Why I changed my mind about euthanasia.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Leah Lebresco Sargeant

In her article: An Idol of Autonomy, that was published by The Dispatch on January 13, 2025, Leah Lebresco Sargeant explains why she changed her mind about euthanasia.

Sargeant explains that she support "death with dignity" so people could avoid the hardest part of dying before reading the article - The Death Treatment - that was published in The New Yorker in June 2015. Sergeant writes"

But then I read Rachel Aviv’s “The Death Treatment,” her feature on Belgium’s euthanasia regime for The New Yorker. Aviv told the story of a Belgian mother who had struggled on and off with depression for many years. When she switched doctors, her treatment goal became completing suicide, not avoiding it. She died without her family knowing she had chosen a date or having the opportunity to intervene. That story changed my mind.

Sargeant explains that since The Death Treatment was published, euthanasia and/or assisted suicide has been legalized in more jurisdictions, including Canada, and is now being debated in Great Britain.

Sargeant challenges the concept that you can have little bit of euthanasia.

I had thought that “death with dignity” might be appropriate for a small range of patients, and that it would be restricted to only those patients for whom pain control was inadequate. I was wrong on both counts. What Aviv’s feature revealed in Belgium has become the pattern of MAiD in most nations that have allowed it. A narrow, sympathetic category of patients forms a beachhead, but then, often on nondiscrimination grounds, more and more patients are allowed or even urged to die. Belgium and the Netherlands have both expanded their euthanasia regimes to include children. One of the first to be killed was an 11-year-old with cystic fibrosis.

Sargeant provides an analysis of why people ask for euthanasia or assisted suicide and explains that the data shows that it is not just about pain but rather it is about autonomy.

Sargeant states that it is hard to limit euthanasia.

Once the state officially agrees that some lives are not worth living—that it might be unfair to others to continue to draw breath—there can be a contagious effect. Canada, which has a particularly permissive law, has seen MAiD death rate surge until 1 in 25 Canadian deaths in 2022 came by medically legitimated suicide. The country has not yet hit a suicide ceiling—advocates want to allow “mature minors” (defined as children 12 and up) to be allowed to elect to die. It remains on the cusp of allowing MAiD for purely mental health conditions (depression, autism, schizophrenia) with legalization currently delayed until 2027. And advocates are suing to allow the depressed to die immediately.

Legalizing euthanasia creates competing interests in suicide.

The simplest framing of what is wrong with MAiD is that it leads to the government operating two competing suicide hotlines, and being, at best, indifferent about which one you call. On one line, people will tell you that every life is worthwhile and that your loved ones do not despise you for your frailties. On the other, a kind doctor will solicitously schedule you for a lethal cocktail or injection.

Sargeant discusses the recent Dying in Dignity poster campaign in the tube (subway) in London UK. Dignity in Dying, a U.K. euthanasia advocacy group, placed pro-assisted dying ads in the London Tube. In one poster, a fit woman leaps in the air with the uncanny joy most often on display in period product ads. Next to her in block capitals: “MY DYING WISH IS THAT MY FAMILY WON’T HAVE TO SEE ME SUFFER, AND I WON’T HAVE TO.”

Clearly this message countered the suicide prevention campaigns that are displayed in the subway systems world-wide.

Christine Gauthier

Sargeant explains her concern with reference to Christine Gauthier's story:

...A Canadian Paralympian who contacted Veterans Affairs for help getting a wheelchair ramp for her house received an unsolicited offer to be given MAiD instead. In seminars for MAiD assessors in Canada, they receive training on how to be emotionally prepared to greenlight requests to die from Canadians with non-terminal conditions for whom “poverty [is] the driver of her MAID request.” It’s a grim idea of what the healing profession is for.

Some people argue that euthanasia is good in theory but not in practise. Sergeant explains how the "ideal" cases get mixed in with exploitative cases. She then states that the BC Civil Liberties Association, who carried the Carter case to the Supreme Court of Canada to legalize euthanasia, are now saying they are concerned with how the law works.

Sargeant concludes that euthanasia should be opposed by caring for people. She writes:

There is already copious evidence that we cannot sustain a modest euthanasia regime. Though advocacy for euthanasia began with the avoidance of pain, it has inevitably slipped into making an idol of autonomy. But no human person has ever fully possessed bodily autonomy, and the legal right to destroy the body cannot make this aspiration achievable. Opposing euthanasia begins with care for the weak, but it ultimately depends on simply telling this truth about the human person.

I think that Sargeant is mainly correct, but she avoids the point, that euthanasia kills people. You cannot have a modest euthanasia regime, and expansion is inevitable, but the only way to prevent euthanasia is to oppose killing people.