MAiD Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide

Roger Foley is a leading activist for the rights of the disabled, including his own. A hero to associations for the disabled, he is often considered a thorn in the side of health bureaucrats. Recently, an account of his case — emanating more sympathy for the bureaucrats than for Foley, alas — was prominently featured in these pages.

Foley suffers from a grave neurodegenerative affliction, spinocerebellar ataxia, which renders him almost completely physically dependent on caregivers. Cognitively normal and technologically skilled, he enjoys a rich life of the mind. In spite of what most Canadians would consider the grimmest of circumstances — which shamefully includes persistent reminders from carers that he has a right to euthanasia, which he just as persistently rebuffs — Foley remains life-affirming and bullish in pursuit of more humane and empowering care conditions.

On Sunday the New York Times Magazine published a feature about Canada’s legal regime for assisted suicide, wrapping large volumes of reporting on law, ethics and medicine around the individual story of Paula Ritchie, an Ontario woman who sought and received “MAiD” after an unhappy life full of pain and misery.

Katie Engelhart’s story plays pretty fair with an explosive social issue that is of increasing global concern. She knows the NYT’s world audience is aware of Canada’s avant-garde experiment with the facilitation of medical suicide for patients who don’t have terminal illnesses, and she doesn’t stack the deck either way.

A euthanasia advocate who was quizzed by murder detectives after the death of a woman using a controversial Sarco euthanasia pod last year has died by assisted suicide, it was announced yesterday.

Dr Florian Willet, 47, was arrested in September 2024 following the death of the 64-year-old woman after police claimed there were strangulation marks on her neck.

He was the only person present for the death of the woman, who was the first person to use the Sarco suicide device, which had been set up in a forest near Merishausen, Switzerland.

We go inside a story about one woman’s journey to die.

I grew up in the ’80s and ’90s and remember being fascinated by the controversy around Jack Kevorkian. He was a Michigan doctor who argued that sick people should be allowed to die on their own terms rather than suffer through a grueling illness. Was he a traitor to his oath to “do no harm”? Or was he an angel of mercy, letting victims of disease exercise one last bit of agency over their failing bodies? Kevorkian, who went to prison for helping dozens of people with “physician-assisted suicides,” seemed so radical at the time.

Now his ideas are commonplace. Ten states and lots of Western nations have assisted-dying laws. But they’re mostly built for people with a life-ending diagnosis.

Canada is trying something more. There, a patient can have a state-sanctioned death if she is suffering — but not necessarily dying — from an illness. For the cover story of yesterday’s New York Times Magazine, Katie Engelhart followed one woman’s journey to die. It’s a nuanced portrait of a person racked with pain and a tour of some controversial bioethics. I spoke with Katie about the difficulty in knowing what’s right and what’s wrong when people suffer.

Paula Ritchie wasn’t dying, but under Canada’s new rules, she qualified for a medically assisted death. Was that kindness or cruelty?

One of the doctors wanted to know why, despite everything, Paula Ritchie was still alive. “I’m just curious,” she said. “What has kept you from attempting suicide since August of 2023?”

“I’m not very good at it,” Paula said. “Obviously.” Then she started to cry. She said that everything was getting worse. She said she didn’t want to suffer anymore. “This is a more dignified way to go than suicide.”

Paula was lying in the big bed that she had pulled into the center of the living room, facing an old TV and a window that looked out on a row of garbage bins. The room’s brown linoleum floors were stained, and its walls were mostly unadorned. On a bookshelf, there was a small figurine of an angel, her arm raised in offering. At 52, Paula had a pale, unblemished face and a tangle of dark hair that fell around her waist. The day before the appointment, in January this year, she washed her hair for the first time in weeks, but then she was not able to lift herself out of the bathtub. When, after hours, she managed to get out, her pain and dizziness was so bad that she had to crawl across the floor.

Canada’s MAID law, which expanded the right to die to people without a terminal illness, raises ethical and medical dilemmas.

In 2023, one out of 20 Canadians who died received a physician-assisted death, making Canada the No. 1 provider of medical assistance in dying (MAID) in the world, when measured in total figures. In one province, Quebec, there were more MAID deaths per capita than anywhere else. Canadians, by and large, have been supportive of this trend. A 2022 poll showed that a stunning 86 percent of Canadians supported MAID’s legalization.

But in some corners, MAID has been the subject of a growing unease. While MAID in Canada was initially restricted to patients with terminal conditions — people whose natural deaths were “reasonably foreseeable” — the law was controversially amended in 2021 to include people who were suffering but who weren’t actually dying: patients who might have many years or even decades of life ahead of them. This new category includes people with chronic pain and physical disabilities.

Canada has seen a significant cultural shift since euthanasia was legalized, marked by unsolicited offers of assisted death, lives being ended prematurely, and what some critics call its “glamorization” as an act of personal autonomy, says an advocate for the prevention of euthanasia.

The shift in public perception of assisted death is largely attributed to the expansion of euthanasia in Canada since its legalization in 2016, as well as growing acceptance of physical or emotional suffering as sufficient grounds to consider a life less bearable or no longer worth living, Amanda Achtman said in a recent interview with Jan Jekielek, host of The Epoch Times program “American Thought Leaders.”

A PJ Media post alleges that there is an Evangelical Fellowship of Canada “brochure” from 2024, still circulating, that is in opposition to that nation’s Medical Assistance In Dying (MAID) program.

That sounds right on its face, but there’s more.

In her final testimony at a coroner’s inquest into the death of her husband, Sylvie Brosseau wept at length on Thursday as she recounted the horrors Normand Meunier suffered at the St-Jérôme Hospital before he chose to end his life with medical assistance in dying (MAID).

Meunier, who was quadriplegic at the time of his death on March 29, 2024, developed gaping, irreversible bed sores on his buttocks — over 20 centimetres in width — after languishing four days on a bare stretcher in a harried emergency room. Brosseau reiterated that the hospital failed to provide until it was too late the mattress her husband absolutely needed for his festering bed sores.

The ‘assisted dying’ bill will make it as easy as possible for disabled, ethnic-minority and poor people to kill themselves.

Presumably, the UK government had hoped it could quietly slip out the impact assessments for the assisted-dying bill without anyone noticing. Two reports were published on the Friday just before the bank-holiday weekend, and just after the results of the Runcorn by-election and other local elections. Clearly, no one was supposed to read them.

Last month, investigators “found a layer of human ashes and bone remains several centimeters thick, measuring approximately 460 square meters” at “depths of 80 centimeters to 1.50 meters”  just outside Hartheim Castle near the Austrian city of Linz. The crushed and incinerated bodies were victims of the Third Reich’s T-4 euthanasia program, which ended the lives of between 70,000 and 20,000 people that the Nazis deemed “life unworthy of life.”

Hartheim Castle, which is now a memorial site, was one of the eight centers where Nazi doctors murdered people with disabilities, mental illnesses, and other people categorized as “useless eaters.” Between May 1940 and November 1944, around 30,000 people were murdered in gas chambers, burned in a specially constructed crematorium, and dumped in a tributary of the Danube, or, we now know, on the castle grounds. The victims also included Dutch Jews as well as prisoners from Spain, Poland, and France.

April Hubbard sits on the theatre stage where she plans to die later this year.

She is not terminally ill, but the 39-year-old performance and burlesque artist has been approved for assisted dying under Canada’s increasingly liberal laws.