Straight Dope on Medicine: MAID in Canada

Author

Scott Ganser
February 03, 2024

MAID in Canada.

This isn’t made in Canada, about Canadian manufacturing and production. Those would be positive.

No, this is about suicide.

State-sponsored suicide.

MAID stands for Medical Assistance in Dying.

How do you qualify?

To be considered as having a grievous and irremediable medical condition, you must meet all of the following criteria. You must:

  • have a serious illness, disease or disability

  • be in an advanced state of decline that cannot be reversed

  • experience unbearable physical or mental suffering from your illness, disease, disability or state of decline that cannot be relieved under conditions that you consider acceptable

You do not need to have a fatal or terminal condition to be eligible for medical assistance in dying.

If your only medical condition is a mental illness, you are not currently eligible for medical assistance in dying.[i]

Indigenous people are also eligible.

Canada cares!

Legislation has been introduced to extend the temporary exclusion of eligibility for MAID for persons suffering solely from a mental illness until March 17, 2027. Learn more:

In collaboration with Indigenous Peoples, Health Canada has begun a multi-pillar engagement process on MAID, supporting both Indigenous-led engagement and federally-led activities, including an online engagement tool that is open until June 30, 2024.

From the verbiage, it sounds like the plan is to expand the criteria to “solely mental illness in 2027.” Time allowances must be made so people are normalized to this evil.

 Evil masquerading as good and compassion.

When did this start?

MAID became legal in Canada in June 2016. Canada's Criminal Code now exempts doctors and nurse practitioners who provide, or help to provide, MAID.

"Medical assistance in dying" includes:

  • the use of medication by a physician or nurse practitioner to directly cause a person's death at their request

  • the prescription or provision of medication by a physician or nurse practitioner that a person can use to cause their own death

Why do they do it?[ii]

Is it really growing?

Yes. You knew it would. Once a government program gets going, the momentum is to expand it.[iii]

More than 13,000 people in Canada were euthanized in 2022, an annual rise of 31.2 percent since 2021. In 2022, 4.1 percent of all deaths in the country were the result of euthanasia; MAID could now be listed as the nation's fifth-leading cause of death.[iv]

It also is now including “natural death not reasonably foreseeable.” The red is getting larger.

Fully one third of Canadians are “fine” with medically assisted death being prescribed for “homelessness.”[v] Roughly the same number told a poll they were fine with approving MAID for someone whose only affliction was poverty.

In the future, maybe it will be prescribed for someone having “a bad day.” Sarcasm.

At some point, the switch will be put in. Medically assisted suicide is now “allowed.” At some point in the future, it might become “required.” That’s the danger. Or another danger. Danger already exists.

Already, Canadian doctors encouraged to bring up medically assisted death before their patients do[vi]

But some ethicists argue that introducing death as a “treatment option,” without the person suggesting it first, is seriously problematic, especially within the expanding realm of MAID, and that people could be unduly influenced to choose to have their life intentionally ended, given the power dynamics of the doctor-patient relationship.

Canada is not alone.

It is now available to over 280 million people in 11 countries around the world.[vii]

In the US, assisted dying is legal 11 states or districts: California, Colorado, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Montana, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon (the earliest, from 1997), Vermont and Washington. Apart from Oregon and Montana, most legislation in these states has been in the last 5 or 6 years.

The Netherlands seems to be big on this. They got the ball rolling in 2002. How are they doing?

A church is the last thing you should see in an image on “assisted dying.” Life is from God, and it should be preserved.

Psalm 139 ESV

 Search Me, O God, and Know My Heart

To the choirmaster. A Psalm of David.

13For you formed my inward parts;
 you knitted me together in my mother's womb.
14 I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.[a]
Wonderful are your works;
 my soul knows it very well.
15 My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was being made in secret,
 intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
16 Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
in your book were written, every one of them,
 the days that were formed for me,
 when as yet there was none of them.

 

LONDON (AP) — Several people with autism and intellectual disabilities have been legally euthanized in the Netherlands in recent years because they said they could not lead normal lives, researchers have found.

The cases included five people younger than 30 who cited autism as either the only reason or a major contributing factor for euthanasia, setting an uneasy precedent that some experts say stretches the limits of what the law originally intended.

In 2002, the Netherlands became the first country to allow doctors to kill patients at their request if they met strict requirements, including having an incurable illness causing “unbearable” physical or mental suffering.

Between 2012 and 2021, nearly 60,000 people were killed at their own request, according to the Dutch government’s euthanasia review committee. To show how the rules are being applied and interpreted, the committee has released documents related to more than 900 of those people, most of whom were older and had conditions including cancer, Parkinson’s and ALS.[viii]

Once it sets in, it germinates.

The number of people seeking euthanasia is growing in the Netherlands, with some 7,666 last year, up by more than 10 percent from the year before (2021), according to official figures.[ix]

Ethical issues

Ethical questions include whether the principle of autonomy extends to the right to die, or whether a physician's commitments to support life override (or not) their duty of care if their patient asks to die 1-4. The ethical debate can be extended to capital punishment (which is also an example of assisted, albeit involuntary, death) and whether a physician should avoid involvement even if, by doing so, the prisoner will die in pain or distress.[x]