How SickKids Toronto and Parliament Aligned on “Mature Minors"

This article was published by Kelsi Sheren on her substack on January 29, 2026.

How is Canada moving toward Assisted Dying for children.

By Kelsi Sheren

Canada is approaching a line it has spent years insisting does not exist, you know the one so many of us have been warning about.

CHILDREN may be NEXT.

In February 2023, the Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying (AMAD) tabled a report in the House of Commons recommending a further expansion of MAID eligibility. Buried among its many recommendations is one that fundamentally alters the relationship between children, parents, and the state. That alone should concern every parent in this country.

The report recommends that MAID be made available to “mature minors.”

More terrifying was how parental involvement is treated. What the parliamentary report actually recommends is very uncomfortable. 19 of the AMAD report states:

“That the Government of Canada establish a requirement that, where appropriate, the parents or guardians of a mature minor be consulted in the course of the assessment process for MAID, but that the will of a minor who is found to have the requisite decision-making capacity ultimately take priority.”

This is not ambiguous language. Remember when they said children should cut their breast off at 12? The only difference here is that, MAID (murder and poisoning by your dr—IS PERMANENT)

Parents or guardians “may or may not be consulted”, depending on what assessors determine is “appropriate.” Even if consulted, their consent is not required. If a minor is deemed to have decision-making capacity, their will takes precedence.

In other words, under the framework Parliament is considering, a child could be euthanized without parental consent.

This is not speculation. It is policy design, and this liberal government is quite alright with killing your children no matter what you do or say.

This idea didn’t start by the current corrupt government, it was pushed by the mentally ill people in the pro death cults of the country. To understand how Canada arrived here, it helps to look back a bit.

In 2018, ethicists at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) published a draft policy on MAID for mature minors in the Journal of Medical Ethics. That policy laid the philosophical groundwork now reflected in the AMAD report.

The SickKids Children’s Hospital working group argued that there is no meaningful ethical distinction between assisted dying and other end-of-life medical decisions already available to minors.

As journalist Sharon Kirkey reported at the time:

“The working group said it wasn’t convinced that there is a meaningful difference for the patient ‘between being consensually assisted in dying (in the case of MAID) and being consensually allowed to die (in the case of refusing life-sustaining interventions).’”

That equivalence is hyper critical here.

If withdrawing treatment and actively administering a lethal injection are ethically the same, then the same consent standards apply and in much of Canada, mature minors already have the legal authority to refuse treatment.

Most Canadian provinces allow minors deemed capable to make their own medical decisions, including refusing life-sustaining treatment.

In Ontario, for example, a minor may consent to or refuse treatment if they understand the “reasonably foreseeable consequences” of that decision. There is no fixed age threshold.

SickKids’ draft policy applied that same logic to MAID.

Sharon Kirkey explained that the hospital’s ethicists concluded:

“There is no meaningful ethical or practical distinction from the patient’s perspective between assisted dying and other procedures that result in the end of a life, such as palliative sedation or withdrawing or withholding life-sustaining treatments.”

Once that premise is accepted, the conclusion follows almost automatically.

A child deemed competent to make medical decisions is also deemed competent to decide to die with or without parental consent.

A permanent decision made in their weakest moments with adults there pushing the narrative.

The AMAD report does not explicitly state that parents should be excluded. Instead, it reframes parental involvement as conditional and secondary to the assessed will of the child.

This is a profound shift.

Parental consent is no longer foundational. It is optional. Consultation replaces authority. As a parent, that notion is simple terrifying.

The report attempts to reassure readers by emphasizing safeguards, capacity assessments, and professional judgment. But the underlying principle is clear: the state is positioning itself as the final arbiter, not the family.

This is the same pattern Canada keeps repeating and never learning from. Canada has been told before that each expansion of MAID would be rare, limited, and carefully contained.

That was said when MAID was limited to terminal illness. It was said again when eligibility expanded beyond end-of-life. It was said again when mental illness entered the discussion.

Each time, the goal post continues to move. Dr’s and this government just can’t seem to get enough of killing their own people.

Now the same logic is being applied to children.

The AMAD report also supports euthanasia based on advance requests — meaning individuals who are no longer competent could be euthanized based on a prior directive. Taken together, the direction is unmistakable.

Consent, once the cornerstone of assisted dying, is becoming conditional. Capacity is redefined. Age is minimized. Parental authority is downgraded.

This debate is often framed as compassion versus cruelty, or autonomy versus paternalism.

People in this country continue to move away from the real, hard questions. Whether it’s because their too weak or whether it’s because they don’t genuinely care about how we care for our children. What does it mean when a society who is supposed to have the best socialized healthcare in the globe starts killing it’s kids.

I’ll tell you, this is a sign of a Godless country, killing it’s next generation just like the Nazi’s did. This is Eugenics all over again, framed as compassion and care. Anyone with two eyes can see that.

Every expansion of MAID has been justified as an exception. But exceptions accumulate and each new door opened makes the next one easier to justify.

Canada is no longer debating whether child euthanasia is conceivable.

It is debating how to implement it and kill more children.

KELSI SHEREN

Source: https://www.parl.ca/documentviewer/en/44-1/AMAD/report-2/page-5

Sick Kids Hospital Toronto will euthanize children with or without parental consent (Link).

Academia Routinely Dehumanizes Disabled People

Meghan Schrader

By Meghan Schader
Meghan is an instructor at E4 - University of Texas (Austin) and is a member of the EPC-USA board.  

I love a good philosophical discussion, but I am frustrated that academia has treated disabled human beings as walking moral conundrums instead of people. 

I think Alexander Raikin put this problem well when he posted on X,

“For all the talk about ‘cancel culture,’ if you're an academic, you can say whatever you want about people with disabilities. You can say that their lives aren't valuable, that being dead is an improvement. You won't be penalized for these views—it'll help you get published.”

Exactly. This pattern is a personal beserk button.

Now I come to my most recent foray into academia, a commentary I was invited to write for a prestigious academic journal’s special issue on “MAiD” and disability. I was told that the paper was enthusiastically accepted and later asked to make various adjustments. 

For nine months I worked diligently to carefully and open mindedly address each point, with input from the person who had asked me to write the commentary. Up to when I submitted the manuscript incorporating the second round of feedback, publication appeared likely.

But then I received notice that the editors didn’t want my commentary after all. 

On some level, I have to suck it up. Article rejections are part of academia. Nevertheless I think it’s worthwhile to examine the editors’ assertion that the final outcome occurred solely because editing my writing did not result in “changes to the style to better match the style of the other manuscripts in the special issue and the style of manuscripts in the journal in general” and had nothing to do with publication bias. 

I think the feedback I received complicates that conclusion. Regardless of their intent, the editors seemed to want me to use language and make statements that favor the “MAiD” movement’s ideology.

I know that this perception is influenced by my personal biases, but the second round of feedback I received strikes me as possibly being an example of the longstanding pattern of some powerful “MAiD” supporters being insincere when they say that they want to “have a discussion” about  “death with dignity.” They want a discussion, but only one where their ideology is cast in the best possible light and opponents are expected to make concessions that sanitize horrible bigotry. 

For instance, during the second round of feedback the lead editors wanted me to address disabled people who want “MAiD.” All I could offer was a more detailed version of the argument that I made in the first draft of the commentary and on this blog: I empathize with disabled people who would like to “use MAiD,” but the disabled proponents are in the minority and I think it’s common sense that their suicidal ideation/desire for autonomy should not be able to turn the rest of the disabled community into a killable caste. 

The editors also seemed to want me to make statements that I worried would imply that the disabled community is evenly divided on the issue of “MAiD,” which is one of the “MAiD” movement’s favorite canards. The  majority of the disability community opposes “MAiD” and has for decades. So, in addition providing an intersectional analysis of disabled people who do want “MAiD,” I added contextualized quotes from other, more accomplished disability justice opponents of “MAiD,” to establish that while not every disabled person opposes “MAiD,” my perspective is not unique, either. 

One of the editors suggested that I call Peter Singer’s assertion that raping some disabled people is acceptable “controversial.” I think they were ok with my proposed substitution of “callous,” but why has academia conditioned people to suggest adjectives like “controversial” when discussing raping disabled persons? The consensus among ethical people in our culture is that rape is abhorrent, not “controversial.” I think referring to the rape of a disabled person as  “controversial” reinforces our culture’s pattern of treating the horrible abuse of disabled persons as if it weren’t necessarily wrong, even if that wasn’t the editor’s intent. 

In addition to seemingly wanting me to imply that the disabled community is evenly divided on the issue of “MAiD” and refer to the rape of disabled people as “controversial,” the editors wanted me to say that killing disabled children with “MAiD” was hateful “in my opinion.” I added the phrase “in my opinion,”  but I also added contextualized quotes from other, more accomplished disability rights advocates who concur with that assessment. I worried that otherwise my commentary might suggest that my perspective on killing disabled children is unique and that such killings are something that 21st century people should agree to disagree about. 

That concession isn’t appropriate for a personal commentary. I’m a disabled disability justice advocate. Therefore I think that disabled people’s dignity demands that if a policy of killing  able-bodied children from other disenfranchised groups is considered hateful, killing disabled children be regarded as hateful.

Even if bias was not the intent, I am nonplussed by the sanitizing language the journal editors asked me to use in my discussion of raping and killing. I think academic and political debate is usually a very good thing, but there are limits to what responsible people should concede. 

Richard John Neuhaus remarked, “Thousands of medical ethicists and bioethicists, as they are called, professionally guide the unthinkable on its passage through the debatable on its way to becoming the justifiable until it is finally established as the unexceptionable.” 

Yes. So I did everything I could to respond eruditely  to my reviewer’s feedback without becoming part of that process. I am sorry that my commentary was not published by the prestigious journal, but at least I didn’t have to say that raping disabled people is “controversial” or that killing disabled children is only hateful “in my opinion.”

Academia’s insistence on treating disabled people like walking thought experiments is obnoxious;  rhetoric that promotes raping and killing disabled people is oppressive. However limited my own influence may be, that’s why I’ve written blogs and X threads that say, “Oh, you want to have a nice, polite discussion about killing disabled people, eh? Here’s a picture of your book in a toilet!” 

Disabled people aren’t “porn” for scholars’ intellectual vulgarity sessions. We are not obliged to accept abuse from academics who wish to debate the merits of raping and killing us at conferences in posh hotels. Not using disabled people’s personhood as an intellectual plaything is one of the least things society could do for people with disabilities.  

Author Note 1: For an incisive, more comprehensive commentary on resisting the “MAiD” movement’s framing in discussions about assisted suicide and eugenics, please read disability policy analyst Gabrielle Peters’s article “Acceding To MAiD Proponent’s Framing Excludes Abolition As a Potential Solution” in the American Journal of Bioethics. 

Author Note 2: For clarification of what I mean when I say that Peter Singer said that raping some disabled people is acceptable, read this blog post.

The False Ally Fallacy

This article is written by Kim Carlson and Paul Magennis from the MAiD in Canada substack.

The following post is part of a structured, multi-week, simultaneously published exchange between Kim Carlson and Paul Magennis, authors of MAiD in Canada, and Gordon Friesen, President of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition. These alternating messages will explore deeply divergent views on Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD), and no mutual endorsement is implied.

Previously published exchanges between Friesen and MAiD in Canada have been:

Gordon Friesen, Monday, January 12, 2026.
Maid in Canada (MIC)     January 19, 2026.
Gordon Friesen                January 26, 2026.

The False Ally Fallacy:

Why Friesen’s references do not support his claims

It is disappointing that Mr. Friesen devoted so much time to matters unrelated to MAiD in cases where eligibility is based on mental illness and the central question is decision-making capacity. By our count, less than half of his latest submission addressed the topic we explicitly agreed to discuss. In addition to being red herrings,[1] this appears to be an attempt to introduce so many diversions that responding to them would distract us from addressing his central—and unsupported—claim.

For now, we simply ask Friesen how characterizing MAiD providers as “homicide-friendly professionals” reflects anything that could reasonably be described as “neutral,”[2] or even respectful, within the terms of this exchange?

Back to the topic

Friesen has not engaged with our previous arguments. Since he has not challenged the fact that people living with mental illness can possess decision-making capacity, we take this point as conceded.

What remains, then, is an argument from uncertainty: that there is no way to distinguish between a desire to die arising from acute symptoms of mental illness, and a reasoned and capable response to long-term, treatment-resistant suffering. Uncertainty is not justification for categorical exclusion, and arguments of this kind have already been considered and rejected by the Supreme Court of Canada.[3]

Denying the rights of an entire group demands substantial justification from those advocating for that denial.[4] Because Friesen’s purported justifications are unsupported—even by his own references—he has not met that burden.

The Canadian Psychiatric Association (CPA)

Friesen notes that the CPA “has not taken a position on whether MAiD should be available” on the basis of mental illness and then treats that as evidence of opposition. It is not. Declining to take a position is not the same as taking a position against, particularly in a complex and contested domain.

More importantly, the CPA’s statement contains no suggestion that decision-making capacity cannot be assessed in this context.[5] Instead, it acknowledges a lack of consensus within Canadian psychiatry—a point made explicit in the preceding sentence that Friesen omitted from his quote:

“Within Canadian psychiatry there are divergent opinions with respect to the provision of MAID, as well as whether access to MAID should be permitted on the basis of mental disorder.”

The CPA declined to take a position because of the complexity of the issue and because its members genuinely disagree—not because they believe decision-making capacity cannot be assessed. For those psychiatrists who believe MAiD might be appropriate in some cases, that view necessarily presupposes that capacity can be determined—further undermining Friesen’s claim.

Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention (CASP) & American Association of Suicidology (AAS)

Friesen again appeals to the CASP and AAS to suggest that MAiD and suicide are indistinguishable. CASP explicitly disagrees with that claim, and AAS doesn’t even make it.

CASP stated that MAiD for those without a terminal illness constitutes a form of suicide.[6] However, CASP does not argue that MAiD and suicide are clinically or ethically indistinguishable, nor that it is impossible to differentiate the two. In fact, in an earlier statement, CASP explicitly affirmed that “MAiD and suicide can, at least in principle, be distinguished,” even while acknowledging possible overlap.[7] 

Claims that CASP regards MAiD and suicide as indistinguishable are not just unsupported—they directly contradict CASP’s published statements.

Friesen makes a similar error with the AAS, who retired a prior statement recognizing a distinction between MAiD and suicide[8] [9]—a standard process for aging position statements.[10] [11] But the removal of that statement does not imply the adoption of the opposite position. Friesen’s conclusion here relies on an inference his source does not support.

The American Psychiatric Association (APA)

Friesen’s reference to the APA follows the same pattern. While the APA opposes MAiD based on mental illness, the objection does not rest on an inability to assess capacity.[12] On the contrary, in the reference Friesen provides the APA explicitly states that:

• psychiatrists may be asked to assess capacity where psychiatric symptoms may impair decision-making;
• some mental conditions involve temporary alterations in preferences that reflect the underlying disorder; and 
• in jurisdictions where MAiD is legal, it is ethically permissible for psychiatrists to assess capacity in this context.

There is no suggestion here that capacity cannot be determined. Indeed, there is an explicit acknowledgment that psychiatrists can assess capacity for MAiD in the setting of mental illness.

The APA’s objection is instead tied to concerns about hope and incurability, stating that “labelling a mental illness as…irremediable is inconsistent with present treatment approaches in psychiatry.” That is a complex and contested claim, particularly given the growing discussion of palliative psychiatry[13]—but incurability is not the subject of our exchange with Friesen.

Conclusion

This exchange now turns on a narrow question: whether the acknowledged difficulty, in some cases, of assessing decision-making capacity justifies denying assessment to an entire group. Neither clinical practice nor legal principle supports that move. Friesen has not shown why it should.

---

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring

[2] “’Homicide”, is a neutral, Latin, technical term.” - Gordon Friesen

[3] Carter v Canada (Attorney General), 2015 SCC 5 at paras. 87–88.

[4] Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, s. 7 (life, liberty, and security of the person).

[5] Canadian Psychiatric Association Position on MAID

[6] CASP Issues Statement About MAiD for Mental Illness

[7] CASP statement on the Expansion of Medical Assistance in Dying to those without a Reasonably Foreseeable Death

[8] AAS Update on Physician Assisted Death Previous Statement

[9] Statement of the American Association of Suicidology: “SUICIDE” is not the same as “Physician Aid in Dying”

[10] World Health Organization, WHO Handbook for Guideline Development, 2nd ed. (2014), s. 12.5 (“Updating guidelines”), pp. 163–164.

[11] Canadian Psychiatric Association – Position Papers and Statements

[12] APA Position Statement on Psychiatric Participation in Physician Assistance in Dying

[13] Trachsel M, et al., “Palliative psychiatry for severe and persistent mental illness: a new treatment paradigm?” BMC Psychiatry (2016).