Back in 2015, the Supreme Court justices who unanimously struck down the Criminal Code provision against medical assistance in dying (MAID) couldn’t foresee how Canada’s assisted dying program might evolve to the point it is today. I don’t mean that figuratively – in their written decision, they implied that they simply couldn’t see it happening.
People fought and died in WW II to extinguish the Mengeles of the world.
When society denies the objective value of human life, no one is safe
Canadian doctors encouraged to bring up medically assisted death before their patients do
In most jurisdictions in the world with legalized euthanasia, doctors are explicitly prohibited, or strongly discouraged from raising assisted dying with a patient.
The request must come from the person.
But a guidance document produced by Canada’s providers of medically assisted death states that doctors have a professional obligation to bring up MAID as an option, when it’s “medically relevant” and the person is likely eligible, as part of the informed consent process.
Abortion, euthanasia – Trudeau has turned Canada into an unholy abattoir.
Its assisted-suicide laws are becoming ever more sinister.
When Canadian campaigners achieved their goal of legalising euthanasia for the terminally ill, did anyone think they would stop there? Today, six years after legalisation, pro-euthanasia activists continue to lobby for ever wider access to the ‘right to die’. And they are winning.
OTTAWA — Explosive testimony Monday before the Commons standing committee on veterans affairs by a retired member of the Canadian Armed Forces suggests a combat veteran was offered MAiD twice — despite repeatedly dismissing medically assisted suicide — and was told that Veterans Affairs had carried out the service for others.
Sounds about right for the Trudeau era.
“Assisted suicide” continues to prosper.
Back in 2014 I wrote here about a healthy two-year-old giraffe named Marius, who, amid much controversy, was euthanized by the Copenhagen Zoo to make room for “a genetically more valuable giraffe,” as the zoo’s scientific director rather indelicately put it. An international zoo official supported his decision, saying that critics (most of them, apparently, American) should think less about Marius and more about “the bigger picture.” As I commented at the time, these two zoo folk weren’t – aren’t – alone; they belong to a contemporary breed of people, particularly thick on the ground in northern Europe, who think this way not just about animals but, yes, about human beings.
MAID in Canada: The Right to Die
America’s culture war over the question of when human life begins has been joined by those who want to reshape how human life ends.
The debate over legalizing physician-assisted suicide began in Oregon nearly thirty years ago. The scheme, in which doctors prescribe lethal drugs and guidance for patients who want to end their lives, was sold to the public as “death with dignity” and carefully restricted to individuals 18 and older who had an incurable and irreversible terminal illness and were not expected to live beyond six months. This novel approach to end-of-life care ran contrary to laws in all 50 states that made it a crime to assist a fellow human being in committing suicide. For physicians, it undermined the age-old Hippocratic Oath provision: “Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course.”
When exactly are you allowed to deliberately block blood flow to the brain?
Are you familiar with something called the “partial resurrection” procedure? That’s how MedPage Today referred to it in a recent article. You might suppose it is some kind of transhumanist scheme to bring the dead back to life, but it is an emerging technique used by transplantation surgeons upon organ donors.
Before knowing anything about this procedure, the first thing one notices is the hubris of the terminology – as if it were within the purview of scientists, even surgeons, to deliver some sort of “resurrection”.
The laws around assisted suicide are terrifyingly liberal
“They’re going to say that all suicides are way down.” Gary Nichols is speaking to me from his home in Edmonton, Canada. In 2019, his younger brother Alan was hospitalised for threatening to kill himself. Within a month, he was dead. He had ended his own life at Chilliwack General Hospital, aged 61, and doctors and nurses had helped him do it.
Our society automatically transforms any desire into law, even a depressed person’s death wish yet we have outlawed the death penalty.
Her name was Shanti De Corte. She was 23. This Belgian girl was euthanized, surrounded by her family, after legally obtaining euthanasia. Six years earlier, Shanti was at Brussels International Airport. She was to fly to Rome after graduation. She was in the departure lounge when Islamic terrorists blew themselves up. Shanti was a few meters away from them. She was taken away alive from the airport that morning, but she would never really get out of that nightmare.
What do you do when you discover your son has made an appointment for his death?
On September 7, Margaret Marsilla called Joshua Tepper, the doctor who planned to kill her son.
Marsilla is 46, and she lives outside Toronto with her husband and daughter, a nursing student. She had known that her 23-year-old son, Kiano Vafaeian, was depressed—he was diabetic and had lost his vision in one eye, and he didn’t have a job or girlfriend or much of a future—and Marsilla asked her daughter to log onto Kiano’s account. (Kiano had given his sister access so she could help him with his email.) He never shared anything with his mother—what he was thinking, where he was going—and Marsilla was scared.
That was when Marsilla learned that Kiano had applied and, in late July, been approved for “medical assistance in dying,” aka MAiD, aka assisted suicide.
Tom Mortier can now rest assured that though he was unable to stop his mother’s euthanasia, he has vindicated her right to life in the face of a system that failed her.
On October 4th, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in favour of Mortier in his claim that Belgium had failed to protect his mother’s life by allowing her to be euthanised, ADF International said in a press release.
Since the government expanded the eligibility for assisted death last year to include those with disabilities, critics have been saying there should be more checks and balances.
CALGARY, Alberta — The first time Cheryl Romaire tried to end her life under Canada’s assisted suicide law, her application was rejected. But after a loosening of the law, she received approval to end her life — and she now intends to do just that.
“It felt like a weight had been lifted off my chest,” Ms. Romaire said recently, as one of her cats and a dog competed for her attention at her apartment in Calgary, Alberta.
Many leftists tout Canada’s socialized healthcare system as something America should emulate, claiming government-run healthcare is more humane. But it seems Canadian officials are more interested in urging doctors to help patients to kill themselves than to treat them.
America’s neighbor to the north has some of the most permissive euthanasia laws in the world. Canada’s medical assistance in dying laws allow almost anyone who can claim some form of hardship or disability to receive physician-assisted suicide, regardless of how minor those disabilities might be.
For a profession that purports to believe in a principle of “do no harm,” the modern medical community seems to perpetually undermine legitimate healthcare. Physicians under the sway of Hegelian ethics — whatever solves a problem on a practical level must be moral, as no action on its own is right or wrong — propose harmful (or lethal) remedies to accomplish a desired end.
