Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, witnesses.
I guess I want to look at it from the medical side and try to find the breakdown in this consent. The medical profession's model is “Do no harm”. I find that doctors are very, very cautious. They are very afraid of making a mistake. If you've ever had surgery, you know all of the steps you've got to go through before they actually perform a surgery. They do not want to look at losing their licence; there's insurance, there are lawsuits, there are all kinds of things. They're very concerned about doing the right thing. So consent is extremely important.
Here we have a case of a female who's pregnant for nine months. Now normally there is a relationship built up between the mother-to-be and her family doctor or a doctor of some sort. During the nine months of pregnancy, there are sonograms and testing done. There are all kinds of things that have to be done. Usually that's a period where a relationship is built, and in that relationship the pregnancy is talked about: how's it going; do we have to be careful about this; what's your nutrition? They talk about how the pregnancy is going to go. They talk about the period after the pregnancy. So there's a lot of communication going on.
I'm wondering what's going on in that process where a fair number of women are making a decision that they either feel they're forced to make or that they don't want to make, when they've had this long period of time to have these discussions to build trust with their doctor, to get informed consent, to talk it through with other people in their family. What's going on? Why isn't the consent breaking down? There seems to be enough time. This is not a rushed thing. This is not like, okay, you've just been in a car accident, you're rushed to the doctor and you've got to do this thing. You've got 10 seconds to make a decision because it's life and death. This is a long process.
Can you give us some background? When you've got all this time and all this stuff available, why are these decisions happening this way? It's not just one doctor; it seems that it's a bigger thing than this. It's happening in multiple cities. It's across Canada. Can you give us some background on why it's not happening the way we would normally think it would happen, with a good decision being made?