medical aid in dying

Religious freedom is under assault throughout the West around what I call “do harm” medicine. With doctors now expected to abort babies, kill or mutilate sick patients, or administer harmful substances to gender dysphoric children, and otherwise toe a utilitarian, secular line in performing professional responsibilities, Hippocratic and pro-life medical professionals and institutions are imperiled.

A column in Canada’s Globe and Mail epitomizes the mindset. When a hospital run by nuns in Nova Scotia threw in the towel, the hospital was secularized. André Picard, the paper’s health columnist celebrated the closure and called for more. From, “It’s Well Past Time for Catholic Hospitals to be Secularized”:

One hundred and twenty-nine of Canada’s 1,087 hospitals are Catholic. Most refuse to perform medical assistance in dying, abortion, tubal ligation, hysterectomy, vasectomy, gender-affirming care, or provide birth control to patients, with some even denying the morning-after pill to victims of sexual assault. There are exceptions, such as cancer-related surgery that affects the reproductive system, and workarounds like bringing in “visiting” nurses to administer meds, or building MAID clinics next door.

Many long-term care homes with religious affiliations also refuse to allow MAID on their premises. These policies are offensive — and likely unconstitutional (court challenges are underway) — and particularly problematic in smaller communities like Antigonish where there is a single hospital or care home.

Euthanasia has become a way of life in Canada (he wrote ironically). More than 100,000 people have been killed by doctors and nurse practitioners. At least one hospice lost funding for refusing to kill patients. Doctors with religious and moral objections were told by Ontario’s highest court to either kill qualified patients wanting to die, procure a doctor who will (“effective referral”), or get out of medicine. Euthanasia has been described in the media as a splendid source of organs. And there are horror stories aplenty. Here’s the latest. If the reporting is accurate, an elderly woman with stomach cancer was euthanized after being coaxed by medical personnel and while mentally incapable. From the Daily Mail story: Two days before Read More ›

The Anglican Church of Canada has authorized clergy to bless people being euthanized just before, during, and after being lethally jabbed (when permitted by the bishop). From “Pastoral Liturgies at the Time of Death in Contexts of Medically Assisted Dying”: It is not our intent to enter into the ethical arguments regarding MAiD, nor to provide a moral argument for or against MAiD.…No matter where people are in their life journey, we as a Christian community and Christian leaders in particular are called to respond pastorally to the needs and concerns of the people before us. Wherever the church serves, we are the Body of Christ reaching out to the suffering, the sick, and the dying. When someone reaches out Read More ›

Canada has gone hog wild for euthanasia. But the pro-death tide may — may — be beginning to turn. The province of Alberta just passed a bill that significantly restricts eligibility for euthanasia (medical aid in dying, or MAID), soon to be signed into binding law. The biggest change in Bill 18 ends the eligibility of non-terminally-ill patients to be MAIDed (known as Track 2). Among the provisions of Bill 18 (“Safeguards for Last Resort Termination of Life Act”), as summarized by the government: Eligibility in Alberta to individuals 18 and over with capacity to make their own health care decision whose natural death has been determined by a physician or nurse practitioner as being reasonably foreseeable, also known as Read More ›

After a bear was euthanized in California because she paw-swiped a human who owned a house under which the bruin and her cubs were living, there was a popular outcry. Now, a bill has been put in the hopper in the California State Senate promoting “coexistence” between people and wild animals. From S.B. 1135:

It is the policy of the state that the management of wildlife shall include an emphasis on the coexistence of humans and wildlife through department-led efforts to reduce, minimize, and mitigate conflicts. These efforts shall also seek to align with the state’s conservation, public safety, environmental planning, and climate adaptation goals and to be accomplished through coordination and cooperation between the department and wildlife coexistence partners.

Here are the details:

Upon appropriation by the Legislature, the department shall establish the Wildlife Coexistence Program to manage and promote wildlife coexistence by conducting all of the following activities:
(a) Managing, tracking, and responding to wildlife conflict calls, reports, and incident responses.
(b) Avoiding, minimizing, and mitigating conflicts between humans and wildlife by proactively and continuously implementing best practices that emphasize effective and ecologically appropriate nonlethal conflict resolution solutions developed using best available science and indigenous knowledge.
(c) Investigating, documenting, and analyzing reported human-wildlife incidents, including, but not limited to, depredation, perceived or actual human-wildlife conflicts, and wildlife health issues.
(d) Maintaining a statewide wildlife incident reporting tool.

Once killing becomes an acceptable answer to human suffering, the kinds of “suffering” that justifies killing continually expands. In the Netherlands, where mental illness can provide the pretext for being MAIDed and there are no age limits (including infanticide for disability), it was recently reported that a suicidal autistic teenager was lethally injected in 2023. From the National Post story: Four-and-a-half years after he was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, a Dutch teen was euthanized at his request. The boy, aged between 16 and 18, had described his life as “joyless.” He’d struggled with anxiety and mood-related problems, and where he fit in, in the world. Oversensitive to stimuli, “every day was an ordeal he had to get through,” according Read More ›

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 ›

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.

With a scribbled signature by Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, the Land of Lincoln became the 12th state (plus the District of Columbia) to legalize physician-assisted suicide.

The new law, which takes effect in September, euphemistically describes assisted suicide as “medical aid in dying”—a pretense that prescribed poisonous overdoses are somehow equivalent to administering healing treatments. Give me a break. The point of “care,” is well, care. The point of assisted suicide is immediate death.

So, why do I insist on using “assisted suicide” instead of “medical aid in dying?” Because this issue is too important and too much is at stake to fall for propagandistic word engineering.

The term assisted suicide is both accurate and descriptive. “Suicide” means to take one’s own life. “Assisted” means to have help in performing an action, in this case, intentionally becoming dead. In other words, it describes what was done, not why.

In contrast, “medical aid in dying”—or MAID as it is usually called—is euphemistic and intended to deflect from the reality of what advocates seek to normalize. Ditto calling poisonous overdoses prescribed for suicide, “medication,” which these laws always do. How can we have a meaningful debate when one side hides behind terms that are designed to lull people into a dangerous complacency?

Of course Governor Pritzker signed the assisted suicide bill. Was there ever any doubt? Assisted suicide has become part of the progressive policy agenda. The new Illinois law (SB 1950) contains many of the usual provisions and supposed safeguards. Once the law goes into effect next September, these putative protections will quickly be redefined as “obstacles” to a good death and the inevitable process of legal loosening will commence. This is the point at which I usually urge doctors to refuse participation in the killing of their patients. The law does permit doctors to refuse to actually prescribe poison (euphemistically called “medication”). But it still appears to require that all doctors assess whether a patient who has asked for assisted Read More ›