Canadian Euthanasia laws may be extended to minors and mentally ill

The really tough decision is whether or not doctor assisted death can be offered to severely mentally subnormal.

I find it frightening. It isn’t the principle, it’s the thought of who decides, and how.

This is an article from The Telegraph, it’s behind a paywall so I’m posting the text here. It raises a number of disturbing points.

It’s rather long, but worth reading to the end.

The representative of the medical regulator spoke in a straightforward, unemotional voice, as though his statements were self-evidently true. Sick children between the ages of 14 and 17, he told the parliamentary committee, should be allowed to choose to commit suicide with medical assistance.
Parents of babies who are born with severe disabilities should be allowed to kill them. Elderly people for whom “life no longer makes any sense” should also be able to end theirs. And so should the mentally ill, and so on and on. Members of the committee ask some follow-up questions, but no one pushes back.

Ever since it burst into the public consciousness almost a year ago, details of Canada’s assisted suicide scheme, known euphemistically as MAiD — medical assistance in dying — have shocked and astonished people around the world in equal measure. Harrowing tales of disabled poor people choosing to end their lives because they could not survive on paltry benefits have since proliferated, as have horror stories of doctors and bureaucrats trying to pressure patients into ending their lives.

Yet the parliamentary committee charged with reviewing the regime seemed to take for granted that access to euthanasia should be expanded to include even more people. The only remaining question will be by how much.

True, there had been warnings that once euthanasia became legal in Canada, its scope would widen rapidly beyond the initial target group of terminally ill people, as had happened in almost every country where it had been legalised. But the Canadian supreme court loftily dismissed these concerns as
a “slippery slope” fallacy when it struck down the criminal prohibition on assisting suicide in 2015.
Then a Quebec court ruled that to limit euthanasia access to those whose deaths were “reasonably foreseeable” discriminated against those whose illness were not terminal — euthanasia was, after all, a human right according to the courts.

Fast-forward a few years, and the Canadian parliament is now calmly discussing whether disabled children could be euthanised by doctors. In other words, infanticide. Nor will euthanasia be limited to physical illness: from next year, mental illness will become a qualifying condition. Already, depressed teenagers on social media are speaking about applying to die once they turn 18.

It might be comforting to dismiss the Canadian experience as an aberration and Canada as an alien country inhabited by a barbarous people. But Canada is a country with a culture much like that of the UK, with an overextended healthcare system, a social care system that is perpetually near collapse, a strained exchequer, and an ageing population.
The perverse incentives which led to Canada’s predicament, in other words, are all present in the UK as well. As is the same heightened culture of human rights discourse, whereby any rights-based claim is given automatic deference, and which has made opposition to euthanasia so politically toxic in Canada. No politician, after all, wants to be seen as taking away rights from the people.

Indeed, the cultural centrality of the National Health Service may make the UK an even more fertile ground for abuse. “Protect the NHS” was a powerful unifying message during COVID, but it is not difficult to see how a society in which such a slogan kept people from receiving cancer treatment might also be fertile ground for euthanasia-related abuse.
And one only needs to remember the Liverpool Care Pathway scandal, when elderly patients were denied basic medical care and even food and water without their consent, to see how catastrophic systemic failure may easily happen once again and shorten many lives.

The Scottish Parliament will shortly be debating a bill to legalise euthanasia. Its proponents will make the same usual arguments about choice and autonomy, trot out heart-rending cases, and talk about the ironclad safeguards within their proposed system.
While our sympathies will be with those at the end of their lives suffering from great pain, the Canadian experience should serve as a warning to anyone who thinks euthanasia will be confined to those cases. After all, the idea that the murder of disabled children could become legal was once far-fetched in Canada too.

25Avalon Thank you for highlighting this.
Blossoming I'm grateful to you for taking the time to copy the Telegraph article.

It is truly frightening the degree to which Canada has become an Orwellian state.
As the article stated, it's just a short step away from happening here.
I can easily imagine a scenario evolving where our young people who have been damaged and scared witless by Covid,
(more people dying now, but where are the nightly broadcasts of doom?).
Are then encouraged by celebs and young royals, to seek help (from the NHS, where there is practically none) for their mental stress.
Come to the conclusion there is no help for them, and no way out or forward.
Whereby some indoctrinated jobsworth encourages 'euthanasia' as an answer.
One minute everyone is criticizing facebook for glamourising or encouraging suicide in the young.
The next the gov. is endorsing it.
Terrifying.

I fully support this extension

I’m not sure this is not a rather one sided article. Assisted suicide has often been used as a political tool to install fear and sway minds. Canadian parliament may well be discussing things like a parents access to euthanasia for a severely disabled child but it would not be discussing it ‘calmly’ as the newspaper writes. (When have parliamentary discussions about anything ever been discussed calmly - unless it’s in the vein of wage rises for politicians?)

This is a political tool to stir up dissent in society that’s increasingly divided, something newspapers, alongside politicians, also do regularly. It’s a long long arc from assisted suicide to euthanising people who may be seen as a drain on society.

Postulating that an 18 year old depressed person will be able to access assisted dying because some teens are talking about it on social media is not a balanced assessment of the subject.

I’ve read articles like this before. They are designed to alarm the reader and cause a reactionary response.

Inevitably, there will be a line like this in the article:

“ While our sympathies will be with those at the end of their lives suffering from great pain” which is a big f you to those people. Empty words.

“the Canadian experience should serve as a warning to anyone who thinks euthanasia will be confined to those cases divided”

All I can tell is that legislated assisted dying in Canada is ONLY for those at the end of their lives suffering from great pain

I’m sure if we examined the text of this telegraph article further, we could see how it’s been designed to stir up emotional responses, that they’ve set up a series of ‘what ifs’ and then come to some frightening conclusion when there is no real basis for the conclusion they have come to..

The problem is who has the power to decide.

Exactly allsorts
May I add another level but about the same thing who decides …….in Iceland downs syndrome babies are aborted
Iceland has a tiny number of Downs ‘that have slipped through the net’ but on the whole it is almost ‘downs free’
Is this not all genetic selection by the state

Bill Gates has made a speech (I think at the fringe if G20 or the latest COP) where he said the world had to weigh up was it worth spending $millions prolonging the life of terminally ill patients when the money could be put to other uses like teachers etc.

Worrying times.

Leaving normal thank you so much for putting a more balanced view.

When the discussion back in th 60's on abortion was taking place, we had all these same sort of 'scare stories'. Of course, the rich could always get a safe pregnancy termintion - it was the poorer members of society that had to seek out the back street abortionist, with all the dangers that entailed.

So, with assisted dying. How cruel our society has become when we prolong the living death of the peope with serious highly painful, debitating illness - do not do that for our pets only for humans.

I have a fatal illness - it is called 'old age' and I really do not understand why I should not have the right to decide the time, place and manner of my death - in the same way I have to decide all that about the manner of my living.

Obviously, much care and protection needs to be put in place, but that is most definitely not beyond the ability to do.

Leavingnormal I’m afraid that’s not quite true. The legislation was amended so persons don’t have to be at the end of their life, and as of 17th March 2023 people with mental illnesses will be eligible for Medically Assisted Dying. This is not a scare story but what is actually going to happen. It smacks of eugenics.

I knew someone would dismiss the article because it has been published in The Telegraph. The writer is a political scientist and lecturer at the University of Oxford.

Blossoming,

I have no idea what paper The Telegraph is, I live in Australia.

Leavingnormal

Blossoming,

I have no idea what paper The Telegraph is, I live in Australia.

Leavingnormal, some GNers will routinely dismiss anything in the Telegraph (often known as the Torygraph) because it’s traditionally been right wing.

I really, really object to the point of fury to an article that uses dismissive phrases like “*trot out heart-rending cases”.

Wherever the author of the article is coming from it is not from a point of view if compassion and caring for people.

Watching my mother die for weeks in screaming agony, a nightmare nobody could alleviate or get away from, sitting beside her and hearing her plead “Can’t you help me to go” and having to say no, because of the law.
Living with the emotional agony that in the end she died alone in a hospital bed with nobody who loved her with her.

If a euthanasia law had been in place her death could have been so very different. Her case was terminal. What could be the justification for keeping anyone alive in those circumstances?

But there we are, just trotting out that experience.

Thanks again Blossoming I should have asked earlier, but can you post the name of the scientist who wrote this article?

Here is a link to an article from the “other side” for those who feel The Telegraph gives a one-sided view. This article appeared in The Guardian in May 2022.

www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/11/canada-cases-right-to-die-laws

Namsnanny

Thanks again Blossoming I should have asked earlier, but can you post the name of the scientist who wrote this article?

Yuan Yi Zhu is a politician scientist at the university of Oxford.

Useful Blossoming
There are always more sides to any argument
Hence the need for discussion

👍😊

I too, nursed my mother and then my mother in law through palliative care. It is heartbreaking when those you love beg you to help them to end their lives, and the fear of the law prevents you from doing so. Had I been stronger, I would have complied with their wishes. I genuinely hope, that in my lifetime, voluntary euthanasia will be an option if I find myself in this position.

Lathyrus I am sorry for your loss. I wish your parent had received better palliative care. However, I still think there is a debate to be had.

I’m not that informed about this, but two things I’ve just read from the Psychiatric Tines is that a mental illness has to be both untreatable and untenable to allow to allow for Medically Assisted Dying. So this is still, to my mind, extreme untreatable illness. But I’d still have to give a lot more thought to it, before agreeing absolutely.
. I’m neither agreeing or disagreeing at this point.

Also, “Once a society embraces doctor prescribed death as an acceptable answer to human suffering or as some kind of fundamental liberty right, there are no brakes.” This, I find hard to accept. But I’d have to think more on this too.

My concern at this moment is that people who are living with intolerable pain with no hope of cure. That they should be made to endure this because society has other concerns is not right. And it’s not okay to say, ‘while we feel for these people, we aren’t going to help them because it could lead to somewhere awful.’ Somewhere awful is here already, I believe, and the people living in it are those with terminal untreatable pain and suffering who want medically assisted dying as an option, but can’t access it.

Blossoming

Lathyrus I am sorry for your loss. I wish your parent had received better palliative care. However, I still think there is a debate to be had.

She received the very best palliative care that could be given.

It is an illusion that pain can always be managed. People want to think something can be done because it’s unthinkable that we would actually chose to torture another human being.

But that what we do.

Please don’t try to dismiss the horror of my mother’s experience by suggesting that with better care it would have been different.

It wouldn’t have been. Dying is often slow, painful, desperate. It’s not like the media show it. One last quiet breath.