MAiD Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide

Euthanasia has been reduced to a bureaucratic detail

Canadian leader Justin Trudeau recently launched a new suicide hotline. Internet jokers wondered whether its aim is to dissuade or to find new takers for Canada’s notoriously liberal state-supported euthanasia programme. Surely it is paradoxical for the same government to offer both pro and anti-suicide services?

It goes by the almost innocuous name of Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID): it’s MAID in Canada.

The federal government does not want to call MAID a euthanasia program because of the negative connotation that word has to murderous, totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany. It may be a voluntary euthanasia program, unlike the coercive program unleashed by the Nazis on their oppressed society, but “euthanasia” should still induce a chill in our spines and nausea in our stomachs.

Scarcely a week goes by in Canada without another gut-wrenching story emerging from the frontlines of our euthanasia regime. There is Rosina, the young woman who opted for assisted suicide because of her crippling loneliness; she selected the day of her death, September 25, 2021, because it was the birthday of her ex-husband. There is the man requesting assisted suicide because he cannot get the back surgery he needs; the young mother who sees euthanasia as one of her only options because she cannot get coverage for the treatment she desperately needs; the 44-year-old Winnipeg woman who opted for euthanasia because she could not get home care.

A recent independent study by British researchers of Dutch euthanasia data has found that people with autism and intellectual disabilities have been legally euthanized in the Netherlands, even though they had no physical disease or ailment.

Euthanasia has been legal in the Netherlands since 2002 and the use of the practice has steadily expanded in the last two decades.

According to the Dutch government’s euthanasia review committee, 60,000 people were killed by their doctors between 2012 and 2021. The committee publicly released documents related to more than 900 of those cases to demonstrate how the law was working.

‘Some people say, ‘Well, we can have a little bit of this.’ That’s what they argued in Canada too,’ a Canadian expert warns American euthanasia advocates.

As backers of assisted suicide push to expand legalization in the United States, new numbers from Canada’s government show euthanasia is now the fifth-leading cause of death in the country.

A stunning 4 percent of the country’s deaths last year were due to assisted suicide. More than 13,000 patients died by it in 2022 — a 31 percent spike from the previous year. The country’s deaths by euthanasia now number nearly 45,000 since legalization in 2016, almost as many as have died from Covid in Canada.

A new report finds that 13,241 people died under the country’s MAiD programme

Last year 4.1% of all deaths in Canada were due to MAiD (medical assistance in dying), according to the country’s health ministry. This amounts to a total of 13,241 people who died under Canada’s MAiD programme in 2022, marking a 31% rise on the previous year.

A few weeks ago, I accidentally toured one of the awful tent cities in Vancouver, Canada. At the corner of Main Street and Hastings Avenue, homeless drug addicts spread their few possessions out on blankets and cover the pavement for blocks on end. It is only a short distance from the restaurants and attractions of this fairly affluent city and is easy to stray into.

Canada will legalize medically assisted dying for people who are addicted to drugs next spring, in a move some drug users and activists are calling “eugenics.”

The country’s medical assistance in dying (MAID) law, which first came into effect in 2016, will be expanded next March to give access to people whose sole medical condition is mental illness, which can include substance use disorders. Before the changes take place, however, a special parliamentary committee on MAID will regroup to scrutinize the rollout of the new regulations, according to the Toronto Star. 

h/t WV

Considering the Nazi-tinged history of euthanasia, there is something dark and ominous about a headline reading “Christine’s ‘Don’t Euthanize Me’ Tattoo.” Christine Nagel, who got her first tattoo at age 81, doesn’t even approve of tattoos – but the Calgarian had an important reason for getting this one. It is on her upper arm, and the ink letters spell out crystal clear instructions: “Don’t euthanize me.”

In today’s Canada, Nagel finds it necessary.

The parents of a woman who died after doctors refused to allow her to travel abroad for treatment have overturned a court order so she can be named.

Sudiksha Thirumalesh was 19 when she died a few days ago at an NHS hospital.

At the end of last month, a High Court judge ruled that despite being conscious and speaking to her parents and doctors, Thirumalesh lacked sufficient mental capacity to challenge the medics’ view as to whether life-sustaining treatment should be withdrawn.

I am acquainted with the forlorn hope of clinical trials.

The Hippocratic oath explicitly prohibits doctor participation in euthanasia/assisted suicide. But doctors don’t take the great oath anymore, precisely because (in part) it conflicts with modern sensibilities that doctors can be ethical takers of human life.