MAiD Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide

Members of Ontario’s government-appointed medical assistance in dying (MAID) review panel are raising concerns about doctors’ eligibility determinations under the expanded rules, noting that in some cases, patients qualified for assisted death after refusing available health care.

The review of three recent MAID cases has prompted “significant” discussion among members of Ontario’s MAID Death Review Committee, as some of the patients involved had conditions that could have improved if they had accepted care, according to the committee’s latest report, titled “Evaluating Incurability, Advanced State of Irreversible Decline in Capability, and Reasonably Foreseeable Natural Death.”

A severely obese woman in her 60s who sought euthanasia due to her “no longer having a will to live” and a widower whose request to have his life ended was mainly driven by emotional distress and grief over his dead spouse are the latest cases to draw concerns that some doctors are taking an overly broad interpretation of the law.

JOLIETTE – In nearly 30 years as a palliative care physician, Dr. Nathalie Allard has provided end-of-life care in busy hospital hallways, and consulted with families with only a curtain separating them from sick people screaming or vomiting on the other side.

On Thursday, she attended the opening of a brand-new palliative care facility northeast of Montreal that represents the kind of place where she wants to work and, one day, to die.

“It’s my workplace — and my final resting place, probably,” she said cheerfully while giving a tour. “Me, I’m going to die.”

A growing demand for MAID. From who and for what reasons exactly?

Almost half of Canadians who sought medical assistance in dying (MAID) in 2023 whose death was not reasonably foreseeable cited “isolation or loneliness” as part of their eligibility criteria, according to Canada’s annual report on euthanasia.

The Fifth Annual Report on Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada found that 21.1 percent of Canadians in the Track 1 category, where their deaths were “reasonably foreseeable,” cited loneliness and isolation as a reason for seeking MAID. For Track 2, that number was 47.1 percent.

In the brilliant book MASH, by Richard Hooker (real name H. Richard Hornberger), Captain Walter “The Painless Pole” Waldowski, a brilliant, handsome, and priapic surgical dentist, suffers from what today would be diagnosed as bipolarism, periodically becoming deeply depressed. His doctor friends offer him the ultimate suicide, complete with a huge party and a painless final shot. In fact, it’s a con, for they simply knock him out to help him sleep off his depression, and they even give the well-endowed dentist a blue ribbon award while he sleeps. All ends well.

Scott Adams, author of the comic strip Dilbert, recently disclosed that he had planned to end his life due to the pain of his untreatable cancer. In May, he announced that he only expected to live a few more months. At the time, alternative treatments were no help.

He scheduled his suicide for June 29.

People across the United States have endured rushed or premature attempts to remove their organs. Some were gasping, crying or showing other signs of life.

A surgeon made an incision in her chest and sawed through her breastbone.

That’s when the doctors discovered her heart was beating. She appeared to be breathing. They were slicing into Ms. Hawkins while she was alive.

Last spring at a small Alabama hospital, a team of transplant surgeons prepared to cut into Misty Hawkins. The clock was ticking. Her organs wouldn’t be usable for much longer.

Days earlier, she had been a vibrant 42-year-old with a playful sense of humor and a love for the Thunder Beach Motorcycle Rally. But after Ms. Hawkins choked while eating and fell into a coma, her mother decided to take her off life support and donate her organs. She was removed from a ventilator and, after 103 minutes, declared dead.

Glenn Beck speaks with Delta Hospice Society Executive Director Angelina Ireland about Canada’s growing fascism.

h/t handy n’ handsome!

The inhuman campaign to cull the elderly, disabled and mentally infirm lives on in ‘progressive’ clothing.

In a letter dated 1 October 1940, Helene M wrote to her father from an asylum in the southern German town of Stetten (1). An epileptic, Helene had been chosen for ‘transport to another facility’. But, in the context of Nazi Germany, she knew what that really meant.

‘Today I must write these words of farewell as I leave this earthly life for an eternal home’, she wrote. ‘I do not want to part from you without asking you and all my dear brothers and sisters once more for forgiveness, for all that I have failed you in throughout my whole life. May the dear Lord God accept my illness and this sacrifice as a penance for this.’

Roger Foley is a leading activist for the rights of the disabled, including his own. A hero to associations for the disabled, he is often considered a thorn in the side of health bureaucrats. Recently, an account of his case — emanating more sympathy for the bureaucrats than for Foley, alas — was prominently featured in these pages.

Foley suffers from a grave neurodegenerative affliction, spinocerebellar ataxia, which renders him almost completely physically dependent on caregivers. Cognitively normal and technologically skilled, he enjoys a rich life of the mind. In spite of what most Canadians would consider the grimmest of circumstances — which shamefully includes persistent reminders from carers that he has a right to euthanasia, which he just as persistently rebuffs — Foley remains life-affirming and bullish in pursuit of more humane and empowering care conditions.

On Sunday the New York Times Magazine published a feature about Canada’s legal regime for assisted suicide, wrapping large volumes of reporting on law, ethics and medicine around the individual story of Paula Ritchie, an Ontario woman who sought and received “MAiD” after an unhappy life full of pain and misery.

Katie Engelhart’s story plays pretty fair with an explosive social issue that is of increasing global concern. She knows the NYT’s world audience is aware of Canada’s avant-garde experiment with the facilitation of medical suicide for patients who don’t have terminal illnesses, and she doesn’t stack the deck either way.