Euthanasia is the Fifth leading cause of death in Canada.

This article was published by National Review online on August 10, 2024.

Previous article on this study: The rise of euthanasia in Canada: From Exceptional to Routing (Link)

Wesley Smith

By Wesley J Smith

Euthanasia is homicide. Such (legal) killings by doctors and nurses now constitute the fifth-leading cause of death north of the 49th Parallel. From a study conducted by Cardus, a Canadian Christian think tank:

• The number of Canadians dying prematurely by “medical assistance in dying” (MAiD) has risen thirteenfold since legalization. 
• In 2016, the number of people dying in this way was 1,018. In 2022, the last year for which data are available, the number was 13,241.
• MAiD in Canada is the world’s fastest-growing assisted-dying program.
• MAiD is now tied with cerebrovascular diseases as the fifth-leading cause of death in Canada. Only deaths from cancer, heart disease, Covid-19, and accidents exceed the number of deaths from MAiD.
• Assisted dying was not meant to become a routine way of dying. Court rulings stressed that it be a “stringently limited, carefully monitored system of exceptions.” Then-minister of justice and attorney general Jody Wilson-Raybould agreed: “We do not wish to promote premature death as a solution to all medical suffering.” The Canadian Medical Association likewise stated that MAiD was intended for rare situations.
• MAiD assessors and providers do not treat it as a last resort. The percentage of MAiD requests that are denied continues to decline (currently it is 3.5 percent). MAiD requests can be assessed and provided in a single day.

It was even worse in 2023, with more than 15,000 people lethally injected according to preliminary data. If the same proportion of Americans were euthanized, the total carnage would approach 150,000 each year, or about the population of Savannah.

The euthanasia movement intends to normalize lethal injections and assisted suicide as a means of dying, and certainly not just for the terminally ill, but for elderly people, those with disabilities, chronic illnesses, and mental issues, indeed, eventually anyone who wants to die. Canadians demonstrate how darkly seductive that message can be. Good grief, our closest cultural cousins are jumping into the abyss with a smile on their collective face.

If it can happen there, it can here. The only sure preventative is to reject the assisted-suicide agenda while it remains relatively limited in scope and reinvigorate the ethical tenets of Hippocratic medicine.