to get heavily medicated to withstand the pain of just getting to the appointment,” her cousin said.

She was supposed to have death with dignity. She wasn’t allowed to have it because a Catholic hospital said she deserved to suffer.

Several months later, the British Columbia Health Ministry signed a deal with Providence Health to alleviate this kind of problem in the future: they would allow a secular health care provider (Vancouver Coastal Health) to set up shop just outside the Catholic hospital in order to take care of all the problems the Catholic hospital refused to solve, including MAiD.

But why the hell was the government creating this makeshift “solution” when the Catholic hospital was receiving taxpayer money? Why prop up a religious hospital that wasn’t serving the public?

Samantha’s parents, Gaye and Jim O’Neill, are now suing the BC Health Ministry, Providence Health Care, and Vancouver Coastal Health. They say the government allowing a Catholic hospital to block their daughter’s ability to access MAiD “is an unjustifiable interference with their rights.” Furthermore, building a new secular facility nearby doesn’t resolve the issues:

Dying with Dignity Canada, which is named as a plaintiff in the lawsuit, says the new space has not yet been built and if it had been built during Samantha’s hospital stay, it wouldn’t have made a difference for her case because she still would have had to be placed on a stretcher and moved to the other facility — a move that would have caused Samantha pain, according to its vice chairwoman, Daphne Gilbert, a University of Ottawa law professor.

She also said moving a patient who requests MAID in a faith-based facility “stigmatizes” the patient because “you’re being told what you’re requesting is sinful.”

The lawsuit says very clearly that the Catholic hospital was interfering with O’Neill’s medical care. When the two are in conflict, the patient’s (legal) needs must come before a hospital’s religious dogma. The government’s job is to be neutral, not side with Catholics when they want a patient to remain in pain.

Dr. Jyothi Jayaraman, a palliative care doctor who’s also a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said that while she respects doctors’ rights to be conscientious objectors when it comes to ending someone’s life, she’s a “conscientious participant.” She believes it’s her duty to help patients end life on their own terms. And yet the hospital would never allow her to practice such care in their facilities.

The question now is whether a faith-based, taxpayer-funded hospital should be exempt from laws that involve patient care.

“Sam suffered because her beliefs did not align with that of a religious group,” said Gaye and Jim O’Neill. “There was no peace in Sam’s passing. It was violent and cruel. We don’t know if we will ever heal from this experience, but we know we owe it to Sam to make sure this never happens to another family.”