Euthanasia and assisted suicide laws undermine the Nuremberg code.

By John JF Killackey

Out of the atrocity of the Holocaust and the medical experimentation conducted on people against their will, emerged the Nuremberg Code. This milestone set of ethical principles is geared to preventing forced human medical experimentation from ever happening again. All societies adopting this Code to ensure that, prior to any medical intervention including experimental medical procedures, patients will be informed of the benefits and the risks in a way that they can fully understand the impact on their health and wellbeing. Furthermore, all patients must formally agree to the procedures and only after fully understanding the risks. In the past, the Supreme Court of Canada has actively defended these principles of informed consent. Sadly, the forced rollout of the Covid-19 mRNA injections marked the setting aside of the Nuremberg Code and many other drug regulatory standard operating procedures established to promote patient safety. This was to the detriment of the people around the world. The full impact of the resulting damage caused by these procedural shortcuts, including deaths and disabilities, has been significant and there is more to come.

Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID), encompassing both euthanasia and assisted suicide, is an experimental medical procedure – there are no carefully controlled clinical studies defining conditions and outlining the risks. Although the planned outcome is patient death, there are procedural and other risks to the patients and so, in the spirit of the Nuremberg Code, all MAID patients should be fully informed of the risks prior to agreeing to the treatment. And the risks are broad and serious and therefore it is also beneficial for all patients to have an experienced, impartial, advocate accompany them throughout to ensure their fully informed consent and to promote the halting of the procedure in the event of a patient’s change of heart. MAID is not about restoring health and therefore the procedure will never be accompanied with the level of care given to a patient hoping to get better. Risks of MAID at the physical level include:

• Extreme fear and anxiety by the patient,
• Pain, patient discomfort, seizures, anaphylaxis,
• Distress for families,
• Problems obtaining intravenous access or loss of intravenous access after the MAID procedure was started,
• Prolonged time to death, necessitating a second MAID procedure,
• In the case of lidocaine, a longer time to death possibly due to the antiarrhythmic effects of the drug, which may prolong the time until cardiac arrest,
• Failure of the MAID drugs to cause death, possibly leaving the patient disabled
• Failure of the drugs to provide unconsciousness leading to an awareness of the mechanism of pharmaceutical death such as paralysis of the muscles of respiration, the inability to move or talk and the resulting suffocation

MAID procedures are not as effortless and smooth as advocates would like you to believe. 

The information provided to the patients could also include a reminder to the MAID practitioner that the taking of the life of another is murder. Despite no requirement to do so, this could be a consideration of eternal significance to MAID practitioners.

Stukalin I, Olaiya OR, Naik V, Wiebe E et al . Medications and dosages used in medical assistance in dying: a cross-sectional study. CMAJ Open 2022 January 18. DOI:10.9778/cmajo.20200268