What a callous, uncaring society we have become when a healthcare professional, or someone else who might even be a stranger to me, can enter the room where I am expecting to receive healthcare and casually offer me a date with death!
To anyone who has been around the pro-life movement for any length of time, it doesn’t come as any surprise to witness how quickly Canada’s limitations, initially called ‘protections’, on access to Medical-Aid-in-Dying (MAiD), the government’s sanitized legislative euphemism for physician-assisted-suicide, have been set aside.
The widespread normalization of offering death to suffering Canadians who are not necessarily terminally ill, i.e. not facing death in the ‘reasonably foreseeable future,’ has not only become par for the course in the healthcare system, but has escalated in the months since the changes to the eligibility criteria have been widened. And, of course, we’ll face yet another increase in eligibility when the government’s proposed offering of self-appointed appointments with death broaden yet again to include those with mental illness.
Even the mainstream media are highlighting the unprecedented and casual offering of MAiD. to vulnerable patients in the healthcare system. A Canadian Veteran has a Veterans Affairs employee offer a death appointment rather than support and treatment in dealing with recovery from PTSD and traumatic brain injuries sustained during combat deployments as part of his military service.1
Another patient has a hospital ethicist remind him he’s costing the healthcare system more than $1500 a day and offers to help him with an appointment for his death. A woman who had mental health issues and a chronic inability to access psychiatric care, without the knowledge of her family, opted for MAiD to the shock and dismay of the family.2
The statistics are morbidly alarming…indicating that we, as a caring society are far less prepared to invest our limited healthcare dollars in those whose prospects to live a ‘normal’ life – like you and me – are less than stellar. We no longer ‘care’ for the ill, the disabled, the mentally or physically unfit, instead we are ‘johnny on the spot’ with the offer of death by lethal injection for any number of people who have no one handy beside them to encourage them to fight the good fight to the end and opt for life.
The statistics are alarming…and the reasons for choosing to be euthanized equally alarming, as outlined in recent mainstream media reports that have been highlighting the statistics. It’s a change from the usual pro-death chatter usually presented by the mainstream media and seems to indicate a naivete that is astounding. It doesn’t take the brain of a nuclear physicist to recognized that if you open the door slightly, all kinds of insidious thinking, beliefs, and actions, will slither in.
And, that’s what we have here…as with the abortion issue, when we initially legalized immolating our unborn children on the altar of convenience, for some very ‘popular’ social reasons like the ‘health’ of the mother, which eventually became, ‘because I feel like it,’ and, over time, ended up with license to kill our unborn children for whatever reason, whenever, during the entire course of a pregnancy, right down to moments before birth. It’s the same thing now with our assisted suicide legalized protocols. Where we approved killing of innocent citizens, by their medical professional, at their own request, for some specific reasons, we have edged over into killing of patients for convenience and, obviously, as a money-saving tactic to address the strains on the limited resources – financial and personnel – available in the broken healthcare system that has developed over years of mismanagement and unwillingness to look at root causes.3
It sounds pretty barbaric to me…and anything but the ‘gentler, more caring’ society that our young, ‘clone’ of his deceased father (Pierre Elliot Trudeau), Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, promised to deliver to Canadians when he was first being popularized by the media, and touted as the modern-day Sir Galahad who would save us from ourselves, and be the answer to the societal ills that plagued us and made Canada such a harsh, uncaring place to live in.
Andrew Coyne, writing in the Globe and Mail, raised the alarm over the ‘slippery slope’ that has become the norm for the Doctor-assisted-death dealing practice prevalent today in the Canadian healthcare system in articles posted in 2020.4
Earlier, writing in 2016 as the legislation was being introduced and voted on, Coyne opined that,
It is not about easing the pain of dying, but easing the pain of living. It is about helping people to kill themselves who are not in any danger of dying, but find their lives, for a variety of reasons, intolerable.5
Coyne went on to point out, sanely, that we don’t, in other circumstances, accommodate those who express a wish to kill themselves, but rather try to intervene to keep them alive. Now, though, assisted suicide, “…asks us to invert that convention: not merely to allow the suicide to proceed, but to facilitate it, indeed to subsidize it.”6
How caring are we really, as a society, when a recent report on MAiD in Canada indicates that 1 in 5 people opt for assisted death because of loneliness and isolation.7, 8
In an eerily familiar fictional scenario published several years ago, Dr. James Dobson and a co-writer, deal with what has become a page out of our Canadian history for physician-assisted-death as a means of dealing with the ‘deplorables’ or as the books refer to them, ‘debits.’9 The trilogy of books are a chilling view of the future where assisted-death is popularized and normalized in the culture and which could be prophetic considering what’s currently happening in Canada today.
Once there is approval for wholescale elimination of the human population at one end of the spectrum of life, as we’ve had for so long in Canada with abortion, it is just a matter of time before there is approval for wholescale death dealing at the other end. Which now appears to be our present situation in Canada, it seems.
Writing in the National Post’s First Reading column, Tristan Hopper says, of the casual offering of MAiD to Canadians, that barely a week now goes by without some new case emerging of a sick Canadian being offered assisted death in lieu of treatment.10 He adds:
It’s a nightmare scenario that was envisioned by no shortage of ethicists and health figures when assisted death was first written into Canadian law. But with few exceptions, these warnings were ignored by the various court rulings that ultimately forced Canada into adopting the world’s most permissive regime of legal euthanasia.11
He quotes Trish Nichol, whose suicidal, severely mentally ill brother was administered MAiD when he sought treatment for a psychiatric episode, in a Chilliwack, BC hospital, saying her brother was screaming uncontrollably minutes before receiving the lethal injection, while hospital staff assured her that he had been of ‘sound mind’ when he opted for assisted death.12 In her presentation to the Medical Assistance in Dying Committee, she said,
Would you feel safe now, bringing your suicidal loved one to seek medical care for recovery when there are no oversight or stringent safeguards surrounding a procedure that kills people?13
I think we are in store for more harshness than we could ever have imagined, as Canadians, who pride themselves on being the most caring, just society that goes out of its way to look after the orphan, the widow, the marginalized, the diverse, the homeless, etc. I believe we are about to see the proliferation of death by voluntary choice evolve into death by legislated mandate, rather than choice. I don’t think it’s a far stretch to think we could see people routinely, not offered, but designated to be euthanized to save healthcare dollars and services once a certain level of care/need has been assessed and a list of criteria checked off.
And, for the naysayers, remember…it has happened before in other, equally ‘civilized’ jurisdictions that prided themselves in being every bit as ‘caring and gentle’ to their citizenry.
I am frighteningly concerned that Medical Aid in Dying, which is presently touted as both death with dignity and being voluntary, will, as I have said earlier, becoming mandatory, and be imposed, even within the not-too-distant future. Then, we will live through horrors that only those who have lived under the most repressive of political regimes, that violated human rights and loosed death squads on dissenters, have tried to warn us about.
That’s my take on it. Time will be the arbiter of the truth of my belief.
Watch for this, supposedly benign, death-dealing to impact you, or a loved one, soon in a healthcare facility near you.
8 https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/hundreds-of-sick-canadians-euthanized-over-loneliness/
9 https://endourlifewell.com/?s=Chillingly+Real+
10, 11, 12, 13 https://link.postmedia.com/view/622959daa0000c70b02b3504h4tg3.4fi/b2d841d7
Ending Our Life Well 