MAiD Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide

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

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.

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

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).

The global capital for assisted death is considering including mental illness as a legitimate reason for ending one’s life, but its euthanasia laws are fiercely criticised by human rights advocates

Mitchell Tremblay ran through all the mental health problems he had been diagnosed with: PTSD, borderline and histrionic personality disorders, major depressive disorder and, most recently, generalised anxiety and bulimia.

When he learnt this year that Canada was planning to widen its assisted dying legislation to include chronic mental illness, he saw a way out.

A woman undergoing life-saving cancer surgery in Canada was offered assisted suicide by doctors as she was about to enter the operating room.

The case comes as the number of people opting to end their lives under the country’s medical assistance in dying (MAID) program has risen thirteen-fold from 1,018 to 13,241 in 2022.

h/t Sweetpea

Euthanasia Dr. Ellen Wiebe has offered an inside glimpse into the job she “loves” where she has ended the lives of more than 400 people through Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD).

In an interview included in a BBC documentary called Better off Dead by Liz Carr, a UK woman who is disabled and is worried state-sanctioned euthanasia could be legalized in her own country, Wiebe bragged “nobody is more grateful” than her patients and their families after refusing to shake Carr’s hand at the beginning of the interview.

Canadians normally feel a little frisson of delight when we get mentioned in other countries. We’re so used to being ignored that we bask in any attention at all.

But the kind of attention we’re getting in the British media these days is the kind we could do without. The U.K. Parliament is getting ready to debate a bill on assisted dying, and Canada is making the headlines as the prime example of how not to handle this delicate issue.