Each Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) practitioner is meant to follow the criminal law. Yet Dirk Huyer, Ontario’s chief coroner, at first publicly, and then for years privately, warned that there is a “pattern of noncompliance” by physicians and nurses with the criminal law on MAID. More than 428 flagged cases later, as I wrote in a recent investigative report for The New Atlantis, no one is listening.
The Doctor Who Helped Me Understand My Mom’s Choice to Die
Earlier this year, my mother ended her life via medical aid in dying, also known as MAID. She had A.L.S., so she was suffering in many ways, and her choice to die in this manner felt right. Probably because it felt that way, in the time leading up to her death I didn’t have many unanswered questions about MAID. I knew it was legal nationwide in Canada, where I’m from and where my mom lived. (There it’s called medical assistance in dying, and unlike in the United States, patients can apply for it when their disease is nonterminal, as long as they have a “grievous and irremediable medical condition.”) I was also aware that in the United States MAID was legal in only 10 states and the District of Columbia. That’s pretty much what I knew, and that was enough.
Ontario’s euthanasia regulators have tracked 428 cases of possible criminal violations — and not referred a single case to law enforcement, say leaked documents.
For years, there have been clear signals that euthanasia providers in Canada may be breaking the law and getting away with it. That is the finding of the officials who are responsible for monitoring euthanasia deaths to ensure compliance in the province of Ontario. Newly uncovered reports reveal that these authorities have thus far counted over 400 apparent violations — and have kept this information from the public and not pursued a single criminal charge, even against repeat violators and “blatant” offenders.
h/t DB
The president of Sarco’s operator The Last Resort, Dr Florian Willet, remains in custody after being arrested along with several other people nearby. Willet was the only person present when the woman died.
The inventor of the Sarco, Philip Nitschke, followed the process by video call but was unable to catch all of it due to technical difficulties.
This, from a report issued by the Ontario chief coroner’s office on how medical assistance in dying (MAID) is being carried out in this province:
Mr. A, “a male in his 40s,” was suffering from inflammatory bowel disease. He also had “a history of mental illness, previous episodes of suicidality, and ongoing alcohol and opioid misuse.” No one offered him treatment for his addictions, but a psychiatrist gave him information about MAID. He was approved for death under what’s known as “Track 2” — cases where death is not reasonably foreseeable. A MAID provider personally drove him to the place where he was given an assisted death.
“If you establish and apply the principle that you can kill ‘unproductive’ fellow human beings then woe betide us all when we become old and frail!… it is only necessary for some secret edict to order that the method developed for the mentally ill should be extended to other ‘unproductive’ people.” ~ Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen
There’s a big difference between what we imagine about Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) in Canada and what actually happens to patients.
In 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada’s Carter decision overturned the ban on physician-assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia for specific patients. The SCC cited “grievous and irremediable medical conditions” and “enduring suffering that is intolerable to the individual” as the criteria for obtaining MAID. The 2016 legislation that followed upon the decision required that death be “reasonably foreseeable.” But today, we see MAID offered proactively to vulnerable patients as part of the range of “treatment” options, and in situations where death is nowhere in sight. If we were first slipping down the terminal illness slope with increasing MAID usage, we’re now skiing down another hill altogether.
An American woman who is believed to be the first person to die inside a controversial “suicide pod” in a Swiss forest was found with marks around her neck resembling strangulation injuries, according to a prosecutor’s statement.
The woman, then 64, allegedly traveled to Switzerland with the intention of using the so-called Sarco pod, a capsule that replaces oxygen inside the pod with nitrogen to induce death by hypoxia.
Scheme originally intended for terminally ill has been expanded, with one patient offered it for hearing loss, leaked call reveals
Assisted dying is being abused in Canada with doctors coercing patients into ending their lives, members of the group who helped to legalise it have admitted.
Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) was introduced for the terminally ill in Canada in 2016 after a campaign group took a case to the country’s supreme court.
Assisted dying has since been rapidly expanded, with disabled people given access in 2021 and those with mental health conditions set to join them by 2027.
Federal Health Minister Mark Holland says Ottawa will not be contesting Quebec’s law that allows advance requests for medical assistance in dying (MAID).
Instead, the federal government will launch a countrywide consultation on the issue next month, with a report set to be published in March 2025.
The province passed a law updating its assisted-dying legislation last year, but delayed accepting advance requests so that the Criminal Code could be amended.
A Nova Scotia grandmother has said that doctors offered her euthanasia three times while she was undergoing cancer treatment, making her feel that she was “better off dead.”
In an October video for the Christian Medical and Dental Association, a 51-year-old Nova Scotia woman anonymously revealed that her doctor asked if she knew about Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) euthanasia program just before she underwent her first mastectomy for breast cancer in 2022.
An Ontario man in his late 40s with a history of mental illness died by euthanasia after his assisted death assessors decided that the most reasonable explanation for his physical decline was a post COVID-19 “vaccination syndrome.”
h/t Mauser
On a visit to Hartheim Castle, a 400-year-old Renaissance fortress not far from Mauthausen concentration camp, I found myself examining a skull-measuring device from 1940. The sinister metal calipers and two measuring scales are on loan from Vienna’s Museum of Natural History; across from the glass display case is a 1930 poster from the UK Eugenics Society featuring a strong, tall man scattering seeds in a field. It reads: “Only Healthy Seed Must Be Sown: Check the Seeds of Hereditary Disease and Fitness by Eugenics.”
Nearby is a 1927 American movie poster: “Youth has its fling—and then comes the burning question—Are you fit to marry?”
h/t Sweetpea
Rates of medical assistance in dying for non-terminal illness in Ontario higher in poorer neighbourhoods, reports say
In one case, an Ontario man in his late 40s with debilitating ulcers was granted medical assistance in dying, despite a litany of mental disorders and previous suicide attempts.
In another, a woman in her 50s with a history of depression, anxiety and suicidality received MAID in part because she couldn’t find housing that would relieve her suffering from multiple chemical sensitivity syndrome, a rare condition in which pain, fatigue, rashes and other ailments arise from mild exposure to chemicals.
Our very own T4 Program.
I did that pic as a joke. I feel sick. Oh Oh… I’m better now!
Assisted dying is used by patients in Canada because they are poor and lack housing, a major report has found.
The first official report into assisted dying deaths in Ontario, which has been obtained by the Telegraph, found vulnerable people face “potential coercion” or “undue influence” to seek out the practice.
Sixteen experts across medicine, nursing and law identified people whose lives may have been wrongly terminated at the hands of the state, where the action is called Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD).
TORONTO (AP) — A homeless man refusing long-term care, a woman with severe obesity, an injured worker given meager government assistance, and grieving new widows. All of them requested to be killed under Canada’s euthanasia system, and each sparked private debate among doctors and nurses struggling with the ethics of one of the world’s most permissive laws on the practice, according to an Associated Press investigation.
As Canada pushes to expand euthanasia and more countries move to legalize it, health care workers here are grappling with requests from people whose pain might be alleviated by money, adequate housing or social connections. And internal data obtained exclusively by AP from Canada’s most populous province suggest a significant number of people euthanized when they are in unmanageable pain but not about to die live in Ontario’s poorest and most deprived areas.
We’re known for a Stupid Woke PM, harboring terrorists and the assembly line killing our most vulnerable. Thanks Trudeau.
