Insight into The Cautionary Tale of Canada's Euthanasia Regime

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Alexander Raikin

On October 9, 2024, The European Conservative published an interview by Jonathon Van Maren with Alexander Raikin. Raikin has recently published a research article titled: The Rise of Euthanasia in Canada: From Exceptional to Routine.

First question: In your view, why did Canada’s euthanasia regime go off the rails much sooner than other jurisdictions that have legalized euthanasia/assisted suicide? Raikin Responds:

The premise of your question is interesting. When the Supreme Court of Canada decriminalized euthanasia, it was based on the argument of a right to life—that those who would die from euthanasia would have otherwise died from suicide. It was a lesser evil. Yet every day in 2022, on average, Canadian physicians and nurses ended the lives of more than 36 people. It is now quadruple the official suicide rate.

In an ordinary country, in an ordinary time, this would be considered a national crisis: a royal commission would be called and weekly press conferences by worried government officials would dominate the news cycle, especially if the victims were all people with disabilities and the elderly. Instead, we now have cognitive dissonance of a national variety. News media credulously write about the horror of a Canadian man selling suicide kits online—and then report almost monthly on how a state-sanctioned, state-funded, and state-administered death from euthanasia is “beautiful.” Or how the lethal injection of prisoners in the U.S. is cruel and unusual, unless a prisoner denied for parole in Canada asks for a lethal injection instead.

This dissonance is reflected in what our public healthcare system funds. The median wait time for a CT scan in Canada was 66 days in 2023. A government-funded suicide, meanwhile? Only 11 days in 2022. I don’t know any elective medical procedure in Canada that is as rushed as euthanasia.

Canada is, of course, not the only jurisdiction with horror stories of what happens when we selectively decriminalize murder and assisted suicide by physicians and nurses. Every jurisdiction that has legalized permissive euthanasia or assisted suicide has seen wrongful deaths that shouldn’t have happened. It is as true in the Netherlands and Belgium as it is in Switzerland or Oregon. I could spend the rest of my life counting these cases: consider, for instance, the dozens of reported cases of euthanasia based on autism or an eating disorder that sparked some worldwide interest. The Swiss Medical Association had to issue a statement that suicide “for healthy persons is not medically and ethically justifiable.” Yet, even in a limited assisted suicide program which requires a terminal diagnosis with less than six months of natural life, we have seen the same excesses. In Washington state, according to the physicians responsible for ending their patients’ lives, 10% of all assisted suicides in 2022 were because their patients were concerned with “financial implications of treatment.” Not one media account reported on it.

But Canada surpasses all these jurisdictions, at least in how quickly we’ve seen the same stories. It was in the first hundred cases of euthanasia in Ontario, for instance, that we saw anorexia as a qualifying condition for euthanasia. Not a single newspaper reported on that either. There is no innate reason for why Canada’s euthanasia program has turned to be such a catastrophic failure in terms of human rights, especially for the people that the Supreme Court of Canada described as “vulnerable persons” who must be protected. On paper, Canada should have one of the strictest euthanasia programs in the world: the eligibility criteria and the safeguards are written as exemptions—in the Criminal Code—from homicide and aiding suicide. If a physician or a nurse practitioner breaks any provision, they would not be protected by these exemptions and could therefore face up to 14 years in prison. That hasn’t happened.

I have some speculations about why Canada’s euthanasia program has turned into a global canary in the coal mine for permissive euthanasia. It’s not because physicians or nurses in Canada are any more diabolical than in other jurisdictions—the vast majority have no interest in killing their patients, even as it becomes a surefire route for a promotion and a leadership position. The irony, of course, is that the exact physicians you don’t want to be involved in ending their patients’ lives are those who are most interested to do so.

I think the more likely reason is because of how Canada was forced to decriminalize euthanasia by the courts. Leon Kass warned that a ‘right to die’ invariably becomes a ‘duty to die.’ Once the Supreme Court of Canada enshrined this right much more forcefully than in other jurisdictions, the Criminal Code protections became moot—the relationship between physicians and their patients were ruptured. If it is a legal right to die, then there is no purpose for anyone else to be involved in this decision, even if it is a cop or a judge. No one else is in that room. It means that a physician and a nurse—who self-selected to reject their roles as healers—can break as many rules as they want, or pressure their patients to die from euthanasia.

It’s not a direct pressure, of course. It is more subtle: if you are suffering, why not be treated by this painless, ‘100% effective’ medical treatment? You are dying anyhow, even if it is a year or four decades from now, and other medical treatments are months away. Why not die? You feel in any rate like a burden to society, to your family, and to me, your caregiver. That is not a hypothetical: according to ‘MAID providers’ (their preferred description), over a third of their patients expressed that as at least one of their reasons to die.

Question 2: Your reporting has uncovered many disturbing aspects of Canada’s MAID system. What are some aspects of the way MAID has been implemented that would (or should) shock people?

Let’s start with something I found today. The Government of Canada created a website to tell physicians and nurse practitioners how to interpret its euthanasia legislation. It states, quite clearly, “Provinces and territories may create further policies and standards with respect to MAID. However, they cannot permit actions that the Criminal Code prohibits.”

Later this month, Quebec is set to unilaterally permit actions that the Criminal Code prohibits—it will allow people to sign an “advanced directive” for a clinician to end their life in the future when they lack the capacity to consent to their death. Let’s be clear what this means: physicians will have to approach a person with dementia, confused and unaware of what is happening, possibly emotional, and then restrain them and end their life. What if these patients changed their mind, maybe regained lucidity for a time, or learned to live a meaningful life with their condition? It wouldn’t matter. It is a murder warrant. One doesn’t have to go as far to read John Locke to know the virtue of why common law has made it so that no one can consent to their own death or harm. The idea that this can ever be made ‘safe’ is wrong.

Yet the truth of the matter is that Canada has already and quietly allowed a version of this. For National Review, I wrote a cover story last year about how Canada removed the requirement for final consent before a death from euthanasia, if a patient enters in a written agreement with one of their two MAID assessors. The form doesn’t need to be signed, and no one else needs to know about it. The exception is that, if a patient shows any verbal or physical signs of “refusal or resistance” to their death, then the euthanasia cannot proceed. MAID providers found and laughed about a loophole instead: they first sedated the patient who “is now delirious, shouting, pulling their arm away as one tries to insert the IV to provide MAID.” There can be no resistance for euthanasia if the patient is first sedated. These physicians then discussed with a bioethicist on the value of having this procedure potentially done away from the family of the deceased, because it would otherwise be distressful.

There are too many stories of abuse in Canada’s MAID program. I wrote about a suicide attempt that failed and then was ‘completed’ through MAID, even though a prominent supporter of MAID believed that it was potentially illegal. I’m writing a story right now on the Criminal Code violations of MAID. But these concerns were known virtually from the beginning of Canada’s euthanasia program. The Office of the Correctional Investigator said, in 2019, “There is no legal or administrative mechanism for ensuring accountability or transparency for MAiD in federal corrections.” Nothing was done. Yet think about what this statement means. It means that the MAID process, in itself, has no legal or administrative mechanisms to keep even the most watched people in our society safe. The federal government has explicitly excluded itself from any oversight role for a policy it created and a criminal law that it is meant to enforce.

Question 3: In your view, why have so many non-religious voices—suicide prevention advocates and disability rights activists—been ignored by the government and groups like Dying With Dignity?

Well, that the government ignores certain groups is not exactly controversial. But I think these groups are ignored not just because they lack a large lobbying purse or political power.

My theory—and I would prefer if I were wrong—is because these non-religious groups sound too much like religious groups. They both rely on an unprovable and therefore uncontestable notion of equality. Your next question asks me about my views on the lawsuit filed by disability organizations in Canada, which claims that Canada’s euthanasia program for people with disabilities who are not terminally ill is discriminatory and unconstitutional. I was listening to their first press conference last week. Heather Walkus, the National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians with Disabilities, Canada’s oldest disability organization, said at the press conference that “CCD will always fight for life.” Fight for life? In 2024? When was the last time that you heard those words from any Canadian or American NGO, let alone a progressive organization—or a religious group nationally in Canada?

Suicide prevention advocates, mental health professionals, disability rights activists: virtually all of them are opposed to the idea that certain lives are less worthy of living. The corollary is that each life has an inherent dignity by virtue of being alive. Call it anti-ableism or a culture of life, imago Dei or article 10 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. We either believe that disabilities do not make a person less worthy of dignity and life, no matter how severe or life-altering, or we do not. Either we believe that human life is sacrosanct, or else that it is disposable.

A government that decriminalizes suicide and murder for only some people is fundamentally unjust. If it is true, as argued Lord Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits, the late chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, “The value of human life is infinite and beyond measure,” then it logically means that “Any part of life—even if only an hour or a second—is of precisely the same worth as seventy years of it, just as any fraction of infinity, being indivisible, remains infinite.” That certainly doesn’t mean that a person who is dying and in pain must suffer: we have developed, even if we don’t fund it adequately, the most advanced form of palliative care, and dual intent for palliative medicine to treat suffering that shortens life is almost universally accepted in medicine and among faith groups. But to cross that line, to treat a patient’s suffering by ending the patient, is the difference between healthcare and deathcare.

I spoke to someone whose sister died from MAID. She had a non-terminal illness, and should therefore not have been eligible for MAID, at least according to the law at the time (in 2021, Canada expanded euthanasia to non-terminal illnesses and disabilities). He told me that, if his sister would have been on the side of a bridge, he wouldn’t have pushed her. But her MAID assessor believed otherwise. His sister couldn’t find a medical treatment option for her in Canada—besides euthanasia.

Question 4: What is your view of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms challenge filed in Ontario Superior Court by a coalition of disability groups and two affected individuals?

It is the start of litigation. It won’t be the end. If a law values some lives as less worthy of living than other lives—be it on the basis of disability, age, or identity—then that law is unjust. There’s a joke in Futurama of a suicide pod in the future where you must pay a nickel. It’s not a joke in Canada. When I lived in Canada, I needed to pay for my drug prescriptions. But MAID is free, always free. The financial and moral costs are paid for by society.

At this point, we need to put some limits on MAID legislation. Even by disability organizations simply launching a lawsuit, it is enough to say to people with disabilities across Canada that they matter, that their lives are worth living, and that simply having a disability is no good reason for suicide. It was a message that, a decade ago, healthcare practitioners used to say to their patients. Now it is disability organizations that are quite literally collecting names of their dead.

Question 5: How do you see this debate unfolding over the next several years? Can the expansion of the euthanasia regime be stopped?

The year is 1919. A group of scientists and physicians claim that using the scientific method and a rational approach, physicians can objectively decide which people would benefit from sterilization and which would not. About a dozen and a half states in the U.S. enacted this practice against the consent of the individual.

In Canada, it is 1928. Despite eugenics originating in the United Kingdom, the only part of the British Empire that legalized forced sterilization was in Canada. In Alberta, where most of these procedures happened, it was at first voluntary and in front of a four-member panel with at least two physicians. Then, in 1937, consent was no longer required.

The arguments for eugenic sterilization and euthanasia are surprisingly similar, partly because, as Ian Dowbiggin demonstrated in his book A Merciful End, these arguments were made by the same people. In both cases, it was pushed through by physicians who believed they were acting in their patients’ interest. In both cases, an objective rubric was meant to apply to decide which patients would be suitable for treatment and which would not. In both cases, it was supported by large majorities and the cultural elite—for a time.

As a society, we haven’t gotten over the role of eugenics. As long as we treat disabilities as a fate worse than death, we remain in the grasps of this dying ideology. Today, even bringing up eugenics in the context of permissive euthanasia is seen to be impolite (and a cancellable offense, as Dr. Harvey Schipper found when he was forced to step aside from a working group on advance requests—the same issue that Quebec is sliding into this month).

Yet eugenics is a dying ideology, at least outside of X. Those who effectively support it are forced to argue for it indirectly. As one prominent bioethicist and supporter of euthanasia suggested, we need infanticide because some babies become disabled through birth. It is a horrific opinion, one that, as G.K. Chesterton described in his Eugenics and Other Evils, could only be sustained through “terrorism by tenth-rate professors.”

We do not need to vacillate on what is right and wrong. Everyone has a right to life, and the experiment in saving life through legalizing some suicides has been an unequivocal disaster. In a generation, or maybe sooner, we will be speaking of euthanasia the same way that we speak of forced sterilization.

Rosina Kamis

Question 6: In your reporting, what story or stories have stuck with you the most?

Every few months, I think about Rosina Kamis. For my reporting in The New Atlantis, through the executor of her estate, I went through her entire email account and her Google Drive. “I think if more people cared about me,” she wrote in an email, “I might be able to handle the suffering caused by my physical illnesses alone.” To her two dozen subscribers on YouTube, she said, “Sometimes all the pain will go away just by having another human being here.” Even without a terminal illness, she was instead given a state-administered euthanasia—the exact condition that disability organizations in Canada are currently contesting.

The other story that struck me the most is how ghoulish proponents of euthanasia have been in promoting euthanasia for Indigenous people. Indigenous Disability Canada is one of the parties in the Track 2 lawsuit, and I hope they will include some of the evidence that I wrote about in National Review. At the 2018 annual convention for the Canadian Association of MAID Assessors and Providers, just two years after legalization of MAID, the physicians and nurses tasked with euthanasia advocated expanding MAID to Indigenous children “because they’re closest to the ancestors.” Even then, MAID providers were surprisingly tolerant of euthanizing “a First Nation patient” whose suffering was exasperated “due to a life lived in poverty.” These MAID providers then suggested that “as soon as a patient tells me their suffering is enough, whether I like it, that is their situation and their context.” Note the answer: try to get their basic needs met, try to fix the system, but above all else, don’t forget to kill a patient suffering from poverty. It’s the only right thing to do, at least in Canada.

Alexander Raikin has been covering Canada’s euthanasia regime for years and has consistently broken stories that other journalists missed (or ignored). His work on euthanasia and assisted suicide has been cited by The Atlantic and the New York Times and has been featured in cover stories for National Review and The New Atlantis.

How ‘Medical Aid in Dying’ Became the Euphemism of Choice for Assisted Suicide

This article was published by the National Review online on October 24, 2023

Wesley Smith

By Wesley J. Smith

The word engineering never stops, does it? When radical policies are proposed, the first step is to change the lexicon to make it seem less extreme, even mundane.

That has certainly been true in the euthanasia movement. Indeed, as described by Ian Dowbiggin in A Concise History of Euthanasia, the term “euthanasia” — which originally meant a peaceful death, in a state of grace — was the first word co-opted by advocates of mercy killing or assisted suicide as a tactic to obscure the fact that the practice involves killing.

But “euthanasia” no longer obscures, so the current gooey euphemism of choice in the euthanasia/assisted-suicide movement is “medical aid in dying,” or MAID. Once the death activists started pushing it, most — albeit not all — media adopted that terminology. Science writer Rachel E. Gross describes the purpose for the word engineering in the pages of the New York Times. From, “How Aid in Dying Became Medical, Not Moral:”

Many health advocates and medical professionals insist that a terminally ill patient taking medication to hasten the end is doing something fundamentally different from suicide. The term “medical aid in dying,” they say, is meant to emphasize that someone with a terminal diagnosis is not choosing whether but how to die. . . .

“There is a significant, a meaningful difference between someone seeking to end their life because they have a mental illness, and someone seeking to end their life who is going to die in the very near future anyway,” said Dr. Matthew Wynia, director of the University of Colorado’s Center for Bioethics and Humanities.

What poppycock. To “assist” means to provide support or aid in an endeavor. “Suicide” means to take one’s own life voluntarily or intentionally. It describes what is done, not why.

Hence, the term assisted suicide is both accurate and descriptive. Which, of course, is precisely why assisted-suicide advocates oppose it.

Moreover, suicide is suicide. There is no difference in the consequence of the act. Life ceases — whether the deceased is someone who is mentally ill, a grief-stricken mother whose child has died, the humiliated failed businessperson, or a patient with an illness or disability. Well, there is one difference. We now allow some suicides to be facilitated where laws allow it, while seeking to prevent the others (at least for now).

Also note that the MAID euphemism is deployed ubiquitously for lethal-injection homicides by doctors and nurse practitioners in Canada — where fatal jabs are definitely not limited to the terminally ill, and indeed, next year will be available to the mentally ill.

The focus on terminal illness as the reason for asking for doctor-prescribed suicide is yet another deflection. True, laws allowing assisted suicide in this country still require a diagnosis of six months or less to live — although there are several cases of people living for years after receiving a lethal prescription. But once the assisted-suicide beachhead has finally been secured, the terminal-illness requirement will be dropped. At that point, I bet that the MAID obfuscation will continue on because its purpose is to serve as the honey that helps the hemlock go down.

MAID isn’t the only obscuring terminology applied by promoters of assisted suicide, as noted by Gross:

Since its enactment in 1997, more than 3,700 Oregonians have taken measures permitted by the law, which allows patients with a terminal illness and the approval of two doctors to receive life-ending medication. The practice is now legal in 10 U.S. states and Washington, D.C.

The drugs used to end life are not “medications.” They are poisons — substances capable of causing the illness or death of a living organism. These substances are taken with lethal intent, not to cure, palliate, or heal. Indeed, in some cases, the same drugs used to execute murderers by lethal injection are the ones used by people who commit assisted suicide.

As Gross notes, the whole point of this lexicon charade is to encourage more assisted suicides by providing a medical imprimatur:

A phrase like “medical aid in dying,” [assisted-suicide advocates] concluded, would reassure patients that they were taking part in a process that was regulated and medically sanctioned. “Medicine has that legitimating power, like it or not,” says Anita Hannig, an anthropologist at Brandeis University and author of the book “The Day I Die: The Untold Story of Assisted Dying in America.” “That really removes a lot of the stigma.”

I don’t believe in judging people who commit suicide, whatever the circumstance. None of us knows what our limits might be. But if we ever enter that darkness, shouldn’t we — including when we are dying — receive prevention rather than facilitation? Otherwise, we are distinguishing among those we think have lives worth living and those we are — at least implying — do not.

I knew several people who were dying and wanted assisted suicide, who changed their minds and lived the remaining days of their natural lives very glad they didn’t receive it. Besides, if people don’t kill themselves because of concern about stigma, isn’t that good? I mean, shouldn’t we want fewer people to commit suicide?

Bottom line: Just as when one calls a dung beetle a butterfly it remains a dung beetle, so too advocates who call assisted suicide “medical aid in dying” are still talking about suicide. If that simple fact keeps people from taking a lethal prescription, the more the better.

Eugenics: The root of the assisted dying movement.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

In response to attacks against the Care Not Killing Alliance in the UK, Jamie Gillies, in spiked-online focuses on the eugenics roots of the assisted dying movement. Gillies writes about Killick Millard who founded the leading assisted dying group in the UK. Gillies states:

Scotland’s media class seems quite happy to spare prominent groups on the other side of the assisted-suicide debate from scrutiny. The Record, for instance, has failed to mention that Dignity in Dying, the group leading the charge for assisted suicide in the UK, was founded and funded by eugenicist politician Killick Millard.

Millard is said to have been ‘informed by a coherent philosophy… underpinned by eugenic ideas about the importance of maintaining the calibre of the racial stock’. He was what, in modern terms, we might call ‘ableist’, arguing in 1931 that the ‘feeble-minded and mentally deficient’ – those with mental-health problems – ‘should be sterilised’.

And he was also anti-working class. In 1911, in an essay on poverty, Millard celebrated the fact that ‘slum dwellers’ had a high rate of infant mortality, stating that ‘this consideration goes a long way towards allaying the fear that the falling birth-rate of the superior classes, and the comparatively high birth-rate of the very lowest class, threatens the quality of the race’.

It must be noted that in March 2020, a UN disability rights expert stated that she is concerned about euthanasia, assisted suicide and the new eugenics.

The American media also ignore the fact that the leading assisted suicide lobby group in the US, was also founded by hard core eugenics proponents.

Historian, Ian Dowbiggin, in his ground breaking book: A Merciful End: The Euthanasia Movement in Modern America. proves beyond a doubt that the founders of the euthanasia lobby were wedded to the eugenics movement. His book was so clear that Compassion and Choices appears to have destroyed its historical archives.

In November 2015 Dowbiggin wrote about his concern that the historical records of the euthanasia lobby were destroyed. He wrote:

One thing is clear: if the euthanasia movement’s records have indeed been destroyed, a lot of history has vanished, Orwell-like, down a cavernous memory hole. And with it, information the right-to-die movement doesn’t want you to know.

I should know, because I saw these records and I know what was in them. I wrote up my findings in my 2003 book on the history of the movement, published by Oxford University Press.

The story of my involvement in these valuable records begins about fifteen years ago when I was given permission to explore the archives of what used to be called Partnerships for Caring, Inc. PFC was a successor organization to the defunct Euthanasia Society of America (ESA). The ESA records, housed in a law firm in Baltimore, consisted of 15 large cardboard boxes holding correspondence, financial records, press releases, published materials and minutes of meetings, much of it uncatalogued.

There were literally thousands of items in these boxes documenting the entire 20th c. history of the U.S. and non-American activists who advocated the legalization of various forms of euthanasia. The ESA archive contained materials relating to the careers of noteworthy social activists such as Derek Humphry, the founder of the Hemlock Society (now called Compassion and Choices), Joseph Fletcher, the founder of “situation ethics,” Alan Guttmacher (after whom the population-control Guttmacher Institute in New York City is named), and the birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger who, unbeknownst to all her biographers, was also a vocal proponent of legalized euthanasia.

Not only did these activists urge governments to permit voluntary mercy-killing and physician-assisted suicide, many also supported the involuntary mercy-killing of handicapped people. For example, despite his knowledge of widespread Nazi murder of people with disabilities, in 1943 the ESA’s president thought it was a good idea to legalize euthanasia in time for returning veterans who suffered from mental and physical wounds.

Dowbiggin then explains how he learned that the euthanasia lobby destroyed their history. Dowbiggin states:

But the story did not end there. About five years after the book’s publication, I was contacted by a US graduate student researching the history of euthanasia. She told me that in trying to track down the ESA records she had been informed that the collection had been intentionally destroyed.

 Just this year another US graduate student got in touch with me, also trying to locate the ESA archives. She too has been told the records no longer exist, although she is still investigating.

Of course, it might be that the ESA records are sitting somewhere safe and sound. Yet why do groups like Compassion and Choices ignore my own requests for information? Why, when a published scholar in the history of medicine enquires about the whereabouts of this important archive, is there a resounding silence?

The euthanasia lobby, world-wide, was intertwined with the eugenics movement and its leadership continues to be suspicious in its ideology today.

Let's be clear. Removing the requirement of consent at the time of death, extending euthanasia to people with dementia, and in the Netherlands, the approval of the Groningen Protocol, which permits killing of babies with disabilities, are all eugenic ideolical positions.

Euthanasia movement destroys its archives.

This article was published by Wesley Smith on his blog on February 6, 2016.
Dowbiggin's historical book - A Merciful End - is available on Amazon.

Wesley Smith

B y Wesley Smith 

Historian Ian Dowbiggin wrote a splendid history of the euthanasia movement back in 2003. 

It was thorough, detailed, and objective. The movement cooperated with Dowbiggin by making its archives available for his use. But now, they may have been destroyed. From, “A Scandal in the Euthanasia Archives:” 

Imagine for a moment that reporters broke the news that the Vatican had destroyed the bulk of its archival records. 

Researchers around the world justifiably might accuse the Roman Catholic Church of a deliberate cover-up.  

Well, the Vatican has done no such thing. But it appears as if the right-to-die movement has. If so, one might well ask; why did people in the movement do it? Are they trying to hide something about their past?  

One thing is clear: if the euthanasia movement’s records have indeed been destroyed, a lot of history has vanished, Orwell-like, down a cavernous memory hole. And with it, information the right-to-die movement doesn’t want you to know. 

A Merciful End.

What is the evidence? 

About five years after the book’s publication, I was contacted by a US graduate student researching the history of euthanasia. She told me that in trying to track down the ESA records she had been informed that the collection had been intentionally destroyed. Just this year another US graduate student got in touch with me, also trying to locate the ESA archives.  

She too has been told the records no longer exist, although she is still investigating. Of course, it might be that the ESA records are sitting somewhere safe and sound. Yet why do groups like Compassion and Choices ignore my own requests for information? Why, when a published scholar in the history of medicine enquires about the whereabouts of this important archive, is there a resounding silence? 

Ian Dowbiggin

What might they want to erase: 

Not only did these activists urge governments to permit voluntary mercy-killing and physician-assisted suicide, many also supported the involuntary mercy-killing of handicapped people. For example, despite his knowledge of widespread Nazi murder of people with disabilities, in 1943 the ESA’s president thought it was a good idea to legalize euthanasia in time for returning veterans who suffered from mental and physical wounds. 

The euthanasia movement spent more than one hundred years looking for the right words and impetus to convince people to follow their dark calling. They think they have found it in “compassssssionnnn.” 

That is part of it, in a twisted way. But there is so much more to it than that–a malign side–and that is what the modern euthanasiaists may not want people see.

Ian Dowbiggin: A scandal in the euthanasia archives - continued.

By Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director - Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Ian Dowbiggin

Ian Dowbiggin's article - A scandal in the euthanasia archives - was published in the Prince Arthur Herald on November 30, 2015. Dowbiggin, who is the author of the book: A Merciful End: The Euthanasia Movement in Modern America, a history professor at UPEI and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada asks - Why has the euthanasia movement hidden or destroyed its history?

Today, the Prince Arthur Herald has published a follow-up article where Dowbiggin responds to an article by Stuart Chambers, a professor at the University of Ottawa, who challenges Dowbiggin's assertion with ad hominem arguments. Dowbiggin responds:

First, let’s dispense with that old canard, used by euthanasia enthusiasts like Chambers, that opponents of euthanasia are all “sanctity of life” proponents. It simply isn’t true; just ask disabilities groups which oppose euthanasia. Nor is it only Christians involved; Islam, Hinduism and many strands of Judaism condemn both assisted suicide and mercy-killing. 

When the euthanasia movement was propagandizing in favour of involuntary mercy-killing for either the good of the species or the economic welfare of society, there was no consensus supporting euthanasia. 

Quite the contrary; there was widespread opposition to this policy. Yet the movement forged ahead in defiance of experts from across the political spectrum and scripted its sorry history. 

Indeed, that is my very point about the euthanasia archives scandal. Chambers and his allies don’t want to open up the topic of their own shady history. If I were in their shoes, I might feel the same way. Their attempts to change public opinion depend on keeping their past under wraps. 

Lastly, Chambers says that even if euthanasia advocates had made mistakes in the past, all is well today. “Euthanasia lobbyists,” he reassures us, could never “maneuver” around the “checks and balances” of euthanasia laws and kill people with disabilities. 

Except that they can and do. The New Yorker, a widely-read and respected magazine which has never been accused of defending the “sanctity of life” doctrine, recently ran a piece about a 64-year-old Belgian woman whose doctor killed her in 2012. Mercy-killing has been legal in Belgium since 2002. The woman had been living with depression for years and therapy seemingly had not helped her. 

Her doctor, known as Belgium’s “Dr. Death,” had no psychiatric expertise, but he was an euthanasia zealot. Under his “care” she got “tired of life” and eventually asked to be euthanized. Her daughter and son only learned of the act the day after her death. The son is currently challenging Belgium’s law before the European Court of Human Rights.
What the Belgian case shows is that people with disabilities can be swayed by ideological activists in the medical profession, with literally fatal consequences. 

Guidelines drawn up by democratically-elected officials aren’t worth the paper they’re written on when individuals with disabilities are “treated” by militants like Belgium’s “Dr. Death.” 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: only a historically-informed understanding of today’s debates over end-of-life care can enable the public to see through the arguments of euthanasia advocates such as Stuart Chambers. They are not telling the truth. Could they have their own “secondary motives”?

Ian Dowbiggin had the unique experience of being granted access to the archives from the Euthanasia Society of America, archives that appear to have disappeared after Dowbiggin published his ground-breaking book: A Merciful End: The Euthanasia Movement in Modern America linking the euthanasia movement to the eugenic movement, a movement of people who advocated euthanasia for people with disabilities.

Ian Dowbiggin: A scandal in the euthanasia archives

The Prince Arthur Herald published this article on November 30, 2015. Ian Dowbiggin is the author of the book: A Merciful End: The Euthanasia Movement in Modern America. 

Why has the euthanasia movement hidden or destroyed its history?

By Ian Dowbiggin 

Imagine for a moment that reporters broke the news that the Vatican had destroyed the bulk of its archival records. Researchers around the world justifiably might accuse the Roman Catholic Church of a deliberate cover-up. 

Well, the Vatican has done no such thing. But it appears as if the right-to-die movement has. If so, one might well ask; why did people in the movement do it? Are they trying to hide something about their past? 

One thing is clear: if the euthanasia movement’s records have indeed been destroyed, a lot of history has vanished, Orwell-like, down a cavernous memory hole. And with it, information the right-to-die movement doesn’t want you to know. 

I should know, because I saw these records and I know what was in them. I wrote up my findings in my 2003 book on the history of the movement, published by Oxford University Press. 

The story of my involvement in these valuable records begins about fifteen years ago when I was given permission to explore the archives of what used to be called Partnerships for Caring, Inc. PFC was a successor organization to the defunct Euthanasia Society of America (ESA). The ESA records, housed in a law firm in Baltimore, consisted of 15 large cardboard boxes holding correspondence, financial records, press releases, published materials and minutes of meetings, much of it uncatalogued. 

There were literally thousands of items in these boxes documenting the entire 20th c. history of the U.S. and non-American activists who advocated the legalization of various forms of euthanasia. The ESA archive contained materials relating to the careers of noteworthy social activists such as Derek Humphry, the founder of the Hemlock Society (now called Compassion and Choices), Joseph Fletcher, the founder of “situation ethics,” Alan Guttmacher (after whom the population-control Guttmacher Institute in New York City is named), and the birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger who, unbeknownst to all her biographers, was also a vocal proponent of legalized euthanasia. 

Not only did these activists urge governments to permit voluntary mercy-killing and physician-assisted suicide, many also supported the involuntary mercy-killing of handicapped people. For example, despite his knowledge of widespread Nazi murder of people with disabilities, in 1943 the ESA’s president thought it was a good idea to legalize euthanasia in time for returning veterans who suffered from mental and physical wounds. 

As recently as 2000, Derek Humphry proclaimed that because of escalating health care costs the elderly had a “duty to die.” 

There was a good deal else in my book which would cause eye brows to arch in this day and age. The picture that emerged from my account was of a movement which harbored many people like the infamous “Dr. Death,” Jack Kevorkian, whose views on end-of-life care included the beliefs that experiments should be performed on dying persons and the mercy-killing of individuals whether or not they requested it was perfectly ethical. 

The overlap between the eugenics and euthanasia movements was particularly eye-opening. For much of the twentieth century the same people who urged governments to permit mercy-killing and physician-assisted suicide typically applauded the courts and elected officials when they legalized the forced sterilization of people with disabilities. 

My research did not always go smoothly. One right-to-die activist warned me that if I included anything he said to me over the phone he would sue me and my publisher. Clearly, the right-to-die movement did not like the contents of my book. Some in the movement must have regretted that I had gained access to their archives in the first place. 

But the story did not end there. About five years after the book’s publication, I was contacted by a US graduate student researching the history of euthanasia. She told me that in trying to track down the ESA records she had been informed that the collection had been intentionally destroyed. 

Just this year another US graduate student got in touch with me, also trying to locate the ESA archives. She too has been told the records no longer exist, although she is still investigating. 

Of course, it might be that the ESA records are sitting somewhere safe and sound. Yet why do groups like Compassion and Choices ignore my own requests for information? Why, when a published scholar in the history of medicine enquires about the whereabouts of this important archive, is there a resounding silence? 

Yet, if, as is highly likely, this magnificent archive is gone forever, one is perfectly entitled to call the right-to-die movement to account. What are they afraid of? The historical truth? 

As a researcher, I am saddened and angry that such a treasure trove is likely gone forever. The scholarly community rightly protests when a similar destruction of historical records occurs. It’s time that its outrage was directed against the people who today tell us mercy-killing and doctor-assisted suicide are the latest “freedoms” you and I ought to enjoy. 

In light of the disappearance of the ESA archives, can they be trusted?

Ian Dowbiggin, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, teaches history at the University of Prince Edward Island. He is the author of A Merciful End: The Euthanasia Movement in Modern America (2003) and A Concise History of Euthanasia (2006).

It is still right to oppose euthanasia.

Ian Dowbiggin

This article was published by the Prince Arthur Herald on May 7, 2015.

By Professor Ian Dowbiggin

I applaud the Prince Arthur Herald for publishing Stuart Chambers’s attack on me and all others who oppose the legalization of physician-assisted suicide (PAS) or mercy-killing. The PAH’s commitment to open debate is admirable and should serve as a beacon to other media outlets in a day and age when it is more important than ever to speak clearly and concretely about the circumstances surrounding end-of-life care in today’s society.

Too often, the debate has been dominated by heart-rending, human-interest stories in the mainstream media about people in pain. What has been missing is plain talk and clear language.

I should know. I have spent the last fifteen years studying and publishing on the history of the euthanasia movement. That history includes the story of now-defunct organizations which paved the way for today’s Compassion and Choices, the leading North American group in favor of permitting assisted suicide. So Chambers’s attack on me is something I’m used to.

He is right about one thing: Based on my empirical studies, I have occasionally warned that, if our courts and other interest groups get their way, Canada will soon embrace the belief that some lives are not as valuable as others. Put another way: that some lives are more worthy of death than others.

One thing I have learned is that, historically speaking, the most vocal advocates of assisted suicide and other forms of euthanasia would not be happy until they could get society to accept the killing of people with a wide range of disabilities, with or without their consent.

Jack Kevorkian was not alone in saying this. He was only more candid.

Now that the Canadian Supreme Court has struck down the Criminal Code ban on assisted suicide, I think most thoughtful people would agree that, regardless of their moral preferences, we have taken a big step in a fateful direction.

But not Chambers, a sociology professor at the University of Ottawa. To him, the practice of PAS is yesterday’s news. The mercy-killing of infants through lethal injection, and the hastening of deaths in other circumstances, is the new frontier.

Thus, it is all the more curious why he dismisses my “slippery slope” argument. In fact, he concedes that “it is reasonable to assume” that decriminalizing PAS will lead to the euthanasia of “terminally ill minors and incompetent patients.” That “causal premise,” he admits, “is potentially valid.”

As for the “normative” side of the slippery slope theory, he insists that “the horror stories professed by Dowbiggin” aren’t horror stories at all because they are now part of “standard medical practice.” He solemnly quotes Supreme Court Justice Lynn Smith who wrote that, in Chambers’s own words, “mercy-killing” was “not a breach of medical protocol or an erosion of fundamental values.” As a community, we have moved on from “absolute moral distinctions” (as if that was what the debate about end-of-life care were all about). Presumably nothing about death and dying is off the table as we go forward.