MAiD Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide

Lisa, 40, is waiting to hear if she will be allowed to die. She is married and has two young children who don’t know she plans to end her life. There is just one more medication she has been told to try to treat her chronic depression, and then, she says, her request for euthanasia will be approved. The hardest part will be leaving her children, but she feels she has no choice. She plans to tell them, with the help of a grief counsellor, when she has set a date for her death.

“It’s not that I want to die, it’s that I don’t want to live this life anymore,” she says. “I’ve tried everything there is.”

Two years ago, over the Thanksgiving holiday, Allison Ducluzeau started to feel pain in her stomach. At first, she assumed she had eaten too much turkey, but the pain persisted. A couple of weeks later, she saw her family doctor who requested CT scans, although none were sorted. Soon after, as the agony worsened, her partner insisted she went to the emergency unit at their local hospital on Vancouver Island. Finally, doctors confirmed the couple’s worst fears: she was almost certainly suffering from advanced abdominal cancer.

Bastards.

In the recently released BBC documentary Better Off Dead?, disability rights activist Liz Carr interviewed Dr. Ellen Wiebe, Canada’s most notorious euthanasia doctor. Wiebe is also an abortionist and an activist with Dying With Dignity, the euthanasia lobby group seeking to expand eligibility for assisted suicide in Canada even further. Wiebe’s attempted defence of Canada’s euthanasia regime backfired when throughout her interview, she laughed and smiled as she discussed ending the lives of patients.

A 29-year-old Dutch woman who has been granted her request for assisted dying on the grounds of unbearable mental suffering is expected to end her life in the coming weeks, fuelling a debate across Europe over the issue.

Zoraya ter Beek received the final approval last week for assisted dying after a three and a half year process under a law passed in the Netherlands in 2002.

Her case has caused controversy as assisted dying for people with psychiatric illnesses in the Netherlands remains unusual, although the numbers are increasing. In 2010, there were two cases involving psychiatric suffering; in 2023, there were 138: 1.5% of the 9,068 euthanasia deaths.

A recent example of the use of medical assistance in dying (MAID) is setting off alarm bells. The CBC reported that Normand Meunier, a quadriplegic man from Quebec, was hospitalized in January for a respiratory virus. Mr. Meunier was left on a stretcher in the ER for four days despite communicating his need for a special mattress. He developed a severe bedsore with exposed bone and muscle, tragically leading him to seek out medical assistance in dying. Mr. Meunier told the CBC, “I don’t want to be a burden.” On March 29, he underwent assisted dying at home. The Canadian health care system’s failure to care for Mr. Meunier contributed to his death.

Suicide is a bit of a hit and miss affair. I can think of six cases of people I’ve known who’ve taken their own lives. One, a very successful business executive, threw himself out an office window; he survived the fall, only to hang himself a couple of years later. The girlfriend of a lodger survived throwing herself in front of an underground train: she left it too late and got blown back onto the platform, breaking a hip. She too, some while later completed the job by jumping off Beachy Head. A business acquaintance, having been diagnosed with Parkinson’s blew his brains out with a shot gun, literally, leaving his wife to clear up the mess. The girlfriend of another acquaintance killed herself when her boyfriend went off to university, only for the boyfriend, my acquaintance, to follow suit on the anniversary of her death. Finally, a university fresher I knew, depressed and alone in his halls of residence, killed himself during the first lockdown. Apparently a grim and drawn-out death. I blame Ferguson, Whitty, Boris and the other nutters for that one.

Some right-to-die activists want everyone to have access to euthanasia—even young people with mental illness. Are they also making suicide contagious?

Zoraya ter Beek, 28, expects to be euthanized in early May.

Her plan, she said, is to be cremated.

“I did not want to burden my partner with having to keep the grave tidy,” ter Beek texted me. “We have not picked an urn yet, but that will be my new house!”
She added an urn emoji after “house!”

Her only known diagnoses described in court earlier this month are autism and ADHD.

A Calgary judge has issued a ruling that clears the way for a 27-year-old woman to receive medical assistance in dying (MAID) despite her father’s attempts through the courts to prevent that from happening.

A publication ban protects the identities of the parties and the medical professionals. CBC News will identify the daughter as M.V. and the father as W.V.

While Justice Colin Feasby acknowledged the “profound grief” that W.V. would suffer with the death of his child, he ruled the loss of M.V.’s autonomy was more important.