Support Grows for Assisted Suicide in America Despite Horrors in Canada

I don’t see how anyone can look at how assisted suicide has developed in Canada and support the practice becoming legal in America.

The statistics say that 13,000 people were assisted in dying in Canada in 2022, 4% of the total number of deaths. That is surely an undercount. It’s Canada’s reporting procedures that are at fault. If someone who has cancer suffers an assisted death, the death certificate will usually say “cancer.” 

This is important because soon, many assisted suicide deaths in Canada will not only be performed on terminally ill people. As of March 2024, you will be able to ask for assisted suicide if you’re in mental distress, chronic pain, or if you’re depressed. 

When the MAID law (“Medical Assistance in Dying”) was passed in 2016, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau dismissed the idea that MAID would be abused. City Journal’s Michael Bonner writes, “When critics argued that the ruling would result in euthanasia being offered to the mentally ill, the depressed, those with disabilities, or other vulnerable persons, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau dismissed such concerns, saying, ‘this simply isn’t something that ends up happening.'” 

Nothing could be further from the truth. Next March, patients in Canada who suffer from severe mental illness will be able to choose death. There will be nothing terminal about their condition at all. And the very definition of their illness makes a joke of the idea that they could give “informed consent.”

One 47-year-old woman suffering from anorexia can’t wait for next March so she can get help killing herself. Advocates of assisted death say it is an issue of personal autonomy. In a perfect world, it may be, but we don’t live in a perfect world.

City Journal:

In one alarming instance, a 71-year-old widower was admitted to hospital after a fall. He contracted infectious diarrhea in hospital, where he was humiliated by staff for the smell of his room. Staff claimed that he had end-stage COPD and offered him MAID; he took their advice and was euthanized within 48 hours of his first assessment. A post-mortem examination, however, proved that he did not have end-stage COPD.

The expanded MAID policy did not distinguish between medical infirmities and avoidable suffering caused by neglect or poverty. Bioethicists Kayla Wiebe and Amy Mullin contended that Canada should not deny people assisted suicide if living conditions make their lives intolerable. Physicians have offered MAID to people who cannot afford housing or find proper medical care. A rogue bureaucrat within Canada’s department of veterans affairs offered MAID to an elderly veteran struggling to make ends meet; the matter was turned over to the police.

Obviously, neither of those two deaths had anything to do with “personal autonomy.” This is a dystopian nightmare right out of a Hollywood movie. When will the state begin pushing people to get euthanized, à la “Soylent Green”?

In 2022, “the most commonly cited sources of suffering by individuals requesting MAID were the loss of ability to engage in meaningful activities (86.3%), followed by loss of ability to perform activities of daily living (81.9%) and inadequate control of pain, or concern about controlling pain (59.2%).” 

We can sympathize with people suffering in pain and agony. But is euthanasia always the way to go?

The problem is one of control. As Canada’s MAID law has shown, the “slippery slope” isn’t just a quaint adage. It’s real and unless stopped in its tracks, thousands of people will die needlessly and cruelly because people who don’t value human life are redefining when it is legal for the state to kill someone. 

Let’s not kid ourselves that the state will be “assisting in anything. Mentally ill people are incapable of deciding to permanently and finally solve their mental anguish. This is especially true when you consider miracle drugs on the horizon and revolutionary treatments that will be able to alleviate the tragic suffering of these people. 

We’re a long way from passing a national assisted suicide law. But individual states are moving in that direction.