Casual observers may understandably imagine that the law the Canadian government euphemistically refers to as “medical assistance in dying,” or MAID, is reserved for patients who’ve a terminal diagnosis and are experiencing unbearable suffering. But they’d be mistaken.
In August, The Associated Press reported the story of Alan Nichols, a 61-year-old man with a history of depression who in 2019 was briefly hospitalized since it was thought he could be suicidal. Inside a month of his hospital stay, he requested euthanasia and was killed despite protests from members of the family, who said he was not taking his medications and didn’t have the capability to make the choice to die. “His application for euthanasia listed just one health condition as the explanation for his request to die,” The A.P. reported: “hearing loss.”
Since Canada amended its criminal code in 2016 to legalize assisted suicide and medical assistance in dying, which the code previously recognized as “culpable homicide,” eligibility for the procedure has been expanded. The unique law required natural death to be “reasonably foreseeable” and for the patient’s medical condition to be “grievous and irremediable.” In 2021 the requirement that death be reasonably foreseeable was dropped. Today, anyone over the age of 18 with a serious illness, disease or disability, even in the event that they are otherwise healthy, may be euthanized. (Whether “mature minors” can consent to be killed is currently into consideration.)
There’s a reason the Catholic Church often speaks of abortion and euthanasia together as life issues.
Next 12 months, Canada’s medicalized killing regime, already probably the most permissive on the earth, is ready to expand again. On March 17, 2023, euthanasia shall be available to individuals affected by mental illness, a move that critics warn could have disastrous consequences for Canada’s most vulnerable residents. In 2020 a bunch of fifty religious leaders, including the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, warned: “Offering euthanasia or assisted suicide to those living with a disability or chronic illness, but who are usually not dying, suggests that living with a disability or illness is a fate worse than death. This may create certain pressures to just accept such lethal procedures, putting the lives of those Canadians at greater risk in what’s now a latest regime that sees certain lives may be ended.”
Nevertheless it is just not only people of religion who object to the expansion of this “right” to those that don’t face imminent death. In 2021 three human rights experts from the United Nations sent a proper letter to the Canadian government warning that the move would “potentially subject individuals with disabilities to discrimination on account of such disability.” Tim Stainton, the director of the Canadian Institute for Inclusion and Citizenship on the University of British Columbia, has called MAID “the most important existential threat to disabled people because the Nazis’ program in Germany within the Thirties.”
Madeline Li, a psychiatrist who has administered euthanasia and helped shape MAID protocols in Toronto, has told lawmakers that given the shortage of standards for assessing mentally sick patients for euthanasia, and indeed the impossibility of knowing whether a psychiatric diagnosis is irremediable, it would be as much as doctors—with their unconscious biases and imperfect value judgments—to make a decision which lives are price living.
Every death, whether sudden or long expected, peaceful or accompanied by great suffering, is the tip of a novel and precious life.
Because the disturbing case of Mr. Nichols demonstrates, we won’t need to wait until March to see if the worst fears of those that have warned of euthanasia’s slippery slope will materialize. Already, doctors report hearing from low-income disabled or chronically sick patients who’re looking for euthanasia because they can’t afford housing or adequate treatment with the social assistance they receive from the federal government. Patients with disabilities say that doctors have presented euthanasia as an option unprompted and in what can feel like a coercive manner, especially within the context of conversations about the associated fee of care. In all, 10,000 Canadians were euthanized in 2021, up from about 1,000 in 2016 and representing 3.3 percent of all deaths within the country that 12 months.
There’s a reason the Catholic Church often speaks of abortion and euthanasia together as life issues. Each are rooted in the identical lie that human dignity is so conditioned upon personal autonomy that profound dependence on others for basic needs could make a life less useful. The one option to make death “dignified” is to acknowledge the incalculable dignity of those that die by caring for his or her needs and accompanying them of their suffering. Every death, whether sudden or long expected, peaceful or accompanied by great suffering, is the tip of a novel and precious life. It would come for us all, but, within the words of Pope Francis, “Life is a right, not death, which have to be welcomed, not administered.”
As now we have learned over the past 12 months following the Supreme Court decision within the Dobbs case to overturn the Roe v. Wade decision, changing the law is just a primary step and an insufficient response to the tragedy of abortion. The rationale the language of “personal selection” is so effective, in debates over each abortion and euthanasia, is that thousands and thousands of our brothers and sisters feel trapped by their circumstances or are experiencing inescapable suffering.
But when a mother feels she has no selection but to finish the lifetime of her unborn child, that is just not freedom. It’s a failure of family, friends, neighbors, government and society to provide her and her child each the fabric and relational support they need. If people suffering with anorexia or deep depression, or if grandparents living in isolation and poverty imagine the world could be higher off without them, selecting to finish their lives is just not freedom. It’s a manifestation of a throwaway culture that might moderately discard those who are suffering than accompany them. Such a selection goals more to avoid the necessity to face the truth of suffering ourselves than to supply mercy to others.
In Canada, where the associated fee of living is rising faster than welfare spending and the health care system has been crippled by the Covid-19 pandemic, some could also be tempted to see euthanasia, like many things that come from the evil spirit, as an answer to a seemingly intractable problem—and thus be distracted from or ignore the harder task of investing in palliative care, reasonably priced housing and the mental health care system. But no individual or society gets a free pass in terms of caring for our fellow residents, especially probably the most vulnerable amongst us. How high must the death toll rise before Canada reconsiders the associated fee of its so-called compassion?
If you happen to are having thoughts of suicide, call the U.S. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK) or Talk Suicide Canada at 1-833-456-4566.
