euthanasia

A Canadian activist has argued that the mentally ill must have access to euthanasia to prevent their committing suicide. From the National Post story: A leading MAID advocate argued to parliamentarians last month that Canada must legalize assisted suicide for the mentally ill, lest those same patients commit suicide. The statement was made at a March 24 parliamentary committee debating the legalization of MAID for Canadians whose “sole underlying medical condition is a mental illness.” Jocelyn Downie, a leading MAID activist since 2004, warned that if the federal government keeps excluding mentally ill Canadians from accessing assisted suicide, the result will be more mentally ill Canadians dying by suicide. The idea here is that a “suicide” will be potentially messier Read More ›

As the West lunges toward propagating a right to be made dead, the deleterious societal impacts of being legally “MAIDed” (killed by “medical assistance in dying”) are becoming increasingly clear. A recent professional analysis published in the Psychiatric Times illustrates the lethal influence on mentally ill suicidal people — including youth — in the Netherlands. From “Psychiatric Euthanasia in the Netherlands: Young People, Procedural Medicine, and the Limits of Psychiatry” (citations omitted): Requests for euthanasia on psychiatric grounds have risen sharply, with a disproportionate increase among young adults and, more recently, minors. The Dutch model, once presented internationally as careful and balanced, is now attracting attention for a different reason: growing uncertainty about whether psychiatry has crossed a boundary it Read More ›

Is love really all you need to make something ethical? In a culture that treats good intentions as the highest moral standard, this episode asks a harder and more important question: Can love be ethical without truth? In this episode of Bioethics Babe, I’m joined by Fr. James Dominic Brent, OP, a Dominican priest and philosopher in the Thomistic tradition, to examine why sincerity alone isn’t enough in moral decision-making, especially in medicine, relationships, and family life. Drawing on Catholic moral theology and the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, Fr. Brent explains: From IVF to euthanasia to sexual ethics, consent, and modern ideas of affirmation, this conversation challenges the assumption that “if it’s done out of love, it can’t be Read More ›

What happens after killing is legalized? In this episode of Bioethics Babe, I sit down with Alex Schadenberg, Executive Director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, to examine what Canada’s euthanasia regime reveals about medicine, consent, and human dignity. Euthanasia and assisted suicide are often framed as compassion about choice, autonomy, and relief from suffering. But as Canada’s MAiD system shows, once killing becomes legal, safeguards collapse, definitions expand, and the most vulnerable people are placed at risk. In this conversation, we discuss: This is a difficult conversation, but a necessary one. If we redefine care as killing, what happens to medicine, trust, and our responsibility to protect one another? For Episode Resources, please visit the episode page here. For more Read More ›

Euthanasia conjoined with organ harvesting just took a particularly disturbing turn in Spain, where a woman was euthanized and then had part of her face transplanted. From the Catalan News story: Vall d’Hebron University Hospital in Barcelona has performed the world’s first face transplant with a donor who passed away from euthanasia. Around 100 medical professionals took part in the partial face transplant, a highly complex operation using neurovascular microsurgery techniques that lasted about 24 hours. In presenting the milestone procedure, the healthcare director, Maria José Abadías, highlighted the “extraordinary generosity of the donor,” the “collective effort” behind the operation and the “pride” of all workers who took part in it. Don’t get me wrong. There is no inherent moral Read More ›

The modern hospice movement is one of the great humanitarian advances of the last hundred years. The story began shortly after World War II, when a young, devout Anglican medical social worker named Cicely Saunders befriended a Jewish émigré named David Tasma. Tasma had escaped the Warsaw Ghetto only to be dying at age 40 in a London hospital. He was alone in the world, and Saunders made a special point to visit with him every day. Their friendship changed how we medically treat—and perhaps even more importantly, perceive—people who are dying. I was honored to interview Dame Cicely (as she is affectionately known in the United Kingdom) in 1998 while researching my book Culture of Death. In reflecting on her Read More ›

Canada has leaped into euthanasia’s moral abyss with a smile on its face. Since 2015, killable categories have expanded dramatically, from those whose death is “reasonably foreseeable” — a category that was already so broad you could drive a hearse through it — to the chronically ill, people with disabilities, the frail elderly, and, starting next year, the mentally ill.

More than 16,000 Canadians were killed by doctors and nurse practitioners last year. It’s the fifth-most-common cause of death in the country.

Many commentators point to these and other facts about Canada’s euthanasia regime to argue against legalization. Defenders of euthanasia know this and have mounted counternarratives trying to convince us that so many killings of such a varied numbers of people is an excellent outcome of a humane policy. The latest example is in the Canadian Journal of Bioethics, in an article by bioethicist and philosophy professor Wayne Sumner, in which he argues that euthanasia should be considered a ho-hum question, nothing to worry about.

Sumner shrugs at the dramatic increase in the numbers killed since legalization because euthanasia is just another medical treatment and should not be considered to be extraordinary. Indeed, to Sumner, doctors’ killing patients is really no different than performing hip replacements. Ditto abortion. And since an increase in abortion rates (to him) is a good, and no one objects to more hip replacements, what’s the problem with the statistical increase in deaths by euthanasia? From “What’s So Special About Medically Assisted Dying?“:

If we regard an increasing number of joint replacements or abortions as success, with supply having risen to meet demand, why should we think that an increasing number of MAiD provisions is a failure, or somehow a problem? If more awareness, more providers, and more support are good things for these other services, why are they a bad thing for MAiD? Why should we think differently about MAiD than we do about other medical procedures? What’s so special about MAiD?

Let me count the ways.

Freedom of religion is on the ropes in increasingly authoritarian Canada — despite a specific charter guarantee of “freedom of religion and conscience.” Indeed, an Ontario court ruled previously that doctors can be coerced under threat of professional discipline to perform lethal jabs or abortions against their religious beliefs and conscience objections. Why? The court ruled that the unenumerated right of patients to receive any legal procedure paid for by the government superseded the specific charter protection. If doctors don’t want to kill, the court also ruled, they can either provide an “effective referral” — meaning soliciting a doctor known to be willing to kill — or get out of medicine. Now, in British Columbia, the family of a euthanized woman, who Read More ›

Once someone is considered killable or supported in suicide, they may become objectified so as to be used instrumentally. Such is the case with people requesting to be euthanized. The idea is that they are going to die anyway, want to die — even as they do not receive suicide prevention — so we might as well get good use out of them such as by conjoining their hastened deaths with organ harvesting. This abandonment (in my view) is rife in Canada, where in Ontario, a patient approved for a lethal jab will soon receive a call from the organ procurement society asking for their organs. The Netherlands and Belgium also permit conjoining organ harvesting — including of mentally ill Read More ›