Atlantic article details the horrors of Canadian euthanasia

This article was published by National Review online on August 13, 2025.

Wesley Smith

By Wesley J Smith

Opponents of euthanasia have been screaming about Canada’s god-awful euthanasia machine for years. And it keeps getting worse. Now, the mainstream media — usually in the tank for assisted suicide — has finally noticed, as demonstrated by a thoroughly researched and objectively presented story by Elaina Plott Calabro.

It’s a long piece, but it’s well worth everyone’s time. Calabro discusses examples of doctors who have killed hundreds of patients, people who have had themselves killed because they couldn’t access proper support services, and many other cases. Euthanasia is Canada’s fifth-leading cause of death, with more than 15,000 patients terminated annually.

But this section really got to me. From, “Canada is Killing Itself“:

The details of the assisted-death experience have become a preoccupation of Canadian life. Patients meticulously orchestrate their final moments, planning celebrations around them: weekend house parties before a Sunday-night euthanasia in the garden; a Catholic priest to deliver last rites; extended-family renditions of “Auld Lang Syne” at the bedside.

For $10.99, you can design your MAID experience with the help of the Be Ceremonial app; suggested rituals include a story altar, a forgiveness ceremony, and the collecting of tears from witnesses. On the Disrupting Death podcast, hosted by an educator and a social worker in Ontario, guests share ideas on subjects such as normalizing the MAID process for children facing the death of an adult in their life — a pajama party at a funeral home; painting a coffin in a schoolyard.

Brr. And guess what. These patients do not receive suicide-prevention interventions. And their organs may be harvested.

When the hastening of death is legalized, it turns some suicides and homicides into a “good.” That transforms culture for the much worse. For example, a 2023 poll found that 28 percent of Canadians polled favored allowing euthanasia for homelessness.

In all of this, I am reminded of the observation made by Canadian journalist Andrew Coyne many years ago: 

“A society that believes in nothing can offer no argument even against death. A culture that has lost its faith in life cannot comprehend why it should be endured.” 

Canada is indeed killing itself. If it can happen there, it can happen here too. Caveat emptor.

Euthanasia without brakes.

This article was published by the Epoch Times on December 7, 2022.

By Wesley Smith:

Wesley Smith

In my first ever anti-euthanasia piece, which was published in Newsweek back in 1993, I warned that legalizing assisted suicide would lead to organ harvesting of those killed by doctors “as a plum to society.” For my trouble. I was called alarmist and hysterical—and those were the nice letters.

Alas, rather than being alarmist, I was prescient. Today in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Canada, people who ask to be killed by doctors are sometimes organ harvested too. Not only that, but the phenomenon was celebrated in the media as “a growing boon to organ donation” in the Ottawa Citizen, with the story sighing, “Ontarians who opt for medically assisted deaths (MAiD) are increasingly saving or improving other people’s lives by also including organ and tissue donation as part of their final wishes.”

Understand that in Canada, one need not be terminally ill to qualify for a lethal injection. The patient can be disabled, elderly and lonely, or chronically ill—and starting next year, people with mental illnesses will also be eligible for killing. Not only that, but once someone is accepted for euthanasia in Ontario, he or she doesn’t receive suicide prevention. No. No. Instead, the Trillium Gift of Life Network in the province contacts the soon-to-be-killed person to ask for their heart, liver, and kidneys. As the story reports, “Ontario, through Trillium, immediately moved to the forefront of organ and tissue donation through MAiD, becoming the first jurisdiction in the world to proactively reach out to those who had been approved for assisted death to discuss donation.”

Remember, many of these patients wouldn’t be dying if they weren’t going to be lethally injected. That serves the organ harvesting agenda well, according to the Citizen, “MAiD donations also typically provide more time for testing donor organs and better matching with recipients.” Again, that time lag would also permit intensive suicide prevention efforts, but that isn’t a public policy priority in Canada when one asks for euthanasia.

But here’s the thing that rarely gets mentioned: Conjoining organ donation and euthanasia can be the tipping point for deciding to choose to be killed by a suffering patient, particularly one who is mentally ill. Remember, these are despairing people who could easily come to think that their deaths have greater value than their lives. It’s a monstrous abandonment.

​I wish I could say that organ donation conjoined with lethal injections was the only slide down the slippery slope I have predicted correctly in my decades of anti-euthanasia advocacy. Here’s a short list of some of the other wrongs I warned against that have, indeed, come to pass. 

• Pediatric Euthanasia: If killing is a “compassionate medical treatment,” as the right to die movement says, how can it be denied to children? Eventually, it won’t be, I have predicted. And sure enough: Belgium allows children of all ages to be euthanized and has publicly reported that children as young as 9 have been made dead by their doctors. Ditto, the Netherlands. The Dutch also allow doctors to commit active infanticide of babies born with serious disabilities or terminal illnesses. There is even a bureaucratic checklist for doctors to decide which babies can be killed known as the “Groningen Protocol.” 
• Killing People with Dementia: Another of my predictions warned that legalizing euthanasia would eventually spread to allowing people who aren’t competent to be killed. And so it came to pass. Belgium, the Netherlands, and soon Canada, permit people diagnosed with dementia to order themselves lethally injected after they become incompetent. Once the document is signed and the patient loses capacity, they can’t change their minds because their “former” selves now control what happens to them. This license to kill the now incapacitated has even led to one woman in the Netherlands being held down by her family as she struggled against being lethally injected. That was against the law, but the doctor was exonerated of committing a crime because the judge said she acted “in good faith.” Soon afterward, the Dutch Parliament changed the law to permit such non-voluntary killings to take place legally. 
• Euthanizing the Elderly: I have frequently pointed out that euthanasia activists promote the idea of allowing the elderly to die rather than face the infirmities of old age. Sure enough. Belgium and the Netherlands have both seen cases of joint euthanasia deaths by married couples who would rather both die than face the pain of widowhood. There was even one case in Belgium of a couple “who feared the future” being euthanized by a doctor—with the planned death arranged by their son. And in Canada, an elderly woman in a nursing home chose to be killed rather than be isolated from her family by COVID-19 protocols. Ironically, the very authorities who wouldn’t allow her family to visit her if she chose to live, permitted them to be present when she received the lethal injection. Can you imagine? 
• Death Doctor Shopping: I have warned frequently against “doctor shopping,” that is patients refused assisted suicide by their own doctors merely going to another doctor they know is willing to do the deed. Examples of such cases are rife. For example, in Belgium an oncologist euthanized a woman who had suffered lifelong depression, even though he was clearly not a medical expert in mental illness nor her treating doctor. Doctor shopping happens all of the time in this country too. It will soon get much worse with assisted suicide now permitted in states such as Oregon and Washington by telemedicine. Moreover, Oregon no longer requires that a patient requesting death be a resident, which means patients from all over the country may be able to access poison prescriptions from doctors they hardly know and may have only counseled with virtually. 
• Death on Demand: I have often remarked that the logic of euthanasia inevitably leads to death on demand for any reason that a suicidal person wants. Thus, I was appalled—but not shocked—when Germany’s highest court created both a fundamental right to suicide and the right to assist or be assisted in being made dead. And this right exists for any reason. The court ruled, “The right to a self-determined death is not limited to situations defined by external causes like serious or incurable illnesses, nor does it only apply in certain stages of life or illness. Rather, this right is guaranteed in all stages of a person’s existence.”
  

In all of this, I’m reminded of Canadian journalist Andrew Coyne’s lament, written more than 20 years ago, about the popular support for euthanasia he sensed in his country: 

“A society that believes in nothing can offer no argument even against death. A culture that has lost its faith in life cannot comprehend why it should be endured.”

If we don’t change our current cultural trajectory we will end up in the same dark corner as Canada, the Netherlands, and Belgium. And the real danger to our cultural wellbeing is that the people who now complacently assume that such warnings are alarmist will be the ones applauding the loudest when that dark time comes.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Andrew Coyne: Canada's slippery assisted suicide slope.

Alex Schadenberg

Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Andrew Coyne

Andrew Coyne is a well known Canadian columnist with the Globe and Mail and is a past editor of the National Post. Coyne has commented on assisted suicide on several occasions but today, in the Hub, Coyne clearly states his concern with Canada's MAiD euthanasia law. Coyne states:

I think in particular, though, with assisted suicide, it was how easily the slope became slippery. You know, undergraduates are all taught, “Slippery slopes, it’s just a fallacy.” Well, no, it’s not always a fallacy; some slopes are indeed slippery. And when you see the progression of how that came to pass, where it was initially pitched as people who were in the last agonizing stages of a terminal disease; who were physically unable to end their own lives. I mean, nobody wants to ban suicide, but in this case, they were physically unable to do it, and therefore the argument was, “Well, they have, you know, somebody has to help them to put them out of their misery.” But that’s a very, very narrow case; it was the Sue Rodriguez type of case, and it was almost instantly, instantly elasticized.

First, it was to people who aren’t in that stage now but might be in the future, and therefore, they need to be able to avail themselves of assistance now, because, you know, when they’re in the last age, they wouldn’t be able to do so. Or it started to include not just physical pain, but psychological pain, which is a much more elusive thing to define. And when you started to sort of burrow into the underlying rationale for it, it really didn’t allow for any constraint, as we’re starting to see. Once you accept this idea that this is actually just a basic human right to have somebody else kill you, then are you going to prevent the mentally handicapped from availing themselves of that? Are you going to prevent children from doing so? And of course, when that was first raised, people said, “Slippery slope; this is alarmism,” and they were perhaps unaware that people even then we’re arguing precisely that, and were going to continue to argue precisely that.

So, I think the nature of that I found very disturbing, and it was, at the same time, kind of interesting to unpack it as an intellectual puzzle. How did people go down this road? How do they allow themselves to lose their bearings so much that we could start advocating a society for basically killing disabled children?

Coyne is correct, that Canada has quickly slid down the slide from discussing assisted suicide for difficult cases to accepting euthanasia for psychological suffering and mental illness and now considering child euthanasia.

Previous articles by Andrew Coyne

• Andrew Coyne: Canada is accelerating toward death on demand (Link).
• Andrew Coyne: "extending assisted suicide to children and the mentally incompetent, once derided as “slippery slope” alarmism, is now the next item on the agenda" (Link).
• Andrew Coyne: Assisted suicide makes us complicit in another's death (Link).
• Andrew Coyne: The absurd logic of assisted suicide (Link).
• Andrew Coyne: Crossing the Rubicon, Supreme Court seems eerily complacent about ramifications of assisted suicide ruling (Link).
• Andrew Coyne: Assisted Suicide, What begins in compassion seems to end in eugenics (Link).

Québec debating protocols for expanding euthanasia law.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Québec debates euthanasia expansion

You may remember that Québec legalized euthanasia before Canada's federal government legalized euthanasia. The Québec National Assembly is now debating further expansions of the euthanasia law and pressure the federal government to further expand killing in Canada.

In December 2014, Andrew Coyne, a former editor of the National Post, in response to the Québec euthanasia law wrote - What begins in compassion seems to end in eugenics. In response to the same Québec euthanasia law I wrote the article - Euthanasia: Theory and Reality.

Steve Rukavina reported for CBC News that the Québec committee hearings on the Evolution of the Act respecting end-of-life care is discussing the protocols for expanding euthanasia to people with mental illness alone. Rukavina states:

Quebec's National Assembly committee will issue a final report this fall, which will likely have some influence on Ottawa.

The CAQ government also backed off its own plan to open up assisted dying to people with mental illness in 2020, a move which ultimately led to the creation of this committee.

For the next two weeks the committee will hear testimony from experts including doctors, professors and lawyers.

During a second round of hearings in the summer lobby groups and individuals will have their chance to weigh in.

The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition will keep you up-to-date on the workings of the Québec committee.

Andrew Coyne: Canada is accelerating toward death-on-demand.

Andrew Coyne wrote the following opinion column, that was published in the Globe and Mail on December 11, 2020. Coyne, who has been writing about issues related to euthanasia and assisted suicide for many years examines Canada's move from cautiously considering euthanasia to Bill C-7 which nearly permits death on demand. Coyne writes:

Six years ago, before the Supreme Court discovered a right to die in the constitution’s guarantee of the right to life, what most people understood as the case for assisted suicide was something like the following: a mentally competent adult, suffering acute pain from a terminal illness and facing more of the same to the end, comes to a firm and unwavering decision to kill herself – but is physically unable, by virtue of the same illness, to do so unaided, or fears she will be unable to when the time comes.

That was the condition of Sue Rodriguez, whose 1993 Supreme Court appeal challenging the constitutionality of the Criminal Code prohibition on assisting in a suicide, though unsuccessful, first brought the issue to public attention. It was also the condition of Gloria Taylor, the woman on whose case the Court based its 2015 decision legalizing the practice (Lee Carter, whose name is attached to the decision’s short-form title, was merely a co-appellant).

Had you predicted then that the right to an assisted suicide would soon come to apply, not only in cases of physical pain but psychological, and not only to patients in the last agonizing stages of death but those who were nowhere near it – had you predicted, indeed, that a patient’s request to be killed would not even have to be repeated and persistent for a doctor to act on it, that the whole process could be telescoped into a single day – you would have been accused of “slippery slope” thinking.

Had you predicted that, by 2019, just the third full year after it was legalized, nearly one in 50 deaths in the country would be by assisted suicide, even on the (almost certainly underreported) official numbers; and that, this having been accomplished, talk would turn to extending the procedure – not just to competent adults, but the mentally ill and even children – you would have been carted off.

Yet that, incredibly, is where we are. The cautious, limited exceptions that people understood the issue to involve at the start – what most people understand it to involve even now – have been overtaken by an accelerating drive toward death-on-demand. Had the public known this was where we were headed, they might have objected. Instead it has been done in stages, a series of bait-and-switch routines in which the courts and legislatures have taken equal part.

The irony is that the very foundation of the Supreme Court’s decision in Carter was that there was no such slippery slope. Perhaps assisted suicide, once legalized, might have spread and metastasized in other countries, barbaric places such as Belgium and the Netherlands, to include children, people suffering depression, prisoners serving life sentences, and so on – but that, the Court was certain, could not happen here. The evidence was “anecdotal.” The “medico-legal culture” was altogether different.

And yet the Court immediately undermined its own premise. Though the decision ostensibly applied only “in the factual circumstances of this case,” i.e. to “people like Ms. Taylor” or “persons in her situation,” i.e. “wracked with pain” and near the “end of life,” by the time the Court got around to working out the general principle to be applied in such cases it had ditched any requirement that a patient’s condition be either terminal or physical; rather just “grievous and irremediable.”

Still, the decision did not preclude governments from imposing such a rule, even if the court declined to do so – if not that death be at hand, then at least “reasonably foreseeable,” in the language the Trudeau government adopted in subsequent legislation. So when a Quebec Superior Court judge ruled that provision unconstitutional in September, 2019, she was essentially freelancing.

The government had ample grounds to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court. Instead, it drafted legislation – Bill C-7, which it is now attempting to rush through the House of Commons in time for Christmas – that obediently accepted the Quebec court’s opinion as its own. Worse, it went further.

No longer would there be a mandatory 10-day waiting period between a request for assisted suicide and its execution, to allow for a change of heart. (According to Health Canada, 263 such requests were withdrawn in 2019.) Neither would two witnesses be required: henceforth, one would suffice.

Previous articles by Andrew Coyne:

• Andrew Coyne: "extending assisted suicide to children and the mentally incompetent, once derided as “slippery slope” alarmism, is now the next item on the agenda" (Link).
• Andrew Coyne: Assisted suicide makes us complicit in another's death (Link).
• Andrew Coyne: The absurd logic of assisted suicide (Link).
• Andrew Coyne: Crossing the Rubicon, Supreme Court seems eerily complacent about ramifications of assisted suicide ruling (Link).
• Andrew Coyne: Assisted Suicide, What begins in compassion seems to end in eugenics (Link).

Child euthanasia comes to the Netherlands

This article was published by First Things on October 21, 2020

Wesley Smith

By Wesley J Smith

Once a society accepts the noxious notion that killing is an acceptable answer to human suffering, the definition of “suffering” never stops expanding.

The history of euthanasia in the Netherlands proves that maxim. The Dutch have allowed doctors to kill sick patients since the ’70s, taking an approach of quasi-decriminalization. Euthanasia was formally legalized in 2002. Over the decades, Dutch doctors “progressed” from euthanizing the terminally ill who ask for it, to the chronically ill who ask for it, to people with disabilities who ask for it, to the mentally ill who ask for it, and even to people with dementia who are unable to ask for it (as long as they left written instructions requesting it). The Dutch have also conjoined euthanasia with organ donation, creating a utilitarian impetus for lethal injection for both despairing patients and society. There have even been joint euthanasia killings of elderly couples who don’t want to experience the grief of widowhood.

*Sign and share the Petition opposing child euthanasia in the Netherlands (Link).

Now the country is getting ready to allow little children to be euthanized. When euthanasia was first legalized, 16 was the age limit. Later, it was lowered to 12. Now, the government is proposing legislation that will allow pediatric euthanasia starting at age 1. From the NL Times story:

For the children referenced in the new policy, doctors are only allowed to give palliative care, like sedation, or withhold nutrition over an extended period of time until the patient dies. Doctors describe this as “a gray area” between normal palliative care and active life termination, he said, and they have been calling out for more regulation. . . . [Health Minister Hugo] De Jonge said his proposal will protect the interests of children, and will afford more transparency to the “gray area.”

Four points bear making here. First, the story notes that young children can already be killed via slow-motion euthanasia, known in bioethics parlance as “terminal sedation.” Unlike legitimate pain control, terminal sedation aims to cause death by keeping the patient in an artificial coma and withholding all sustenance until the patient dies of dehydration (thirst) in about two weeks. This is not the same procedure as “palliative sedation,” an ethical pain-controlling technique that puts the patient into lesser or deeper levels of sedation as the patient requires. The purpose of palliative sedation is to maximize the patient’s comfort. In such cases, death comes naturally from the underlying condition—not from the sedation or withheld food or water.

Second, given the steady expansion of euthanasia eligibility in the Netherlands over the years, there is no reason to believe that the “terminal diagnosis” restriction will be followed—much less stick—for long. Some mentally ill people who are killed would otherwise live a normal lifespan, but that fact has been used as a justification for killing because it means the patient could experience many years of suffering.

Third, doctors already euthanize terminally ill and seriously disabled babies—that is, they commit infanticide—thanks to a bureaucratic checklist known as the Groningen Protocol. If a three-week-old baby with, say, spina bifida can be killed in the Netherlands without legal repercussions, eventually it will be permissible to kill children who become seriously disabled (particularly if the disability is cognitive).

Finally, the Dutch frequently justify expanding euthanasia eligibility by claiming they are merely coloring in “gray areas” to permit greater certainty and transparency. Yet these redefinitions of the law only go in one direction—increasing the number of people eligible for lethal injection. Besides, transparency does not transform an act that is immoral into somehow being moral. It just makes the entire society complicit.

The Netherlands won’t be the first country to permit child euthanasia. Belgium removed all age restrictions a few years ago. We know, based on government reports, that children as young as nine have been killed by doctors. One assumes their parents gave the go-ahead. But children are not so many pets to be put down when the owners think the time has come.

Pediatric euthanasia may soon come to this side of the Atlantic. Canada permits lethal injection euthanasia for adults—known as “medical assistance in dying” (MAID). As the country is preparing to expand its eligibility criteria, some hope that will include children—perhaps without parental consent. An article published last year in the Journal of Medical Ethics supported pediatric euthanasia. It was written by doctors who practice at a Toronto children’s hospital. Since Canadian children considered sufficiently mature may legally refuse life-extending care without parental consent, the doctors wrote, they should also be allowed to request a lethal injection. From “Medical Assistance in Dying at a Paediatric Hospital”: 

If . . . a capable [legally underage] patient explicitly indicates that they do not want their family members involved in their decision-making, although healthcare providers may encourage the patient to reconsider and involve their family, ultimately the wishes of capable patients with respect to confidentiality must be respected. If we regard MAID as practically and ethically equivalent to other medical decisions that result in the end of life, then confidentiality regarding MAID should be managed in this same way.

Can you imagine visiting your sick child, only to learn that hospital doctors killed her without your knowledge or consent? The rage and agony would be unimaginable.

So what is the bottom line? Once a society embraces killing as an acceptable answer to human suffering and redefines assisted suicide as a “medical treatment,” the culture’s entire mindset shifts. Helping suffering people live ceases to be the overriding objective: These patients are rarely offered suicide prevention. Instead, death becomes the imperative, and not just for adults but eventually for sick and disabled children too—perhaps with organ donation thrown in as a plum to society.

It’s all so disheartening. As Canadian journalist Andrew Coyne once wrote about the growing popularity of euthanasia: 

“A society that believes in nothing can offer no argument even against death. A culture that has lost its faith in life cannot comprehend why it should be endured.” 

When the euthanasia death angel comes for children, who can say he is wrong?

Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. His latest book is Culture of Death: The Age of “Do Harm” Medicine.

Euthanasia Party!

This article was published by National Review online on March 14, 2019.

Wesley Smith

By Wesley J Smith

Party!

A Canadian man with diabetes named Dan Laramie, whose illness had advanced to the point he would need amputations, decided to be lethally injected instead. He was killed by his doctor to cheers and applause from family and friends at his euthanasia party — at which photos were taken to commemorate the event, and perhaps, to send along with the story to the media. From the Daily Mail story:

She said music was played an important part in the end-of-life celebration and he had even written 30 songs while he was in hospital.

Speaking after the party [Laramie’s wife] Stef said: ‘I don’t really feel loss, we don’t need any sorrow at this time and I don’t know if that sounds rude.

‘We had a really amazing relationship, if he had died in a way that we had no notion of it or by surprise then it would be a sorrowful thing. But I don’t think dying should be sorrowful.’

His friends, sister, son, daughter, grandchildren and some of his nurses all came to the party.

So, let me ask you, my dear readers, to ponder: If invited to such a “party,” would you go?

It could be an agonizing decision:

Attend, and it seems to me you become complicit in the suicide/homicide. You validate it. You affirm to the suicidal patient that his or her worst fears about continuing to live are true, such as; my life can never have meaning again; I will die in agony; I won’t be remembered well; I am a burden, etc . . .

But refuse, and you could feel guilty for not being with your loved one at his or her death. Moreover, your family supporting the suicide/killing could ostracize you. “How dare you judge grandma! How dare you not be there to support her ‘choice’!”

Back at the euthanasia party, people were getting restless, and so it was time to get on with the killing:

Once Dan signed the papers and said he was ready, his family gathered at his bedside. Stef explained: ‘You could see sort of an energy in the room where people could feel that it was time.

‘It was a really blessed evening. It happened a little later than we had planned so you could feel people getting a little bit restless. ‘The doctor came down, he was beside us and the nurse, the pair of them brought such light and beauty into this assistance.

‘I can’t even tell you how beautiful the smile in his eyes was, he was so ready and it felt like everything we had talked about , that we planned about all these people made it the perfect exit.’

She said after he received three injections, his eyes closed and she gave him a kiss.

Stef said that Dan wanted a round of applause as he died so everybody cheered for him.

‘The release of all that energy, it was really great. There were a lot of things that were very comforting and Dan just loved every minute of it.’

These death events — this is far from the first such story about euthanasia parties — are being publicized in the service of normalizing euthanasia as the best way to die. It’s the real “death with dignity,” don’t you know?

The goal, I believe, is to push society toward the point that having oneself killed becomes the expectation, not the exception.

Is this kind of thing right or wrong? It depends on one’s values and moral beliefs. Some may see it as empowering, dying “his own way,” as the media continually put it.

Others, as I do, see darkness and nihilism in cheering on death, an (often unintentional) abandonment of people at their darkest hour. Indeed, this story reminds me of Canadian journalist Andrew Coyne’s cogent warning against the culture of death from many years ago:

A society that believes in nothing can offer no argument even against death. A culture that has lost its faith in life cannot comprehend why it should be endured

Yup. Those with eyes to see, let them see.

Barbara Kay: Canada, euthanasia and the slippery slope.

Alex Schadenberg

Executive Director - Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Barbara Kay

The National Post recently published an excellent article by columnist Barbara Kay concerning the incremental extensions to euthanasia that are occurring in Canada.

Kay refers to the fact that the Supreme Court euthanasia decision was promulgated four years ago with the prediction that there would be no "slippery slope" toward abuses of the future law. She quotes Andrew Coyne, the former editor of the National Post who then stated:

“When the subject is as priceless as a human life, it is not enough that consent usually be obtained. It must be in every case. It will not suffice if the safeguards are adequate. They must be perfect.”

Kay continues:

But since the right to be killed by medical practitioners paid by the state has now been normalized, individuals are stepping forward, as any student of human nature (and observer of the euthanasia histories of Belgium and the Netherlands) might have predicted, to demand custom-tailoring of that right.

Case in point, Kay writes about the Audrey Parker campaign to extend euthanasia to incompetent people who made a previous request:

Audrey Parker, a Halifax woman with terminal cancer who was assisted to death on Nov. 1, weeks earlier than she wished, left a video, released last week by Dying with Dignity Canada. In it, she said she would have preferred to stay alive until Christmas, but worried that her cancer, creeping to the lining of her brain, would render her unfit by then to invoke MAID. She asked for a “Parker’s amendment” to the law, allowing for a proxy to facilitate a previously sworn request in such circumstances. 

It sounds reasonable. All safeguard abrogations do when they are attached to sympathetic protagonists with a black-and-white narrative. They are less palatable, though, when attached to muddier stories, like the case of a Dutch woman with dementia who’d signed a living will endorsing euthanasia when of sound mind, but then, when the time came, struggling against the needle, had to be held down by relatives as the doctor killed her. 

In fact, the Canadian government already asked the Council of Canadian Academics to study advance consent, as well as euthanasia in cases of mature minors and advanced dementia. On Dec. 13 the council submitted a report including what it saw as the pros and cons of each proposal, but without recommendations. 

Federal Justice Minister David Lametti has said the government will continue to review the practice of MAID. He looks forward to “speaking with Canadians about how the (MAID) regime is working for them.”

Kay then examines the issue of conscience rights in Ontario. She states:

The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO), considered by many stakeholders to be the most aggressive association of its kind in the country on this file, took a conscience-hostile stance on physicians who refuse to perform or refer for euthanasia (or abortion) a decade ago, and hasn’t softened up since. 

According to Dr. Ryan Wilson, president of Canadian Physicians for Life (CPL), “Ontario is the only (physicians’ association) that says you have to either participate in or refer to someone who will participate.” 

CPL and other advocacy groups had hoped that Premier Doug Ford’s new administration would end the political shunning they were accustomed to under the Liberals, especially since in November, the province of Ontario dropped its intervention on CPSO’s behalf in a court case brought against the association by five doctors of conscience. But at the Nov. 16-18 Ontario PC party Toronto convention, Ford’s promise to legislate conscience rights did not make it through the policy committee. 

The five physicians’ case was heard at the Court of Appeal on Jan. 21-22, with judgment pending. If they lose, as is likely, they are determined to take it to the Supreme Court.

Kay brings up several significant concerns with the application of Canada's euthanasia law. But there are more.

• Canadian woman seeks euthanasia from pelvic mesh pain.
• Mother upset after doctor pressured her to approve assisted death for her disabled daughter.
• Woman who dies by euthanasia may only have had a bladder infection.

Dying of Despair

This article was published by the National Review online on August 22, 2017

Wesley Smith

By Wesley Smith

I began my work against assisted suicide in 1993. 

In the intervening years, I have witnessed a very disturbing change. When I began, the emotional zeitgeist of society focused intensely on preventing suicide. Today, in many cases, the emotional oomph (if you will) supports suicide, not in all cases to be sure, but certainly in some. 

There has been a concomitant downgrading of suicide prevention intensity. As I wrote a few years ago, we now have what I call “invisible” suicide prevention campaigns. 

I write this because there is a very good article in First Things by UC Irvine psychiatrist Aaron Kheriaty that explores the general issue of suicide. He diagnoses the causes of our crisis as coming from a loss of hope, and to some degree, the decline of religious practice (as distinguished from affiliation). 

I intend to dig deeper into his article later. But for now, I want to focus on the assisted suicide aspect. 

I have long believed that promoting assisted suicide–even if you call it something else, like “death with dignity” or “aid in dying”–sends an enervating message to the suicidal that self-killing is an acceptable answer to suffering and life’s most difficult problems. 

Indeed I believe that the elevation of Brittany Maynard to movie star levels of adulation and celebrity–solely because she promoted and committed assisted suicide–was a tremendously destructive and subversive act that could help push people in dark directions. 

Dr Aaron Kheriaty

Kheriaty discusses that question too. From, “Dying of Despair: 

The law is a teacher, and American law ­increasingly teaches indifference to life when it runs up against respect for radical autonomy. 

California and Colorado recently joined four other states in permitting doctors to assist terminally ill patients to take their own lives. In the same week that Gov. Brown signed the California bill, two British scholars published a study showing that laws permitting assisted suicide in Oregon and Washington have led to a rise in overall suicide rates in those states. 

I wrote about that study here too. Back to Kheriaty: 

These findings should not surprise us. We know that publicized cases of suicide tend to produce copycat cases, often disproportionately among young people. Recall the recent spate of adolescent suicides in Silicon Valley. Social scientists call this “the Werther effect,” from Goethe’s eighteenth-century novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, in which the protagonist, thwarted in his romantic pursuits, takes his own life with a pistol. After the book’s publication, a rash of suicides among young men using the same means alarmed authorities in Germany…  

The case of fourteen-year-old Valentina Maureira, a Chilean girl who suffered from cystic fibrosis, illustrates both effects while highlighting the power of social influences.  

Maureira made a YouTube video begging her government to legalize assisted suicide. She admitted that the idea to end her life began after she heard about the case of Brittany Maynard, the twenty-nine-year-old woman who campaigned for the legalization of assisted suicide before ending her own life.  

Maureira, however, later changed her mind after meeting another young woman suffering from cystic fibrosis who encouraged her to persevere in the face of adversity. Her father complained that the media were only interested in her story when she wanted to die. 

If Maureira had killed herself, we never would have known she would, one day, change her mind. 

But that fact won’t resonate at all with those who increasingly believe that suicide, at least of the sick, is a right rather than a cultural crisis. They will simply shrug and sniff, “She didn’t do it so what’s the problem?” 

But there is a huge problem that could be taking the lives of some who would later want to live. Consider: We now see suicide parties extolled in the media–even joint suicides and euthanasia killings of elderly couples. Movies promote suicide of the sick and elderly. And one can’t discuss assisted suicide with out seeing the photo of a beautifully smiling Brittany Maynard holding a puppy. 

In all of this, I am reminded of a quote from Canadian journalist Andrew Coyne. Writing in the wake of widespread public support for a father who murdered his daughter because she had cerebral palsy, Coyne worried: 

A society that believes in nothing can offer no argument even against death. A culture that has lost its faith in life cannot comprehend why it should be endured. 

We aren’t there yet, but if we aren’t careful, we could become a pro-suicide culture, or at least a suicide-indifferent one. 

Indeed, when it comes to the ill, disabled, and elderly, many of us are already there. And the casualties are mounting.

Charles Lewis: Unbiased and ethical journalists exist.

By Charles Lewis

I attended the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition 2016 Symposium in Windsor, ON., recently. I am writing this to address something that deeply concerns me about what I heard, over and over, about the media.

Speaker after speaker blamed the media for much of the misinformation about euthanasia and a general hostility towards our cause.

The media is not perfect. But nor is any profession perfect. We all have encountered bad dentists, indifferent doctors, inept lawyers and lax government officials. Though the difference is most of us do not condemn the entire profession.

I will go as far to say that there are journalists whose biases get in the way of their reporting. I think this is especially true of the CBC.

I worked at the National Post for 15 years. I was an editor for half that time I was an editor and the rest I reported on religion. Many people saw my bias as a conservative Catholic come through, though I always tried to balance my pieces. But my audience, mainly conservative Canadians, applauded my point of view. In other words they did not mind my bias because it fit with their world outlook but they might condemn someone else with a liberal bias.

At the Windsor Symposium I stood up at one point to try to make the point that some of the country’s most prominent columnists — Margaret Wente of the Globe, Rosie DiManno of the Star, and Rex Murphy and Andrew Coyne of the National Post all raised serious questions about euthanasia.

But I soon realized that many in the audience had never heard of these fine journalists. Which made me wonder how anyone can judge the media when they are not aware of some of the prominent people in the profession.

I think something else needs to be explained — and this especially applies to print journalists. Over the past 15 years most newspapers have seen their newsroom staff gutted. Meaning for those left behind there is more work to do.

Even in good times putting out a newspaper is a monumental task. Every day there is a firm deadline. I wrote several thousand stories in my career. Some were features in which I had a week or several days to write. But most stories are done in a single day. More often still they are done in a matter of hours.

An editor will turn to a reporter at 2 p.m., four hours before deadline, and say she needs 800 words on something that just took place. That means that the reporter must get interviews lined up at lightening speed. If the reporter is luck, he finds the best people. If not he finds whom he can. In newspapers there is no arguing with the clock.

But here is the important point. No one should read a newspaper story as being definitive. A story should be read for the information it contains. If the story is about conscience rights for doctors, for example, what is important is what is new in the story: Did a court just rule against conscience rights? Is there a proposal to limit those rights?

At that point readers who really care about the issue need to do their own research. That is the beauty of the Internet. You can plug in key words and get a raft of information, much of it provided by conservative and religious sites. In other words, let the newspaper article, or the item on radio or a televised newscast, be your starting point.

Finally, and this applies mainly to newspapers, editorials and news are separate spheres. Editorial boards are supposed to reflect the views of the owners. For the most part reporters and editors, who produce what fills the rest of the paper, are not guided by editorials.

Let me now give you a list of some great websites where you will find great information that conforms more to what most of us see as the truth. However, one caveat: It is a big mistake to read only what you agree with. First off, by never reading the other point of view you will have no idea of the arguments they use. And if you do not know, how can you combat it? Also, even in those articles and editorials that seem to oppose us, there is often something that indicate the doubts of the writer. This could be an opening for dialogue.

Most writers like getting emails. The key is to be polite and not start off with accusations. Treat these people with the same dignity we afford each other.

So here are some sites to bookmark on your computer. Many of these will send you daily newsletters. They have good information and go through a process of rigorous editing — something important to make sure writers tell the truth or at least do not stretch it beyond all credibility.

Here they are: The National Review, National Catholic Register, Christianity Today, The Rebel Media, The Acton Institute, Catholic Civil Rights League, The Atlantic (at times) and Mercator Net, and The Wall Street Journal. This is partial list. Find your own sites and share them.

Finally, two of my favourite columnists work for the dreaded New York Times: David Brooks and Ross Douthat. These are highly ethical and conservative men and can be read for free. You would be wise to read them.

Andrew Coyne: "extending assisted suicide to children and the mentally incompetent, once derided as “slippery slope” alarmism, is now the next item on the agenda."

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director - Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

In February 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down Canada's assisted suicide laws and used language to allow for the legalization of euthanasia. In their decision, the Supreme Court ordered parliament to legislate on the issues of euthanasia and assisted suicide.

One argument employed by the Supreme court in their decision  clearly protected people was that Canada would employ a rigorous set of safeguards that would ensure that abuse of the law does not occur and there is no proof that Canada will experience an expansion of the law, that many of those who intervened against euthanasia and assisted suicide had predicted.

Well, Bill C-14 is not the law yet, the predicted expansion of the law is already occurring.

Andrew Coyne

Andrew Coyne, a National Post columnist exposes the push to expand euthanasia, in his column: Who says the Supreme Court of Canada won't change its mind on assisted suicide - yet again? Coyne points states that:

Advocates of assisted suicide have already served notice they will challenge the legislation in court: because it does not apply to children, or the mentally incompetent; because it defines “grievous and irremediable” to mean, in part, that the patient’s “natural death has become reasonably foreseeable;” even for imposing a 15-day waiting period (since amended to 10). 

They will not rest, in short, until there is an unrestricted right to death on demand.

Coyne explains the inconsistency of the claims for euthanasia expansion:

...it is bizarre to see the same people discover, in a ruling that was expressly limited to mentally competent adults, a right to assisted suicide for children and the mentally incompetent. Bizarre, but not necessarily wrong. It is difficult to say how this Court will rule on any given question, and indeed the Court’s own logic, in finding in the Charter’s “right to life” a right to death, redefined as relief from suffering, would leave it little room to refuse that relief on the basis of age or infirmity, when the case is brought.

If, likewise, the court could reverse its own decision before, it may be persuaded to do so again. The justification offered for overturning Rodriguez was that in the interval the “matrix of legislative and social facts” had changed; that the fear that had justified the law then, namely that assisted suicide would otherwise come to be applied to a wider and wider expanse of the population, had been disproved by experience; or at any rate that whatever might have happened in Belgium and the Netherlands — where the numbers of those euthanized annually has skyrocketed, and where it is now available not only to children and the mentally ill but for the relief of all manner of ailments — could not happen here, on account of our differing “medico-legal cultures.”

In other words, the incremental expansion of the law is already occurring, even before Bill C-14 has passed into law. The hubris of the Court has already proven to be wrong. Coyne ends by stating:

But even if that were true at the time of the court’s ruling, it is clearly not true any more. The notion of extending assisted suicide to children and the mentally incompetent, once derided as “slippery slope” alarmism, is now the next item on the agenda. So it would be entirely open to the Court to find that the matrix of legislative and social facts had shifted again.

I’m not saying it will. But it certainly won’t if it is not asked.

The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition will never stop working to protect people from euthanasia and assisted suicide, through supports and through the courts.

Assisted suicide makes us complicit in another's death.

Andrew Coyne, a former editor of the National Post, published another excellent article, today, in the National Post - Assisted Suicide makes us all complicit in another's death.

C

Andrew Coyne

oyne begins by defining assisted suicide:

By now it should be clear what assisted suicide is not about. It is not about the right of mentally competent adults to end their own lives, or to refuse treatment that might save it: that right has long existed, and is not in question. 

Indeed, it is not about mentally competent adults, suffering unendurable pain at the end of their lives, at all. That may be how most people imagine the issue, and may be how it is still justified by those who have not been paying attention. It may even be, for now, the limits set out in Bill C-14, federal legislation authorizing “medical assistance in dying.”

Coyne comments on the political turmoil related to Bill C-14.

But it is equally clear this is just the start. What once was the furthest limits of the imaginable, something permitted in only a few other countries on Earth, is now the baseline. The senators who, armed with a democratic mandate from exactly no one, are vowing to delay or defeat the bill are not doing so because it goes too far: because, say, it does not require the patient’s consent in all cases, but allows another adult to sign on their behalf; or because the 15-day waiting period is optional, at the doctor’s discretion; or because it does not require that death be imminent and inevitable, but only that it be “reasonably foreseeable.” 

No, the reason the bill is under fire is because, in the view of its critics, it does not go nearly far enough: specifically, because it does not allow for the termination of children, the mentally ill and those who book their demise in advance, in fear of finding themselves unable to consent at the time. Even worse, the bill would still require that death be somewhere in the offing, however vaguely: physical or psychological suffering on its own would not be sufficient. This was not a stipulation of last year’s Supreme Court ruling, which has lately become Holy Writ, or at least the parts that do not mention competent adults.

Coyne uncovers that the government intends to expand euthanasia over time.

For its part, the government gives every indication of being amenable to these changes. Asked on CTV how the government could have brought in “such a conservative” bill, Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould replied, in effect, give us time. At which point it will become even more clear this is not about “end-of-life care” or “dying with dignity” or “assistance in dying,” or any of the other pleasant euphemisms in which the issue is now swaddled. It is not about easing the pain of dying, but easing the pain of living. It is about helping people to kill themselves who are not in any danger of dying, but find their lives, for a variety of reasons, intolerable. 

Again, this is explicit among its advocates. For the writer Sandra Martin, for example, author of The Good Death, “I might want to say if I can no longer speak, if I no longer can recognize my family, if I can no longer take care of my own bodily functions — then it would be unacceptable for me to carry on living.” Others have argued that it should apply to those suffering from depression. In Belgium, as Rachel Aviv writes in The New Yorker, doctors have been authorized to kill not just in cases of depression, but also “autism, anorexia, borderline personality disorder, chronic-fatigue syndrome, partial paralysis, blindess coupled with deafness, and manic depression.”

Coyne then opens the question - does assisted suicide effect our attitudes towards suicide?

Very well. Suppose we legalized assisted suicide in all the ways demanded. Suppose we were then presented with children, suffering from a mental illness — severely depressed, perhaps — but non-terminal, who expressed a strong desire to kill themselves. Suppose, that is, we were dealing with the situation reported in Attawapiskat today. On what basis would we deny them their request? 

That has been the convention to date. We do not accommodate people, let alone children, who want to kill themselves. We try to stop them, by force if necessary, a desire to kill oneself having been seen until now as prima facie evidence of mental incapacity. You see a guy standing on a ledge, you pull him in. But assisted suicide asks us to invert that convention: not merely to allow the suicide to proceed, but to facilitate it, indeed to subsidize it. Doctors who refuse to provide this “service,” or at the least to refer patients who request it to others, may face disciplinary action. 

This is what it means to normalize suicide. While the preamble to Bill C-14 takes pains to affirm the “inherent and equal value of every person’s life” and expresses a desire to avoid “encouraging negative perceptions of the quality of life of persons who are elderly, ill or disabled,” that is the unmistakable message we would be sending: some lives are not worth living. Suicide prevention advocates, likewise, are adamant that suicide not be presented as a rational alternative to suffering. Yet that is exactly what we would be doing.

Coyne finishes by explaining how assisted suicide makes us complicit in another's death.

We seem powerless, nevertheless, to resist. Arguments for assisted suicide are couched in the language of personal autonomy, of the inviolable rights of the individual. But if it were only a matter of an individual wishing to take his own life, there would be no debate. The difference between assisted suicide and suicide is the involvement of another individual, or individuals, and so far as we permit their involvement it implicates us all. 

Do we not see what a fundamental change is entailed — not merely in our attitudes to death but to life? Perhaps this is a step we wish to take, as a society. But we are just as entitled to decide not to.

Link to previous - excellent articles by Andrew Coyne on euthanasia and assisted suicide.