Canada’s Deadly Compassion.
Posted by Ed Folsom, December 4, 2023.
In 2022, 13,241 people received medical “assistance” in dying under Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying law (MAiD). Many of them were euthanized by lethal injection. This represents a 31% increase in the number of such deaths over 2021 and a thirteen-fold annual increase from the 2016 effective date of the law. Altogether, medically assisted deaths, including by lethal injection, made up 4.1% of all deaths in Canada in 2022. That’s slightly more than 1 in every 25.
Under the original version of the MAiD law, euthanasia could only be performed on people with a terminal illness for whom natural death is “reasonably foreseeable.” In 2021, those requirements were eliminated. Now, people who don’t have a terminal illness and whose death is not reasonably foreseeable are fit subjects.
The disabled may now also be euthanized based on their disability. And beginning in March of 2024, mental illness becomes a legitimate basis for administering a fatal jab.
These developments bear watching closely. There’s historical precedent for medically assisted suicide by request as an act of compassion, morphing into euthanasia by choice for the social good, morphing into euthanasia as an obligation for the social good, morphing into euthanasia for the social good. To my knowledge no one ever started out saying publicly: “Let’s just euthanize all the unfit, undesirable, and too-costly-to-pay-for people!” Ending up there, however, has happened.
