CONSIDERING EUTHANASIA
by William Thomas
Is Canada’s world-leading Medical Assistance In Dying a beacon of hope and compassion for an aging population — or a money-saving cull of the indigent and non-terminally infirm?
MAiD was legalised in 2016 after the Supreme Court found that “individuals who have a grievous and irremediable medical condition” have a right not to be forced to “endure intolerable suffering.”
But only five years later, those with chronic conditions who no longer wanted to live became eligible for assisted suicide. Canadians can now see a MAiD practitioner in only two business days. And according to Health Canada, the wait time between requesting MAiD and death is often 11 days.
“I don’t know any other procedure under Canada’s public healthcare system that you can get as quickly as MAiD,” says investigative journalist, Alexander Raikin.
DO NO HARM?
In September 2022, The Lancet worried that “What was originally conceived as an exceptional practice in medicine has quickly become normalised.
While the primary aim of “assisted dying” legislation is to provide a “safe and comfortable” death to patients facing unbearable suffering at the end of life, seminar notes from The Canadian Association of MAID Assessors and Providers reveal doctors openly discussing the euthanisation of patients whose only underlying condition was poverty — and suggested how to manage their own “moral distress” at these cases!
Slamming “Canada’s unique pedal-to-the-metal approach to assisted dying,” FORBES charged that Canadian physicians are “routinely and all too casually” offering assisted suicide “alongside other medical interventions” to COVID vaccine injured, the impoverished, and other non-terminally ill patients.
“We are witnessing an alarming trend where people with disabilities are seeking assisted suicide due to social deprivation, poverty, and lack of essential supports,” worries Krista Carr, executive vice president of Inclusion Canada. “It’s time to put an end to helping people with disabilities commit suicide and start supporting them to live.”
By December 2022, Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) had killed well over 40,000 Canadians.
ORGAN GRINDERS
MAiD is the world’s fastest-growing assisted-dying program. While injecting lethal drugs intravenously to end a patient’s life is currently practiced in seven countries, Canada stands alone in approving assisted suicide by a nurse practitioner.
Moreover, with more than 10,000 Canadians now dying from medically assisted death annually, nearly half of all worldwide Organ Donation After Euthanasia are Canadians.
Comments Society for the Protection of Unborn Children Executive Director, Michael Robinson,“Wherever assisted suicide is introduced, the rate inexorably climbs year on year, just as eligibility becomes ever more expansive.”
An August 2023 memo from Quebec’s Commission on End-of-Life Care told doctors to slow down assisted suicide cases following an alarming province-wide 54% rise in assisted suicides in just one year.
“In an era where we recognize the right to die with dignity, we must do more to guarantee the right to live with dignity,” insists Canada’s human rights commission head, Marie-Claude Landry.
YOUTUBE HORROR
A horrific YouTube interview by well-known Clinical Psychologist and Professor Emeritus at U. of Toronto, Dr. Jordan Peterson with anti-MAiD activist Kelsi Sheren has terrified 1.4 million viewers with claims that euthanasia is being pushed to slash palliative care costs by Canadian doctors using the same drugs administered for capital punishment that drown recipients in their own fluids for up to 24 hours — while a paralytic drug prevents them from crying out.
Paul Mehennis, a Registered Nurse in BC who’s taught MAiD to healthcare professionals, calmly eviscerates those 13 minutes of wildly misinformed speculation by pointing out that the three medications used for MAiD in Canada — midazolam, propofol and rocuronium — are completely different from the pentobarbital used in American executions.
Around 78% of individuals requesting MAiD receive palliative care, with an additional 10% having access to palliative care but choosing to refuse it.
It’s a criminal offense in Canada to counsel a patient to die by suicide. Canada’s last execution was in 1962.
“There’s no scientific basis for assuming that the drugs used in MAiD could cause fluid in the lungs,” he states; an opinion emphatically backed by a veteran Vancouver anesthesiologist.
Death by IV typically takes 5-10 minutes.
EUTHANASIA PROCEDURES IN CANADA
Propofol is initially administered intravenously to put patients “into a very deep medical coma” in which “a person’s mind and body are essentially separated,” Mehennis relates.
“In this state, there is no awareness of their surroundings, and they will not experience anything that is happening. It’s not that you were merely unconscious during this period — your consciousness was completely turned off; there was no experience to be had.”
After propofol is used “for a peaceful passing,” a paralytic is given last to shut down the lungs — “most often after the person has already died.”
SLIPPERY SLOPE?
For Paul Mehennis — and many aging Canadians — euthanasia is about “respecting personal autonomy when it comes to how much intolerable and irremediable suffering a person is willing to endure.”
But Canada now allows euthanasia for people suffering from serious but nonfatal medical conditions and disabilities.
“Eligible patients don’t need to have a terminal illness but simply a life-limiting disability. Physicians are proposing euthanasia as a choice of equal standing amongst other options for treatment and palliative care — in some situations without the patient themselves raising the topic,” FORBES reports.
On private forums, doctors and nurses have expressed deep discomfort with ending the lives of vulnerable people whose deaths were avoidable. A Canadian doctor who boasts that she helped kill 400 people through assisted suicide, declares that “loneliness and poverty” are good enough reasons to justify her actions.
In Canada, there were 10,092 doctor-assisted deaths in 2021; 13,241 in 2022.
“Suicide has gone from illegal to optional,” observes Dr. Vernon Coleman, MB ChB DSc. How soon will euthanasia become compulsory and for whom?”
READ my original 2,200 word article at willthomasonline.net
