Canada is Killing Itself: Some Canadian doctors find euthanasia "energizing"

Alex Schadenberg

Executive Director, 

Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Elaina Plott Calabro wrote an exposé on Canada's euthanasia law that was published in the September edition of the Atlantic titled - Canada is Killing Itself. The article is too long to comment on in one article, so I am writing a series of articles covering the important points.

Calabro first explains out how fast euthanasia has been normalized:

It is too soon to call euthanasia a lifestyle option in Canada, but from the outset it has proved a case study in momentum. MAID began as a practice limited to gravely ill patients who were already at the end of life. The law was then expanded to include people who were suffering from serious medical conditions but not facing imminent death. In two years, MAID will be made available to those suffering only from mental illness. Parliament has also recommended granting access to minors.

There are many problems with the implementation of Canada's euthanasia law. Calabro writes:

There have been unintended consequences: Some Canadians who cannot afford to manage their illness have sought doctors to end their life. In certain situations, clinicians have faced impossible ethical dilemmas. At the same time, medical professionals who decided early on to reorient their career toward assisted death no longer feel compelled to tiptoe around the full, energetic extent of their devotion to MAID. Some clinicians in Canada have euthanized hundreds of patients.

Calabro interviews several of the euthanasia doctors about their experiences. Some of the doctors consider euthanasia to be the "most meaningful work" of their career.

Stefanie Green compares her euthanasia deaths to baby deliveries. Calabro explains:

Stefanie Green, a physician on Vancouver Island and one of the organization’s founders, told me how her decades as a maternity doctor had helped equip her for this new chapter in her career. In both fields, she explained, she was guiding a patient through an “essentially natural event”—the emotional and medical choreography “of the most important days in their life.” She continued the analogy: “I thought, Well, one is like delivering life into the world, and the other feels like transitioning and delivering life out.” And so Green does not refer to her MAID deaths only as “provisions”—the term for euthanasia that most clinicians have adopted. She also calls them “deliveries.”

Gord Gubitz, a neurologist from Nova Scotia to Calabro that:

He finds euthanasia to be “energizing”—the “most meaningful work” of his career. “It’s a happy sad, right?” he explained. “It’s really sad that you were in so much pain. It is sad that your family is racked with grief. But we’re so happy you got what you wanted.”

Dr Ellen Wiebe

A previous article about euthanasia in Canada concerning Liz Carr's movie Better Off Dead? features Ellen Wiebe, a euthanasia doctor in Vancouver stated:

'I love my job, I've always loved being a doctor and I delivered over a 1000 babies and I took care of families but this is the very best work I've ever done in the last seven years.'

There are many problems with Canada's euthanasia law. The first being that it gives doctors and nurse practitioners the right in law to kill people. Another is that some doctors and nurse practitioners actually enjoy killing people. 

You are not 'safe' when somebody is happy to kill you.

• Does Canada's euthanasia law enable healthcare seriel killers? (Link).