Page 3 of 3 FirstFirst 123
Results 21 to 29 of 29

Thread: Euthanasia Worldwide

  1. #21
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jun 2015
    Location
    Pennsylvania
    Posts
    4,795
    This a slippery slope that will eventually lead to oh my parent has Alzheimer's, and I don't want them to live anymore since it's an uncurable disease. Then the "medical professional" who gets a paycheck from the insurance on Zoom approves the MAID request.

    I give it 4 years at most before this is regular.
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  2. #22
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jun 2015
    Location
    Pennsylvania
    Posts
    4,795
    I'll let the headline speak for itself I'll link the article below. But again, with this ever-evolving shift on this issue to offering to kill its citizens due to government inefficiency

    Disabled Canadian Army veteran Paralympian blasts government for offering to EUTHANIZE her when she complained about how long it was taking to install stairlift at her home

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...uthanasia.html
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  3. #23
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jun 2015
    Location
    Pennsylvania
    Posts
    4,795
    It's the most rewarding work we've ever done': Canadian doctor who's euthanized 400 people proudly shares how she helped kill man deemed incapable of choosing assisted suicide - as another physician says she's helped 300 die

    By RONNY REYES
    DAILYMAIL

    A Canadian doctor who's personally euthanized more than 400 people said she helped kill a man who was previously deemed unsuitable for assisted suicide.

    Ellen Wiebe, a doctor who works with Dying With Dignity Canada, boasted in a seminar for physicians working in assisted suicide about the time she treated a patient who did not qualify for the end of life service.

    A Medical Assistance In Dying (MAID) assessor had rejected the unnamed man because he did not have a serious illness or 'the capacity to make informed decisions about his own personal health.'

    But the man eventually made his way to Wiebe, who cleared him, flew him out to Vancouver, and euthanized him, The New Atlantic reports.

    'It's the most rewarding work we've ever done,' Wiebe said of MAID during a 2020 event in a video that's since been shared online.

    Obstetrician Stefanie Green, a colleague of Wiebe, also revealed that she's helped 300 people die in Canada's controversial MAID program, which eclipses similar programs in the US.

    She uses the term 'deliveries' to describe both her work helping women give birth - and people end their lives.

    In 2021, only 486 people died using California's assisted suicide program, but that same year in Canada, 10,064 died used MAID to die that year. MAID has now grown so popular that Canada has both anti-suicide hotlines to try and stop people killing themselves, as well as pro-suicide hotlines for people wanting to end their lives.

    MAID has fallen into further scrutiny over claims that people are now seeking assisted suicide due to poverty and homelessness or mental anguish, as opposed to the traditional method of the terminally-ill seeking a painless death.

    Among the new type of patients was Rosina Kamis, 41, who said she needed to be 'euthanized ASAP.'

    According to an analysis of Kamis' medical history and messages sent to doctors and family reviewed by The New Atlantic, the 41-year-old was facing eviction, needed to crowdfund to pay for food, and was afraid that she would 'suffer alone.'

    She also feared being institutionalized, and saw MAID as 'the best solution for all.'

    Although Kamis suffered from chronic leukemia and other health problems, her condition was not terminal, The New Atlantic reported, and a letter seemingly made for her attorney painted a different picture as to why she sought euthanasia.

    'Please keep all this secret while I am still alive because… the suffering I experience is mental suffering, not physical,' she wrote.

    Kamis was approved for MAID and chose to die on September 26, 2021, the date of her ex-husband's birthday. She passed away in her basement apartment after a doctor gave her a lethal injection. Some of these new cases were highlighted in a 2021 MAID presentation by Althea Gibb-Carsley, a recently retired care coordinator and social worker for the Vancouver Coastal Health's assisted dying program.

    In the presentation, Gibb-Carsley describes a 55-year-old patient by the name of Mary, who suffers chronic pains and cannot tackle the issue due to her low income.

    'She does not want to die, but she's suffering terribly and she's been maxing out her credit cards. She has no other options,' the presentation reads.

    Gibb-Carsley goes on to describe similar situations with a patient named Nancy, 68, a former doctor who ran out of savings, and another named Greg, 57, a writer suffering from a history of trauma who lacks housing.

    Gibb-Carsley also highlighted a case of a 38-year-old trans woman named Lucy, an immigrant who suffers from chronic pains and felt trapped in her one-room studio apartment with 'no air or light and creepy men all around.'

    It is unclear if any of these people were ever approved for assisted suicide.

    Gibb-Carsley's presentation concluded with a note that the problem points out the inadequacies of the welfare state that is incapable of helping those who are struggling to make ends meet.

    The report appears to suggest that Canada should bolster its social welfare programs based on the rising number of people seeking to end their lives due to poverty. In regards to these types of patients, Wiebe told The New Atlantic: 'It is rare for assessors to have patients who have unmet needs, but it does happen. Usually these unmet needs are around loneliness and poverty.

    'As all Canadians have rights to an assisted death, people who are lonely or poor also have those rights.'

    Green, who describes her work as an obstetrician and euthanasia assistant as helping with 'deliveries,' told the publication that stories about the poor seeking MAID are just 'clickbait.'

    'You cannot access MAID in this country because you can't get housing,' she said. 'That is clickbait. These stories have not been reported fully.'

    However, that is one person who is one step closer to MAID services despite listing poverty as his primary reason for seeking assisted suicide. Lee Landry, 65, told assessors for the procedure he 'doesn't want to die' but has applied for MAID because he can't afford to live comfortably.

    Astonishingly, a doctor has given one of the two signatures required for Landry to end his own life.

    Landry is awaiting the decision of a second doctor who has assessed his eligibility. If that doctor rejects the application, Landry says he will simply 'shop' around for another who's prepared to sign off on his death - something that's allowed under Canada's assisted dying laws.

    The shocking case lays bare the increasingly relaxed approach to euthanasia in Canada, where experts say 'choosing to die is more accessible than support for people with disabilities'.

    Landry uses a wheelchair and has several other disabilities that mean he is eligible for MAID, including epilepsy and diabetes. But until recently, he was able to live comfortably, sharing his modest home in Medicine Hat, Alberta, with his service dog.

    Changes to his state benefits when he turned 65 in May meant his income was cut and he's now left with around $120 per month after paying for medical bills and essentials.

    Landry is also braced for a rent hike in January that could mean his benefits no longer cover the cost of essentials, placing him on the brink of homelessness.

    'I don't want to go homeless,' he told the DailyMail. 'I don't want to end up living in a van so I can't make the van payments. I don't want to end up homeless. Who would want to be homeless at 16, never mind 65?'

    Many of gone on to blast Canada's euthanasia program, including former Paralympian Christine Gauthier, who slammed her government for offering to euthanize her when she grew frustrated at delays in having a wheelchair lift installed in her home.

    Gauthier, a retired Army Corporal testified in Parliament last month that a Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC) caseworker made the assisted suicide offer.

    After years of delays in getting the home lift, Gauthier says the caseworker told her: 'Madam, if you are really so desperate, we can give you medical assistance in dying now.'

    The worker who made the offer hasn't been named, but they are feared to have offered three other veterans who contacted VAC with problems the same 'solution', Global News reported.

    The scandal emerged a week after Canada's veterans affairs minister confirmed that at least four other veterans were similarly offered access to Canada' MAID law in response to their troubles, a situation Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called 'absolutely unacceptable'.

    Gauthier said that she has been seeking VAC assistance in getting a chairlift for her home since 2017.

    'It has isolated me greatly, because I have to crawl down my butt with the wheelchair in front of me to be able to access my house,' she told Global News.

    She said she was shocked by the offer of suicide from the caseworker, which came in a conversation in 2019.

    'I was like, 'I can't believe that you will … give me an injection to help me die, but you will not give me the tools I need to help me live,'' she said. 'It was really shocking to hear that kind of comment.'

    Gauthier was injured in an Army training accident in 1989, suffering permanent damage to her knees and her spine.

    She competed in the 2016 Paralympic Games and Prince Harry's 2016 Invictus Games as a canoeist, power-lifter, and indoor rower.

    Gauthier's testimony, and reports of other similar cases, have drawn public outcry, and Trudeau vowed to make changes.

    Medically assisted suicide was first legalized in Canada for terminally ill patients in 2016, but last year, the law expanded to offer euthanasia to patients whose natural death is not believed to be imminent.

    Now, people with long-term disabilities can also receive medical assistance in dying. Last year more than 10,000 people in Canada died by euthanasia.

    Starting next year, a new law will allow people suffering from mental illness, which had not previously be a qualifying condition, to receive medically assisted suicide.

    The expansion of Canada's euthanasia laws, already among the most permissive on the planet, has raised concerns from some quarters.

    Amid the latest expansion, Canada has two hotline systems for people looking for help in for assisted suicide, as well as those who want to be talked out of killing themselves.

    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...g-suicide.html
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  4. #24
    Administrator Aaron's Avatar
    Join Date
    Nov 2015
    Location
    New Jersey, unfortunately
    Posts
    4,382
    The poverty aspect is pure evil. The elites deliberately ship jobs overseas and crush purchasing power, leading to inability to afford a home or family and feeding the inertia and torpor we see with no prospects or frontiers to conquer. So in other words, we're witnessing the deliberate manufacturing of declining birth rates and despair so that they can push their "remedies" of mass migration and now suicide to further hasten their goals.
    Don't ask questions, just consume product and then get excited for next products.

    "They will hurt you. They will hurt your grandma, these people. The root cause of this is there's no discipline in the homes, they don't go to school, you know, they live off the government, no personal accountability, and they just beat people up for no reason, and it's disgusting." - Former Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters

  5. #25
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jun 2015
    Location
    Pennsylvania
    Posts
    4,795
    Genevieve Lhermitte: Belgian mother who killed her five children euthanised

    By Jeremy Gahagan
    BBC News

    Genevieve Lhermitte killed her son and four daughters, aged three to 14, in the town of Nivelles on 28 February 2007, while their father was away.

    She then tried to take her own life but failed, and ended up calling emergency services for help.

    The 56-year-old was sentenced to life in prison in 2008, before being moved to a psychiatric hospital in 2019.

    In Belgium the law allows for people to choose to be euthanised if they are deemed to be suffering from "unbearable" psychological, and not just physical, suffering that cannot be healed.

    The person must be conscious of their decision and be able to express their wish in a reasoned and consistent manner.

    "It is this specific procedure that Mrs Lhermitte followed, with the various medical opinions having been collected," her lawyer said.

    Psychologist Emilie Maroit told the RTL-TVI channel that Lhermitte likely chose to die on 28 February in a "symbolic gesture in respect for her children".

    "It may also have been for her to finish what she started, because basically she wanted to end her life when she killed them," the psychologist said.

    The quintuple murders in 2007, and the subsequent trial, rocked Belgium.

    During the trial Lhermitte's lawyers argued she was mentally disturbed and should not be sent to prison. But the jury found her guilty of premeditated murder and sentenced her to life in jail.

    In 2010 Lhermitte filed a civil lawsuit demanding up to three million euros (£2,655,840) from a former psychiatrist, claiming his "inaction" failed to prevent the murders, but she ended up abandoning the legal battle after 10 years.

    In 2022, some 2,966 people died via euthanasia in Belgium, an increase of 10% compared to 2021.

    Cancer remains the most common reason, but officials said in nearly three out of four requests the patient presented "several types of suffering, both physical and psychological".

    Since 2014, Belgium has allowed children to be helped to die as well as adults, if they are terminally ill and in great pain and if they have parental consent.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europ..._medium=social
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  6. #26
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jun 2015
    Location
    Pennsylvania
    Posts
    4,795
    Head of papal academy sparks new row with euthanasia remarks

    By Elise Ann Allen
    Crux

    In Monday the Pontifical Academy for Life hit back against critics of remarks its president made several days prior implying that while personally opposed to euthanasia and assisted suicide, he was supportive of legislation regulating it.

    Last Wednesday, speaking at the Perugia Journalism Festival in Perugia on “The last journey (towards the end of life),” Italian Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, said the Catholic Church “does not have a package of prêt-à-porter, a pre-packaged truth as if it were a distributor of truth pills.”

    Rather, its teaching is the result of “Theological thought evolves throughout history in dialogue with the Magisterium and with the experience of the people of God in a dynamic of mutual enrichment.”

    To this end, he pointed to the development over time of the church’s position on the death penalty, which previously held that there were certain circumstances in which it was considered permissible until Pope Francis modified the Catechism of the Catholic Church 2018 to state that it is always “inadmissible.”

    When the church intervenes publicly at the intellectual political, or juridical level, it does so “the level of culture and dialogue between consciences,” Paglia said.

    In terms of end-of-life issues, Paglia said the big question is how to achieve an ethical and juridical plan that respect both individuals and society as a whole.

    He stressed the importance of individual freedom and insisted that when it comes to decisions regarding death, it often happens that those who apparently make a free decision to medically end their own lives do so as the result “of a social injunction,” and often “under the pressure of economic convenience.”

    Paglia noted that adults with mental incapacity or whose decision-making ability has been compromised are among those who receive euthanasia or assisted suicide, and as a result, “the cases of involuntary euthanasia and palliative sedation without consent have grown.”

    “The overall result is that we are witnessing a contradictory outcome: in the name of self-determination, the effective exercise of freedom is curtailed, especially for those who are most vulnerable,” he said, and stressed the need to foster a culture of “accompaniment” and of palliative medicine for the sick and dying.

    This mentality must not only be fostered at the individual level, but also at the level of culture and society, he said, saying that in this context, “it cannot be excluded that in our society a legal mediation is feasible which allows assisted suicide in the conditions specified by the Constitutional Court’s judgement.”

    Paglia was referring to a decision by Italy’s Constitutional Court in 2019 which partially decriminalized assisted suicide under certain conditions, require local heath authorities and an ethics board to approve each request.

    However, the court at the same time ruled that parliament must pass a law regulating the practice, and lawmakers have yet to pass that legislation.

    In 2021, supporters of euthanasia in Italy gathered 1.4 million signatures, well over the required 500,000, to petition the Constitutional Court to approve a national referendum on assisted suicide, making it legally available to all who wish to avail themselves of it.

    The signatures and arguments were submitted to the court early last year, however, the Constitutional Court shot down the referendum as unconstitutional on grounds that it did not guarantee “the minimum constitutionally necessary protection of human life in general, with particular reference to the weak and vulnerable.”

    Under current Italian law, anyone who assists another person commit suicide can be jailed for 5-12 years.

    Debate over assisted suicide is still a heated topic in Italy, and lawmakers remain deeply divided over the issue, meaning still have not been able to overcome their deadlock on legislation regulating the practice, or the hundreds of amendments to a draft bill that have been proposed.

    In his speech, Paglia noted that according to the Constitutional Court’s 2019 ruling, a person seeking assisted suicide must be “kept alive by life support treatments and affected by an irreversible pathology, which is a source of physical or psychological suffering they consider intolerable, but fully capable of making free and informed decisions.”

    He noted that the draft legislation currently under debate, which has been approved by Italy’s lower house of parliament but not its upper house, follows the same line.

    “Personally, I would not practice assisted suicide, but I understand that legal mediation can constitute the greatest common good concretely possible in the conditions in which we find ourselves,” he said, closing his speech.

    Paglia’s remark on legal regulation of euthanasia as “the greatest common good” given Italy’s current status on the issue generated immediate backlash, with many arguing that the Catholic Church should not be advocating for a law that offers legal protection for euthanasia, and that it was inappropriate for the head of the Vatican’s Academy for Life to appear supportive of an end-of-life legislation.

    Concern was also raised over Paglia’s remarks on the development of church teaching over time and his apparent comparison of the death penalty to euthanasia.

    Many criticized Paglia’s remarks as confusing and as signaling a potential openness to euthanasia and assisted suicide at worst.

    In a statement Monday, the Pontifical Academy for Life hit back against critics saying Paglia, “reaffirms his ‘No’ to euthanasia and assisted suicide, in full conformity with the church’s Magisterium,” meaning its collective body of teaching.

    The statement insisted that Paglia in his presentation briefly touched on the Constitutional Court’s 2019 ruling and the current status of assisted suicide in Italy “without full development” of the topic.

    “In this precise and specific context, Archbishop Paglia explained that in his view a ‘legislative initiative’ (certainly not a moral one) could be possible which would be consistent with” the court’s ruling and which would preserve “both the criminality of the act and the conditions in which the crime carries no penalty, as the Court requested Parliament to legislate.”

    The academy insisted that for Paglia, it is crucial that the court’s ruling on the criminality of assisted suicide “remains and is not overruled.”

    “Any further elaboration is uncalled for,” the statement said, insisting that at the scientific and cultural levels, Paglia “has always supported the need for accompaniment of the sick in the final phase of life, using palliative care and loving personal attention, to ensure that no one is left to face alone the illness and suffering, and difficult decisions, that the end of life brings on.”

    Critics also hit back against the statement, arguing that it did little to clarify Paglia’s remarks and generated more confusion on the issue, while offering no insight into the Italian legal situation Paglia was referring to.

    Paglia, who is also the head of a government commission established in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic on care of the elderly, generally prefers an attitude of friendly engagement with the government on Catholic moral issues, rather than publicly sparring over controversies.

    For this and other reasons, he has been an increasingly controversial figure over the past 18 months, both for personal remarks and decisions made by the academy under his leadership.

    Since last year, the academy has made headlines repeatedly for controversial publications and statements and for its social media activity.

    Most of those debates surround the appointment of a prominent pro-choice Italian-American economist to the academy’s membership and for the publication of a controversial volume which included contributions from theologians suggesting that artificial contraception and reproduction was permissible in certain circumstances.

    They have also come under fire for a series of tweets that were dispatched and later retracted arguing that Pope Saint Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae – which reinforced the church’s teachings on marriage and upheld its condemnation of artificial contraception – was not covered by the doctrine of papal infallibility, meaning it can be subject to change.

    Paglia has repeatedly insisted that it is the academy’s duty to facilitate debate among experts and theologians of differing views and that he is acting with the pope’s backing.

    https://cruxnow.com/vatican/2023/04/...anasia-remarks

    Death Penalty Bad> Suicide GOOD
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  7. #27
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jun 2015
    Location
    Pennsylvania
    Posts
    4,795
    An online poll on Euthanasia within Canada has found that 3 in 10 respondents favor legalizing euthanasia for people, for the reason that they are either poor, or homeless.

    https://researchco.ca/2023/05/05/maid-canada-2023/
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  8. #28
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2013
    Location
    Toronto, Ontario, Canada
    Posts
    20,875
    The Canadian gov. delayed allowing mentally ill people assisted suicide until 2024.
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  9. #29
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jan 2013
    Location
    Toronto, Ontario, Canada
    Posts
    20,875
    Have Assisted Dying Laws Gone Too Far?

    As Canada expands access to MAID, many people with disabilities are sounding the alarm. Some say the law was flawed from the outset

    By Meagan Gilmore
    The Walrus

    TARRA CARLSON’S plan for her old age is simple: to die before her husband.

    She’s been nearly inseparable from him since they met thirteen years ago on a dating site. After a few messages and video chats, they learned they lived just blocks apart. The revelation led to a long midnight drive together. Soon, he moved in. They got married a few years later. He is, without a doubt, the greatest and best thing in her life, she says. He is also, in some ways, her guarantee of life.

    Carlson, forty-eight, has autism and ADHD. She didn’t get a formal diagnosis until she was thirty-nine—“Only boys in my time had those disabilities,” she says—but her whole life has been marked by social exclusion. She says that, when she was growing up, her teachers and school administrators sensed there was something different about her, but they didn’t know *exactly what; some, she says, would use the r-word to describe her. Carlson attended separate classes for students with disabilities throughout elementary and parts of high school. She struggled in college because of a lack of disability accommodations. She remembers that when she was a child, a doctor suggested her parents send her to an institution; doctors also warned she’d never be able to live independently as an adult.

    Despite the warnings, she did achieve some degree of independence: at twenty-three, she moved to Alberta from British Columbia on her own. She makes a living as a caregiver for people with disabilities and people who hire and train their own support staff rather than rely on agencies.

    For several years, she also received payments under Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped, a provincial social assistance program for disabled adult Albertans. It’s not a lot of money to live on—the maximum 2023 rate is $1,787 per month; in 2017, when Carlson last received it, it was $1,588. (By that time, she says, she was personally receiving well below that amount because of her husband’s salary and her pension plan disability benefits.) The amount decreased when she earned money, so the program did little to maintain her independence or help her plan for the future. By mid-2017, she lost access to the program entirely; her husband’s income made her ineligible. She says she still receives about $800 a month in Canada Pension Plan disability benefits and can get by with her husband’s support, but the situation feels temporary.

    “I’m petrified of growing old with a disability,” she says. If her husband dies before her, she may have no way to access financial support. She’ll lose her biggest advocate and support system—and her home. She’s worked in long-term care facilities and never wants to live in one. Applying for disability support programs, such as home care, can be cumbersome. There’s no one-stop shop for disability services; they’re spread across government agencies and ministries. Wait lists are long. Paperwork can be complicated. Carlson doesn’t think she’ll be able to understand how to navigate social assistance programs without her husband to explain them to her. But if she dies first, she reckons, she won’t have to.

    Compared with disability support, medical assistance in dying, or MAID, seems relatively easy to request. Written applications differ by province or territory but are fairly straightforward; most are only a few pages long. For some of them, to confirm eligibility, an applicant simply has to sign and initial certain statements—for example, that they have an irremediable and grievous medical condition and are in a state of advanced decline. If any more health conditions were to crop up on top of her disability, eroding her independence completely, says Carlson, she’s pretty sure she’d qualify for MAID. “It’s a one-way ticket,” she says, “because you have no choice.”

    BEFORE 2015, providing medically assisted deaths was a criminal offence. That year, the Supreme Court of Canada declared the Criminal Code’s prohibitions on assisted suicide unconstitutional insofar as they did not permit physicians to provide medically assisted death to consenting adults. The following year, legislation came into effect that legalized MAID, allowing physicians to administer lethal drugs to patients who, as the law put it, had a “grievous and irremediable” sickness, disease, and disability and whose “natural death” was “reasonably foreseeable.” (Interpretations of the term “reasonably foreseeable” and what sort of timeline it denotes can vary, but it is generally understood by clinicians that it can mean several years.) This would, presumably, allow individuals with terminal illnesses to end their lives when they wanted and on their own terms.

    Until recently, most of the public discourse and reporting about MAID has described it in positive and, some would argue, romantic terms. (A 2015 editorial in The Walrus called MAID “the last human right.”) Proponents say MAID gives suffering individuals a painless end. Some say they feel relief knowing that their death will be controlled and that they can anticipate a peaceful exit. MAID, they say, has given them an option other than prolonged suffering or a violent suicide—or perhaps an unsuccessful and traumatic attempt at one.

    That rosy perception began to darken when, in 2021, the legislation was expanded to include people whose deaths are not considered reasonably foreseeable—an option now known as Track Two. The development particularly angered many disabled Canadians. The change in legislation made it possible for disabled people to qualify for MAID even if they weren’t terminally ill. Over the past year, according to news reports, people have considered applying for or have died by MAID for reasons such as insufficient housing and meagre social supports that have left them in perpetual poverty. Carlson knows people with disabilities who have applied for MAID because they couldn’t find proper supports to live. “Canada has made it so that it’s become the only resource or recourse that people who are marginalized or poor have,” she says.

    In 2024, Canada plans to further extend eligibility to people whose sole underlying condition is mental illness, prompting many to question whether MAID has gone too far. (The government was due to introduce this expansion in March 2023 but passed a law earlier this year to extend that deadline, citing the need to give medical professionals more time to prepare.) Ostensibly, there are legal and administrative safeguards in place to keep MAID from being abused, whether by patients or providers. But, for a growing chorus of critics, it’s unclear whether any such measures can suffice to protect vulnerable people from being all but forced into MAID.

    Concerns about the legislation aren’t new. Some say it was flawed from the outset and that Canada’s assisted dying laws have always singled out disabled people by listing “disability” as a type of medical condition that could guarantee eligibility. In 2019, before Track Two was legalized, Catalina Devandas-Aguilar, then UN special rapporteur for the rights of persons with disabilities, wrote that she was “extremely concerned about the implementation of the legislation on medical assistance in dying from a disability perspective.” In her report on the country’s compliance with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities—which Canada ratified in 2010—she mentioned troubling accounts of people with disabilities who were institutionalized and offered MAID. She recommended the government investigate such claims and “establish adequate safeguards to ensure that persons with disabilities do not request assisted dying simply because there are no community-based alternatives or palliative care.”

    In February 2021, three UN experts on the rights of seniors and people with disabilities as well as on human rights and extreme poverty wrote a letter to the federal government, urging it not to legalize Track Two. “There is a grave concern,” the letter stated, “that, if assisted dying is made available for all persons with a health condition or impairment, regardless of whether they are close to death, a social assumption might follow (or be subtly reinforced) that it is better to be dead than to live with a disability.”

    The Canadian government nevertheless stayed its course. There are restrictions that are meant to keep the practice in check: for those deemed eligible for Track Two, for example, there is a mandated ninety-day period between when an assessment begins and when MAID can be provided. (For those whose applications fall under Track One, there is no required reflection period; someone could theoretically be approved for MAID in the morning and be administered the lethal drugs in the afternoon.)

    But ninety days isn’t long enough for comprehensive reflection, says Virginia Duff, a Toronto-based psychiatrist. Most people, she says, would not likely reverse or even reconsider such a decision within that time frame. This is especially true, she adds, for people who have recently acquired a disability and are adjusting to its impact on their lives. “They’re in a crisis at the beginning,” says Duff. “They’re going to be regarding their future in a certain light and often in a negative light. But they don’t know at that point what they don’t know. And they don’t know that life with a disability can be very different from what they imagined it to be.”

    The Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying (AMAD), established by the House of Commons and Senate in 2021 to review MAID law and proposals for further expansions, received 358 written submissions from organizations and individuals. One of them was from an elderly woman who wrote to the committee about her degenerative eye condition, saying there is a need for MAID to be expanded to include people who aren’t experiencing pain as a form of suffering—whether that be physical or psychological. She wants to apply for MAID once she is considered legally blind. Society, she wrote, isn’t built for blind people; she has no desire to learn Braille or how to use adaptive technologies.

    For Duff, who is visually impaired, the way we talk about MAID expansions ignores the complexities and years it may take to treat conditions such as mental illness. The language we use around it is also euphemistic: “The title of the act is ‘medical assistance in dying,’” she says. “But these aren’t people who would otherwise be dying. We’re not just assisting them. We’re actually making it happen, which is very different.” (Some jurisdictions where medically assisted death is legal use terms such as assisted suicide, in which patients are given fatal drugs to ingest, and euthanasia, the process by which medical practitioners directly administer a lethal intravenous injection. MAID effectively covers both, although the vast majority of MAID deaths in Canada are clinician administered.)

    For some, the availability of MAID isn’t so much a concern as the ease with which this country offers it. According to Health Canada, 31,664 people died by MAID in the five years after legalization. In 2021 alone, the number of medically assisted deaths in Canada—just over 10,000—was about twenty times higher than in California, a state with an assisted suicide program and similar population size. (In California, eligibility is granted only to those who are terminally ill.) Track Two was introduced in Canada in March 2021, and in less than a year, 219 people who were presumably not imminently dying had received it.

    “Canada has become a poster child for how bad MAID can become,” says Heidi Janz, a long-time disability rights activist and playwright. An associate adjunct professor at the University of Alberta, she studies and teaches the ethics around end-of-life care and disability. Janz, along with Catherine Frazee, a professor emerita of disability studies at Toronto Metropolitan University, started the GRIM Project in 2022 to document the stories of disabled people who have considered MAID or have died by it. (Both Janz and Frazee appeared as witnesses for the AMAD committee, as well as several other sources I interviewed for this story.) The project takes its name from the Criminal Code’s language of a “grievous and irremediable condition.” Janz and Frazee have spent years listening to the stories of disabled Canadians, many of whom live in poverty and struggle with social isolation. MAID, says Janz, “has become an acceptable solution to poverty for people with disabilities.”

    “These problems predate the MAID system,” says Frazee. She frequently hears stories of disabled Canadians turning to MAID out of desperation and thinks about them every day. They tell her they don’t want to die yet the government seems to be pushing them to. “But the MAID system makes it all a perfect crime because the MAID regime destroys the evidence,” she says. “It destroys the lives of the people who were here to report their experience of poverty and alienation and stigmatization and devaluation.”

    In September 2020, the federal government announced its intention to create a financial benefit for disabled Canadians who are working-age adults. Bill C-22 passed unanimously in the House of Commons in early February this year and, as of mid-April, was still in the Senate. When it was being debated in the House of Commons, Bloc Québecois MP Luc Thériault questioned the reliability of stories that report Canadians seeking MAID because of socio-economic hardships: “No one who appeared before the Standing Committee on Health told us up front that [these] claims are common practice,” he said. Others said issues of disability, poverty, and MAID were “intertwined”—that it was impossible to discuss reducing poverty for disabled Canadians without also recognizing that many are requesting MAID because they live in poverty.

    Carla Qualtrough, the minister of employment, workforce development, and disability inclusion, responded to Thériault’s criticisms in an interview I recorded for Now with Dave Brown, a national TV show and podcast produced by Accessible Media Inc. “I believe that when someone says a decision was motivated by a socio and economic factor like poverty that it was,” she said. “There’s no reason why somebody would ever say it wasn’t. . . . It keeps me awake at night.”

    Some advocates argue that Bill C-22 could keep disabled Canadians from applying for MAID. (The details around how much the benefit will amount to and who exactly will be eligible for it are yet to be worked out.) But poverty is just “one piece of the puzzle” of why disabled Canadians are considering or are being approved for MAID even when they’re not dying, says Kerri Joffe, a staff lawyer with Arch Disability Law Centre, a Toronto-based legal clinic that focuses on disability rights law and policy in Ontario. The problems of disability poverty and the lack of affordable, accessible housing and proper home-care supports need to be addressed, she says. But Joffe, and others, have raised concerns that Canada’s MAID legislation denies disabled Canadians equal rights to life. The government needs to address this, she says, by removing Track Two altogether or changing the law “fundamentally so that it would comply with international human rights law.”

    “I think that disability should have been absent from [the original MAID legislation],” says André Schutten, director of law and public policy at the Association for Reformed Political Action (ARPA) Canada, a Christian legal organization and lobby group. The phrasing of a “reasonably foreseeable” death is also too vague, he says. ARPA wrote to the joint committee requesting that a “reasonably foreseeable” death be defined as one backed by a prognosis that the patient is likely to die within six months. The organization also wants Track Two deaths eliminated so that only individuals whose natural deaths are reasonably foreseeable can die by MAID. ARPA isn’t alone in this request. Inclusion Canada, a secular organization that represents people with intellectual or developmental disabilities, has also called on the government to remove Track Two for MAID. Arch Disability Law Centre, another secular organization, has expressed similar concerns about Track Two.

    In fact, ARPA disagrees with MAID wholesale. As a “foundational principle,” says Schutten, doctors should not be able to end patients’ lives. “When you say, ‘No, there are some situations where a doctor should have a licence to end the life of a patient,’ then it’s very difficult to say, ‘Well, in this situation, you can. In this situation, you can’t.’ Every safeguard becomes arbitrary in a sense.”

    But there is an understanding among the organization’s leaders that MAID has become a part of Canadian society, one that seems immovable. “We also recognize the political reality that we live in,” says Schutten.

    THIS PAST FEBRUARY, the parliamentary joint committee released a report that recommended, among other things, that the government consider removing the word “disability” from the legislation altogether. It echoed the need for greater social and financial supports for disabled Canadians.

    Yet the report also spoke favourably of further expansions, such as permitting advance requests for MAID. This would potentially allow people to stipulate under what circumstances they would want to receive MAID should they lose their capacity to consent to it. The committee also suggested that MAID be made available in certain circumstances to “mature minors,” though it recommended further consultations. (Currently, Belgium and the Netherlands are the only countries with comparable provisions for those under eighteen.) There should be no age limit to who can consent to receiving MAID, the report states; applicants should qualify if they are deemed capable of making the decision, though it does not go further to define “capable.” The committee also recommended that parents and guardians be consulted during the process, though not that they be required to approve of their child’s decision: “the will of a minor who is found to have the requisite decision-making capacity [must] ultimately take priority,” the report states.

    The majority of Canadians—three out of five, according to a recent Angus Reid poll funded by Cardus, a Christian think tank that opposes MAID—are in favour of the legislation in its current state. This apparent public support doesn’t shock physicians who have been providing MAID in Canada almost since the beginning. When it was legalized, Konia Trouton, a doctor and MAID provider who was then practising in BC, had patients phoning her, asking for more information about medically assisted dying. “The legislation came about not because doctors were going to the courts and saying we need this option,” she says. “It’s because patients went to the court saying, ‘It is my right to die.’”

    That’s what motivated Trouton to start assessing patients for and performing MAID back in July 2016. “Patient autonomy and choice is really important,” she says. She has since helped found the Canadian Association of MAID Assessors and Providers, where she’s now vice president, and is a member of the clinicians’ advisory council for Dying with Dignity Canada, a pro-MAID lobby group. (Trouton also submitted a written brief to the AMAD committee.)

    Trouton, who now lives in Ontario, says she’s aware that some Canadians have received MAID even when the main cause of their suffering was a socio-economic factor not directly related to their qualifying medical condition. But that doesn’t technically make those cases ineligible. “The suffering and the irremediable disease don’t have to be the same,” says Trouton, citing the law’s language around safeguards: it does not explicitly state the need for suffering to be caused by a medical condition.

    She points to other safeguards meant to ensure MAID applications are vetted appropriately. Applications go through at least two rounds of review. Two clinicians have to separately assess the MAID request to determine whether the applicant meets the medical criteria for it as outlined in the law, a step that can be done virtually.

    Requests that qualify for Track Two require an opinion from someone with expertise in the applicant’s medical condition, and that expert can be one of the two reviewing clinicians. The assessors also have to determine whether a patient has reasonably considered all the treatments, therapies, or supports that could help alleviate their suffering. “We don’t have to have proof that you’ve tried [them],” says Trouton. “But we have to feel that you’ve given reasonable consideration.” Some patients require multiple assessments; for Trouton’s most complex case to date, five consultations were completed before she was assured the patient was eligible for MAID. She would like to see more training about MAID assessments incorporated into medical education so that clinicians—regardless of their area of practice—feel comfortable broaching the subject with their patients.

    Trouton usually calls her patients the day before their scheduled death to make sure they still want MAID. On the day of, to confirm that they understand what will happen to them, she asks them to tell her who they are and why they are there. “We do the same thing in surgery,” she says.

    Even if the government does not expand MAID for those with mental illnesses or mature minors, and even if it doesn’t allow for advance requests, Trouton sees the number of Canadians dying by MAID only rising. “There’s been an increase already in the past seven years in MAID across the country,” she says. “It doesn’t look like that trajectory is stopping.”

    Other MAID providers are looking at MAID expansion differently. Madeline Li, a psychiatrist at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, which is part of Toronto’s University Health Network (UHN), says she has “grown increasingly concerned” about how MAID is practised in Canada. “I’ve never been in favour of expanding MAID to non-terminal [cases],” she says.

    Li developed the MAID program at UHN and says the law has always lacked sufficient safeguards, and this has only become more apparent as MAID has expanded. Specifically, the law needs to be more clinically informed, says Li, who is also a scientific researcher. The terms “reasonably foreseeable” and “incurability” must be defined medically, with specific time frames attached to the former and further explanations around the latter. A patient shouldn’t be deemed to have an incurable illness, for example, if they’ve refused treatments, she says. And providers need a clearer interpretation of what constitutes suffering in the context of MAID. “There needs to be clarification that the suffering needs to be medical suffering directly related to the medical condition,” she says. “And that sources of suffering indirectly related to the medical condition don’t qualify.”

    Li would also like an oversight body to qualitatively review complex cases. What she’s proposing currently doesn’t exist on the federal level in Canada. She thinks clinicians need to be legally required to have more detailed conversations with patients who say they want MAID—conversations that don’t take the patients’ request at face value and aim to get at the best medical option for them.

    “I genuinely think clinicians are doing their best to help patients,” she says. But the law itself is inherently flawed, and that puts people at risk. If concerns aren’t addressed through amended legislation, “they’re not going to be addressed [fully] through practice guidelines or training,” she says.

    “The problem has been that the people who first entered MAID work are now very experienced, but they’re confusing experience with expertise. They’ve been very focused on ‘Does a patient qualify?’ and not ‘Should a patient have MAID?’”

    THE LOOMING EXPANSION of MAID, under Track Two, to include people with mental illnesses has raised red flags for several psychiatrists, who say that allowing people with mental illnesses to die by MAID could rob them of the chance to find treatments that enhance their lives. According to Duff, it could violate the principles of suicide prevention. “One of the tools that we use to help prevent suicide is to eliminate the means,” she says. And if assessors comply with only the minimum requirements for the MAID expansions, “we’re just handing [patients] the means and not questioning why they want to kill themselves.”

    “To say this is not suicide inducement or that it’s not suicide, I find bizarre,” says John Maher, a Barrie, Ontario, psychiatrist who has spent twenty years working with assertive community treatment teams. These twelve-person multidisciplinary teams work with people who have severe mental illnesses, including schizophrenia. There’s no consensus among psychiatrists that mental illnesses are irremediable, that they never get better. Maher argues that even patients with serious mental illnesses can improve; they often just need more time to find the right treatments that work for them—and for those treatments to be available to begin with.

    “If you’re saying ‘irremediable’ means they can’t be cured completely, sure, there are people who are irremediable,” he says. “If you’re saying it means there are people where you can’t reduce suffering . . . I don’t buy it.” The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health has echoed these concerns. Its June 2022 brief to the government committee that reviewed MAID states, “We do not believe that eligibility for MAID should be extended to people whose sole medical condition is mental illness at this time.”

    Mitchell Tremblay says he plans to apply for MAID as soon as it becomes available for people with mental illnesses. Based in Guelph, Ontario, he has a disability and has been vocal online about his financial hardship. He has had suicidal ideations since he was eleven; he has experienced cycles of homelessness; he doesn’t speak to his family; he says he has very few friends—and even those relationships are strained—and he doesn’t want to try to make more of them. He’s keeping careful records of his mental health diagnoses: social anxiety disorders, generalized anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder, among others. He doesn’t want his MAID request to be denied, so he intends to show that his condition truly is lifelong—that he’s not applying because he’s in a temporary situation of depression. But even though he wants MAID for himself, he’s concerned that some other MAID applicants will be approved when they don’t actually have a serious, diagnosed, chronic mental illness—people who are experiencing a major depressive episode, brought on by events like a romantic breakup or the loss of a job or home, and whose mental health might improve with the right treatment.

    “I think it’s going to be a national blight,” he says about expanding MAID eligibility while people don’t have proper supports. “There has to be all the avenues explored before MAID is the final option there for them.”

    Maher fears that if MAID for mental illness becomes legal, it won’t be clear how doctors should determine which suicidal patients will receive psychiatric care and which will be assessed for MAID.

    “Suicide prevention work is about giving people hope: helping them make sense of suffering, giving them a sense of purpose in life, putting in speed bumps at those points in time when things look like there’s no hope of recovery,” says Maher. “The whole point of my team—our services, our care philosophy—is we don’t quit. We don’t go away. We don’t stop helping. We don’t stop trying to reduce suffering, we don’t stop helping people heal. We’re a recovery model.”

    EVEN THOSE who want to support people in vulnerable situations can be left in the dark about their intentions to seek MAID—and feel powerless to stop it. Gary Hertgers has spent months trying to piece together the final days of his older sister Wilma’s life. She was sixty-three when she died on January 30, 2022. The first indication that something was off was a cryptic voicemail message from a doctor he didn’t know—someone he would later find out was Wilma’s MAID provider. He phoned the doctor back and left a voicemail. Then the manager of Wilma’s apartment building called to inform him that the coroner had just left. That’s how he learned Wilma had died by MAID.

    He’d last seen Wilma two days before, at her apartment in Chilliwack, BC. “She never mentioned a single thing about what was all organized and scheduled for that Sunday,” he says. Currently, there is no requirement that family be informed of a MAID applicant’s request to die.

    Wilma had been increasingly despondent since 2008, when her twin and long-time roommate, Jenny, died of cancer. Once a small business owner, Wilma had stopped working full time in the years after Jenny’s death. She increasingly complained of pain, Gary says. He remembers that she always seemed to be rotating through appointments with various specialists—oncologists, cardiologists, rheumatologists. Gary wanted to help his sister, and he and his family tried. But Wilma could be difficult at times, and he needed to set up boundaries for himself, he says. Still, his grief over Wilma’s death is unlike anything he’s ever experienced.

    This is Gary’s third time grieving a sibling—and perhaps the most complicated. When he was almost sixteen, he watched his older brother, Martin, drown. It took him years to find some peace with respect to Martin’s death. He hasn’t come to that peace yet about Wilma’s.

    Gary called the numbers on a contact list Wilma kept by her phone and learned she had an “army” of people ready to help if she needed meals or company. She had friends from church and her volunteer work. But Gary doesn’t know whether any of them were aware that Wilma had scheduled her death.

    A semi-retired farmer, Gary isn’t sure what he can do to raise awareness about MAID’s overreach. He wrote to the government committee studying MAID, asking its members to reconsider the legislation. “Rather than expand their definition [of who is eligible for MAID],” he says, “they need to retract it.”

    There are some questions raised by Canada’s MAID laws that can’t be addressed through increasing mental health supports, reducing poverty, reverting to the previous MAID laws, or even eliminating MAID altogether. Fundamentally, says Thomas De Koninck, a professor emeritus in the faculty of philosophy at Université Laval in Quebec City, MAID forces people to think about death and what comes next. It also forces people to consider the meaning of suffering in life and whether suffering and hope can exist together.

    And those are questions that laws can’t answer.

    “What people desire most is to be loved,” especially when they’re dying or are in pain, says De Koninck. “And so many people are left alone in hospitals or in big houses, where nobody comes to see them. So they’re just stressed. They need friendship. They need concern. They need palliative care in that sense.”

    For De Koninck, the existence of MAID should prompt questions about what is causing people to decide that death is better than life. The law’s vast acceptance in Canadian society, he says, is evidence that people have lost hope, that they are alone, or that they don’t have meaningful relationships.

    Tarra Carlson is determined to enjoy her life with her husband. A voracious learner, she spends much of her free time reading the latest research in disability studies and psychology. She loves learning about cultures around the world, including various beliefs around death and the afterlife. She’s pulled different pieces from what she’s come across and has settled on a form of reincarnation. She likes the idea that the soul finds a new body after death, that every life is a chance to learn more about being a better person. It’s a reminder that life goes on.

    She’s in no rush to die—“I want to live a very long and cantankerous life,” she says—but when she finally does die, she wants her ashes sprinkled in San Josef Bay at the northern tip of Vancouver Island.

    Until then, rather than dwell on her predicament of living in a world that doesn’t understand or accept her disability, she prefers to tell jokes, to laugh, to consider all the ways she’s “privileged”: her job, her home, and her husband—always, her husband. For her, at least, “not everything’s doom and gloom,” she says. She pauses. But, she says, “what is happening to people with disabilities is doom and gloom.”

    https://thewalrus.ca/assisted-dying/
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

Page 3 of 3 FirstFirst 123

Thread Information

Users Browsing this Thread

There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •