MAiD (euthanasia). How does death actually occur?

So when they die, they're actually drowning in their own blood.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

The Bridge City News did an interview with Dr Joel Zivot, who is a Candian anesthesiologist and adjunct professor at Emory University in the United States. Zivot spoke to the Bridge City News about how euthanasia drugs cause death. I have edited the comments by Zivot for length. Zivot stated:

I'm an anesthesiologist and I also do intensive care medicine. I'm from Canada originally and I've been in the US for a number of years, and I'm always interested with what's happening in Canada. I have practised in Canada and I trained in Canada.

Zivot comments on the Supreme Court of Canada Carter decision that led to the legalization of euthanasia, which is known as MAiD in Canada. Zivot continued:

I was concerned that such an action would imperil medical professionalism in Canada because it seemed to be advocating a wholesale ethical change as to what physicians are supposed to be doing. Medicine is interested in saving life, not taking it.

...In my intensive care capacity I encounter a lot of patients who die and that's normal and natural but the idea that medicine could be transformed into a practice that I could actually kill someone and call it treatment. Now treatment can be killing. That, of course, to me is an anathema to the ethical practice of medicine.

In the US I am also involved with the area of the death penalty. The reason I got involved in the death penalty is the use of science and medicine as a method of punishing people. The most common method of execution in the US is lethal injection which takes certain types of chemicals that in my hands are medicine and in the state's hands are poison and repurposes them to kill prisoners.

Zivot comments on his beliefs related to the death penalty and then says:

It's not the job of the doctor to kill prisoners and it is not the job of the tools of medicine. So my protest is that if the state wants to executive people, it has to use a technique that isn't an impersonation of medicine.

Zivot then comments on Canada's euthanasia program:

Assistance in Dying in Canada is strikingly similar to the way that prisoners are executed in the United States. When I realized that was going on that caught my attention.

I have reviewed hundreds of autopsies of prisoners executed using lethal injection and found a strikingly common finding of bloody froth in their lungs. So when they die, they're actually drowning in their own blood.

You may have no sympathy for convicted murderers but the US Constitution makes it very clear that when a prisoner is punished that the punishment can't be cruel. I believe that the punishment of lethal injection creates a cruel death.

I brought those same concerns to Canada. My concern in the Canadian assisted dying system is that there's been a persistent dishonesty in exactly what is happening when people are being killed by MAiD.

Dr Zivot was asked about the drugs that are being used for euthanasia. Zivot responds:

No drug company is manufacturing a drug where the labelled indication is to kill. It's not made for that. ...In both the death penalty and assisted dying, it's recognized that these drugs can be repurposed and be converted into poison.

Zivot comments on medical politics in Canada. He then speaks about dying with dignity:

There's been little focus on is the killing part of being dead. To get from alive to dead, you have to be killed, you have to die, and that's not instantaneous. So there's a thing that has to be done to you that causes your death. And that can take some time. 

So words like dignity of course, what does it mean to be dignified, to die with dignity? ...

So to suggest somehow that the only dignity available to people who are suffering is to kill them feels to me to be a very sinister use of the word dignity.

You're basically saying that if you want to be alive and in pain that there is something wrong with you. So if your not dying with dignity then you're living with undignity.

That's branding, that's a false and pernicious claim about people who want to be alive.

Zivot was asked about euthanasia being extended to people with mental illness alone in March 2027. Zivot responds:

That's obviously very disconcerting. Let's hope that between now and then that clearer heads prevail.

I take care of a lot of people who are mentally ill. I have patients who've tried to kill themselves. 

When I encounter them, my assumption is that they want to live. Sure enough, in many cases once they have recovered from their attempted suicide, they live. Sometimes there's gratitude.

I think that you want your doctor to assume that you want to live. Mental illness leads to a series of bad decisions. I don't know how. if we say that a person has mental illness and loses capacity, that the capacity to request death, that capacity is preserved.

So why is a person who is mentally ill able to make that decision? 

Zivot then comments his experience with patients with mental illness and how they are cared for to help them live. Zivot states:

If there is some particular theoretical person who has thought about it, who's done every possible thing, who is not under resourced, who is not lonely, ... and you think that person should be allowed to die? I still don't think it's my job to do it. 

The problem is that once you make that available, you create opportunities and incentives for people to die and that's the worst possible thing.

Zivot was then asked, if lethal injection results in death by drowning, why aren't there more doctors screaming from the rooftops? Zivot responds:

I presented my concerns to the Senate of Canada and I was roundly criticized for it. When I was testifying, a person who was there waiting their turn to speak was an advocate of MAiD, when talking about MAiD he began to cry and said it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

When it came to my turn, I said to the chairperson, if you would like me to cry, I can do that too, if that would be effective.

I am not suggesting that this person was not sincere, but the sense that the only beauty lies in killing is a terrible, terrible idea. 

Zivot was then asked for his final comments. He said:

MAiD is basically saying that if you don't have MAiD then you're facing a terrible painful death. That is untrue.

Palliative care is a branch of medicine that is probably underfunded. Even without palliative care, I'm a physician in intensive care and I deal with people who are dying and I'm pretty comfortable in providing people with sedation or pain control to allow a natural death.

I don't need to kill them. They will die and they don't have to die in pain. 

What people really need is companionship.

Zivot spoke about a study on labour epidurals. The study found that when a woman has companionship and support that the pain she experienced was less. Zivot continued:

We should be there in support of people while they live. If death is going to occur, then we should provide something to ease the pain of natural dying but we don't need to kill them to do that. It's just not true. 

I think that MAiD has created this illusion that there's only two choices. It's either a miserable painful death or MAiD.

That has to stop and be challenged.

Zivot ended the interview by commenting on the effect of Canada's Charter on the euthanasia issue.

Previous articles concerning Dr Joel Zivot (Link to articles).