Years ago, I had the opportunity to talk to a few hundred Grade 11 and 12 students from across Regina, all of whom were interested in becoming health-care professionals, and one of them asked me why I chose to be a doctor. “Sometimes I am able to save a life,” I answered, “sometimes I relieve suffering, but what draws me to this work is the privilege of accompanying a person on what is often the worst day of their life.” My daughter, high-school-aged at the time, was somewhere in the audience, near the back of the room. She has gone on to graduate from medical school and join me as a physician. I owe it to her to weigh in on some of the most important and difficult moral and ethical issues that affect our profession.

As a healthcare provider, I am drawn by the principles that my job upholds: a reverence for life and concern for the good of the person. But increasingly, the cultural values that have historically affirmed the value of life are being subjugated to newer North American cultural values that permit an individual to choose their own death, or even the death of someone else. The rights of choice are increasingly imposed as duties of service upon a medical profession that has traditionally rejected death as a therapeutic option. I want to help work through these issues, so the duty to provide death as a treatment option will not be forced on my daughter and her generation of physicians.

David Kopriva MDCM, FRCS(C)

Vascular Surgeon

Clinical Associate Professor of Surgery, University of Saskatchewan