BC Hospice Seeks ‘Sanctuary’ in Alberta After Government Pulls Funding for Refusing Euthanasia

A B.C. hospice society that had its public funding and building seized by the government for refusing to allow euthanasia onsite is now seeking a “sanctuary” location in rural Alberta for its new facility.

Delta Hospice Society (DHS) President Angelina Ireland said efforts to build a new palliative care home in B.C. have gone nowhere, forcing the society to pursue options elsewhere.

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Canada’s disturbing experiment with a world where suicide is painless

In the brilliant book MASH, by Richard Hooker (real name H. Richard Hornberger), Captain Walter “The Painless Pole” Waldowski, a brilliant, handsome, and priapic surgical dentist, suffers from what today would be diagnosed as bipolarism, periodically becoming deeply depressed. His doctor friends offer him the ultimate suicide, complete with a huge party and a painless final shot. In fact, it’s a con, for they simply knock him out to help him sleep off his depression, and they even give the well-endowed dentist a blue ribbon award while he sleeps. All ends well.

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NYT Op-Ed: Take Organs From Coma Patients

A New York Times op-ed advocates for taking organs from people who are in comas to improve transplant rates.

In a July 30, 2025, op-ed, the authors say that we should broaden the definition of death “to include irreversibly comatose patients on life support. Using this definition, these patients would be legally dead regardless of whether a machine restored the beating of their heart.”

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A Push for More Organ Transplants Is Putting Donors at Risk

People across the United States have endured rushed or premature attempts to remove their organs. Some were gasping, crying or showing other signs of life.

A surgeon made an incision in her chest and sawed through her breastbone.

That’s when the doctors discovered her heart was beating. She appeared to be breathing. They were slicing into Ms. Hawkins while she was alive.

Last spring at a small Alabama hospital, a team of transplant surgeons prepared to cut into Misty Hawkins. The clock was ticking. Her organs wouldn’t be usable for much longer.

Days earlier, she had been a vibrant 42-year-old with a playful sense of humor and a love for the Thunder Beach Motorcycle Rally. But after Ms. Hawkins choked while eating and fell into a coma, her mother decided to take her off life support and donate her organs. She was removed from a ventilator and, after 103 minutes, declared dead.

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Canada’s euthanasia regime is already killing the disabled. It’s about to get worse

Even the UN has described Canada’s assisted suicide program as ‘state-sponsored eugenics’ and called upon the government to curtail plans to expand euthanasia access.

In Canada, we kill the disabled. Over 90 percent of babies diagnosed with Down syndrome in the womb are aborted; pre-born children diagnosed with other disabilities usually meet the same fate. But for decades, our Nazi-style lethal ableism was limited to those not yet born.

With the expansion of euthanasia eligibility to those suffering solely from disability or mental illness scheduled to come into effect in 2027, that is slated to change. Disability groups have been nearly unanimous in their condemnation of this plan, which has been delayed twice by the Liberal government due to pushback from across Canadian society – but not cancelled entirely.

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The eugenicist roots of assisted dying

The inhuman campaign to cull the elderly, disabled and mentally infirm lives on in ‘progressive’ clothing.

In a letter dated 1 October 1940, Helene M wrote to her father from an asylum in the southern German town of Stetten (1). An epileptic, Helene had been chosen for ‘transport to another facility’. But, in the context of Nazi Germany, she knew what that really meant.

‘Today I must write these words of farewell as I leave this earthly life for an eternal home’, she wrote. ‘I do not want to part from you without asking you and all my dear brothers and sisters once more for forgiveness, for all that I have failed you in throughout my whole life. May the dear Lord God accept my illness and this sacrifice as a penance for this.’

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Barbara Kay: A disabled man’s fight for life in an age of MAiD

Roger Foley is a leading activist for the rights of the disabled, including his own. A hero to associations for the disabled, he is often considered a thorn in the side of health bureaucrats. Recently, an account of his case — emanating more sympathy for the bureaucrats than for Foley, alas — was prominently featured in these pages.

Foley suffers from a grave neurodegenerative affliction, spinocerebellar ataxia, which renders him almost completely physically dependent on caregivers. Cognitively normal and technologically skilled, he enjoys a rich life of the mind. In spite of what most Canadians would consider the grimmest of circumstances — which shamefully includes persistent reminders from carers that he has a right to euthanasia, which he just as persistently rebuffs — Foley remains life-affirming and bullish in pursuit of more humane and empowering care conditions.

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Colby Cosh: There’s no point to gatekeeping MAiD if doctors never say ‘no’

On Sunday the New York Times Magazine published a feature about Canada’s legal regime for assisted suicide, wrapping large volumes of reporting on law, ethics and medicine around the individual story of Paula Ritchie, an Ontario woman who sought and received “MAiD” after an unhappy life full of pain and misery.

Katie Engelhart’s story plays pretty fair with an explosive social issue that is of increasing global concern. She knows the NYT’s world audience is aware of Canada’s avant-garde experiment with the facilitation of medical suicide for patients who don’t have terminal illnesses, and she doesn’t stack the deck either way.

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Suicide pod activist takes his own life after being arrested for murder of woman who used the Sarco pod he promoted

A euthanasia advocate who was quizzed by murder detectives after the death of a woman using a controversial Sarco euthanasia pod last year has died by assisted suicide, it was announced yesterday.

Dr Florian Willet, 47, was arrested in September 2024 following the death of the 64-year-old woman after police claimed there were strangulation marks on her neck.

He was the only person present for the death of the woman, who was the first person to use the Sarco suicide device, which had been set up in a forest near Merishausen, Switzerland.

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A Merciful Death

We go inside a story about one woman’s journey to die.

I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s and remember being fascinated by the controversy around Jack Kevorkian. He was a Michigan doctor who argued that sick people should be allowed to die on their own terms rather than suffer through a grueling illness. Was he a traitor to his oath to “do no harm”? Or was he an angel of mercy, letting victims of disease exercise one last bit of agency over their failing bodies? Kevorkian, who went to prison for helping dozens of people with “physician-assisted suicides,” seemed so radical at the time.

Now his ideas are commonplace. Ten states and lots of Western nations have assisted-dying laws. But they’re mostly built for people with a life-ending diagnosis.

Canada is trying something more. There, a patient can have a state-sanctioned death if she is suffering — but not necessarily dying — from an illness. For the cover story of yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, Katie Engelhart followed one woman’s journey to die. It’s a nuanced portrait of a person racked with pain and a tour of some controversial bioethics. I spoke with Katie about the difficulty in knowing what’s right and what’s wrong when people suffer.

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Do Patients Without a Terminal Illness Have the Right to Die?

Paula Ritchie wasn’t dying, but under Canada’s new rules, she qualified for a medically assisted death. Was that kindness or cruelty?

One of the doctors wanted to know why, despite everything, Paula Ritchie was still alive. “I’m just curious,” she said. “What has kept you from attempting suicide since August of 2023?”

“I’m not very good at it,” Paula said. “Obviously.” Then she started to cry. She said that everything was getting worse. She said she didn’t want to suffer anymore. “This is a more dignified way to go than suicide.”

Paula was lying in the big bed that she had pulled into the center of the living room, facing an old TV and a window that looked out on a row of garbage bins. The room’s brown linoleum floors were stained, and its walls were mostly unadorned. On a bookshelf, there was a small figurine of an angel, her arm raised in offering. At 52, Paula had a pale, unblemished face and a tangle of dark hair that fell around her waist. The day before the appointment, in January this year, she washed her hair for the first time in weeks, but then she was not able to lift herself out of the bathtub. When, after hours, she managed to get out, her pain and dizziness was so bad that she had to crawl across the floor.

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Five Things to Know About Assisted Dying in Canada

Canada’s MAID law, which expanded the right to die to people without a terminal illness, raises ethical and medical dilemmas.

In 2023, one out of 20 Canadians who died received a physician-assisted death, making Canada the No. 1 provider of medical assistance in dying (MAID) in the world, when measured in total figures. In one province, Quebec, there were more MAID deaths per capita than anywhere else. Canadians, by and large, have been supportive of this trend. A 2022 poll showed that a stunning 86 percent of Canadians supported MAID’s legalization.

But in some corners, MAID has been the subject of a growing unease. While MAID in Canada was initially restricted to patients with terminal conditions — people whose natural deaths were “reasonably foreseeable” — the law was controversially amended in 2021 to include people who were suffering but who weren’t actually dying: patients who might have many years or even decades of life ahead of them. This new category includes people with chronic pain and physical disabilities.

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French MPs To Vote on One of the World’s Most Extreme Euthanasia Laws

Deterring a suffering loved one from receiving a lethal injection could earn you up to two years in prison and a €30,000 fine.

French MPs are preparing to vote on a law that would legalise euthanasia and assisted suicide. In the final days of the parliamentary debate, as the proposal’s provisions were reviewed, some of the most outrageous articles were discussed and, unfortunately, many were adopted.

For several days, the voices denouncing the text have been growing. The proposal that MPs are preparing to vote on will make France one of the most permissive countries in this area, alongside countries that have sunk into increasingly serious abuses of ‘assisted dying,’ such as Canada and Belgium.

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