Dr. Feargal Twomey:

Patient autonomy and choice are important but cannot be absolute. As Dr. Lyne said, patient choice should be supported where reasonable. There needs to be joint decision-making between a patient and his or her healthcare team, which often but not always includes a doctor. An analogy I give is if I am in an aeroplane flying somewhere, when the seatbelt sign goes off I cannot go up and open the front door of the plane because I want to. That is because of the risk of harm to others. My concern about the inability for safeguards to be maintained leads me to say the only true safeguard is that the law does not change, which is an option for this committee to decide upon.