Canadians are expressing outrage over the increased normalization of medical-assisted suicide in the country’s single-payer system.
Numerous families have reported physicians and nurse practitioners pressuring loved ones into suicide through a practice known colloquially as “medical assistance in dying” or MAID.
Benjamin Turland told The Loop about the intense grief he felt when both his grandmothers chose MAID within two months.
“With my grandfathers, I couldn’t have done anything about them passing,” Turland told the publication. “That was just the natural time for them to go. But when you choose it, then you feel like there’s something I could have done, and it impacts multiple generations.”
Turland’s experience is featured in a new short film by Amanda Achtman, a patient advocate, creator of the website Dying to Meet You, and subject of a separate Health Care News article (opposite page).
Children’s Author, Vets, Babies
Some individuals, like 80-year-old Robert Munsch, author of the children’s book Love You Forever, have publicized their plans to choose MAID. Munsch, who has been diagnosed with dementia and Parkinson’s disease, told the New York Times Magazine, “When I start having real trouble talking and communicating, then I’ll know.”
MAID, however, is not always so voluntary. A scandal has unfolded at Veterans Affairs Canada over allegations that a now-suspended caseworker pressured at least five Canadian military veterans, including one with traumatic brain injury and PTSD, to consider medical suicide. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police is leading an internal review of the matter, reports CBC News.
Doctors are also pressuring parents of newborns with disabilities to consider MAID. Right to Life UK reported physicians have discussed the option in several public forums, stating that ending such a child’s life would constitute “care.”
Socialism’s Solution
Canadians have become nihilistic, atheistic, immoral, liberals, says John Dale Dunn, M.D., a Texas physician, attorney, and policy advisor to The Heartland Institute, co-publisher of Health Care News.
“They’re all part of the same ideology–socialism–which is all about turning people into nothing more than a mass of cells that don’t have any particular importance and therefore, are expendable, depending upon the needs of the collective, which can eliminate them because they demand attention and consume resources,” said Dunn.
“Whenever you develop an ideology that is based upon the welfare of the collective, it means that to go forward in efforts to further this altruistic idea of helping the collective, you have to decide upon people that should be eliminated, then they won’t be taking resources from the rest of us,” said Dunn. “If we look at ethics and morality over a period of centuries and eons, this is probably the dividing point of the questions: What is the value of a human life? What’s the value of a human individual? When did they not become valuable and become a burden, and should they be eliminated?”
Misfits and the Despairing
Canada now has two types of people dying unnatural deaths, says Dunn.
“Canadians are at the point where they actually euthanize thousands of people who are nothing more than on the fringes of society and or definable dependent upon the resources of society for one reason or another,” said Dunn. “And then there’s another group of people who are unhappy or depressed, and are inclined toward suicide, so euthanasia is offered to them as a good solution for their unhappiness and depression.”
When a society reaches the point Canada has, then it searches through the population for suicide candidates, says Dunn.
“These patients would be considered normally as candidates for medical care, rehabilitative care, supportive care, or surgery,” said Dunn. “But instead, you’re introduced to a doctor who will help you along. Or they could just withhold your care, and you could die from your medical problems.”
Evolving Doctor-Assisted Suicide
Should the United States worry about the promulgation of Canada’s euthanasia culture?
Interest in doctor-assisted suicide rose in the United States with the rise of physician Jack Kevorkian in the 1990s, said Merrill Matthews, Ph.D., a health care policy analyst and columnist for The Hill.
With the publication of his book, Prescription Medicide, in 1991, Kevorkian defended and promoted his position on physician-assisted suicide, says Matthews.
“Even though Kevorkian was an outlier when we interviewed him by radio in the mid-1990s, it seemed likely that his ideas would spread–and they did,” said Matthews.
Currently, eleven states and Washington, D.C. allow what is referred to in the United States as medical aid in dying. Seven more states–Illinois being the latest– have a bill approved by the state legislature.
“Kevorkian had an expansive view, even supporting physician-assisted suicide when a patient wasn’t terminally ill,” said Matthews.
“While states passing legislation have tried to put strict controls and limits on the practice, the concern has been that with the passage of time, those restrictions would be relaxed, that views about MAID would shift from a ‘last resort’ option to a reasonable response,” said Matthews.
A Money Saver?
Matthews points out that initially, medical-assisted suicide for patients with severe medical challenges was heralded as a way to ration care.
“In 1998, I was asked by medical ethicists at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City to contribute a chapter to a book, Physician Assisted Suicide: Expanding the Debate, said Matthews. “My chapter asked whether MAID actually saved the health care system money. The answer, at that time, was clearly no. In most cases where physician-assisted suicide was considered an option, the patient was only a few weeks, not years, away from death. Any money saved by an early death was minimal.”
Kenneth Artz ([email protected]) writes from Tyler, Texas.
Artz has more than 20 years’ experience in nonprofit organizations, publishing, newspaper reporting, and public policy advocacy.
