In the TV ad, a narrator says Gill was fired for pushing “dangerous ideas, advocating unlawful medical practices and methods a hospital said would put lives in danger.”
Gill, an emergency-room physician in Bloomington, publicly supported physician-assisted suicide more than a decade ago. In one letter to the editor of The Pantagraph of Bloomington-Normal in February 1998, he said surveys at the time showed that 60 percent to 70 percent of Americans felt physician-assisted suicide should be legalized. He also said a law proposed in Illinois at the time had safeguards against “using physician-assisted suicide as anything other than merciful relief of the otherwise unavoidable agony that dying is for some patients.” […]
According to Pantagraph stories, Gill was scheduled to begin work at the OSF Medical Group in Clinton in January 1999 after leaving a family practice job in Morton. He was terminated before he began, and a spokeswoman for OSF Medical System said at the time it was because his December 1998 letter brought to light that Gill “embraces and advocates medical treatment methods that are unlawful in this state and that are not acceptable by community medical standards.”
OSF Healthcare also said that Gill damaged OSF’s reputation by publicizing viewpoints that contradicted the system’s Roman Catholic principles.
Gill sued and reached a settlement. He calls the ad “slanderous.” But I’m not sure why. Watch it yourself [Better version uploaded]…
