MAiD Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide

After Balenciaga, more publicity campaigns are taking a disturbing turn

Fashion has been smashing taboos since Coco Chanel first marketed trousers to women after World War I. But today there are very few norms left to assault in pursuit of publicity-generating controversy. So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised to find the rag trade venturing into truly taboo territory: paedophilia and now suicide — albeit with a fig-leaf of liberal proceduralism, in its guise as medically-assisted voluntary euthanasia.

Societies can prevent suicide by substituting homicide. In Canada, doctors in the spring of ‘23 will be authorized to encourage patients who are depressed, mentally ill, or just difficult or expensive to treat to commit suicide. To be fair, two doctors must sign off on the final decision, and there will be a 90-day waiting period before the execution can be carried out. If doctors are squeamish about it, the law is going to permit nurse practitioners to do the deed (probably with a hefty bonus for each ‘patient’ so treated).

This new policy is materially different from the assisted suicide that is already legal in Canada. That sees doctors supplying the drugs for ending life and leaves it to the individuals to choose the time and place to self-administer.

Parliament is now calmly discussing whether disabled children could be euthanised by doctors. In other words, infanticide

The representative of the medical regulator spoke in a straightforward, unemotional voice, as though his statements were self-evidently true. Sick children between the ages of 14 and 17, he told the parliamentary committee, should be allowed to choose to commit suicide with medical assistance.

Parents of babies who are born with severe disabilities should be allowed to kill them. Elderly people for whom “life no longer makes any sense” should also be able to end theirs. And so should the mentally ill, and so on and on. Members of the committee ask some follow-up questions, but no one pushes back.

Junior’s Canada is so progressive you can’t tell us apart from the Nazis.

The date whispers in Julie Leblanc’s mind when she is feeling most hopeless. It tugs at her thoughts when, for days, she forgets to eat, or doesn’t shower. She thinks about it more than she knows she should.

On March 17, assisted dying will become legal for Canadians with a mental disorder as their sole condition, and Ms. Leblanc can apply.

She has been struggling with mental illness since she was 8 years old. At 13, she was prescribed her first trial of anti-depressants; now at 31, she has tried too many medications to count, and spent much of her life either in therapy or waiting on a list to receive it. Bounced between doctors, she has been given multiple diagnoses – depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, borderline personality disorder.

Back in 2015, the Supreme Court justices who unanimously struck down the Criminal Code provision against medical assistance in dying (MAID) couldn’t foresee how Canada’s assisted dying program might evolve to the point it is today. I don’t mean that figuratively – in their written decision, they implied that they simply couldn’t see it happening.

People fought and died in WW II to extinguish the Mengeles of the world.

Canadian doctors encouraged to bring up medically assisted death before their patients do

In most jurisdictions in the world with legalized euthanasia, doctors are explicitly prohibited, or strongly discouraged from raising assisted dying with a patient.

The request must come from the person.

But a guidance document produced by Canada’s providers of medically assisted death states that doctors have a professional obligation to bring up MAID as an option, when it’s “medically relevant” and the person is likely eligible, as part of the informed consent process.

Abortion, euthanasia – Trudeau has turned Canada into an unholy abattoir.

Its assisted-suicide laws are becoming ever more sinister.

When Canadian campaigners achieved their goal of legalising euthanasia for the terminally ill, did anyone think they would stop there? Today, six years after legalisation, pro-euthanasia activists continue to lobby for ever wider access to the ‘right to die’. And they are winning.

OTTAWA — Explosive testimony Monday before the Commons standing committee on veterans affairs by a retired member of the Canadian Armed Forces suggests a combat veteran was offered MAiD twice — despite repeatedly dismissing medically assisted suicide — and was told that Veterans Affairs had carried out the service for others.

Sounds about right for the Trudeau era.

“Assisted suicide” continues to prosper.

Back in 2014 I wrote here about a healthy two-year-old giraffe named Marius, who, amid much controversy, was euthanized by the Copenhagen Zoo to make room for “a genetically more valuable giraffe,” as the zoo’s scientific director rather indelicately put it. An international zoo official supported his decision, saying that critics (most of them, apparently, American) should think less about Marius and more about “the bigger picture.” As I commented at the time, these two zoo folk weren’t – aren’t – alone; they belong to a contemporary breed of people, particularly thick on the ground in northern Europe, who think this way not just about animals but, yes, about human beings.

MAID in Canada: The Right to Die

America’s culture war over the question of when human life begins has been joined by those who want to reshape how human life ends.

The debate over legalizing physician-assisted suicide began in Oregon nearly thirty years ago. The scheme, in which doctors prescribe lethal drugs and guidance for patients who want to end their lives, was sold to the public as “death with dignity” and carefully restricted to individuals 18 and older who had an incurable and irreversible terminal illness and were not expected to live beyond six months. This novel approach to end-of-life care ran contrary to laws in all 50 states that made it a crime to assist a fellow human being in committing suicide. For physicians, it undermined the age-old Hippocratic Oath provision: “Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course.”