Article By Steven Ertelt
A Canadian woman in her 70s was approved for euthanasia after she lost the ability to cook for her family, a role she had prized as the matriarch.
Unfortunately, she was almost killed before counseling helped her see that her life was not measured by the meals she served.
Doctors Gary Rodin and Madeline Li of the University of Toronto described the case in a New York Times opinion piece. The woman felt she had lost her value to her family and was approved for medical assistance in dying before she sought counseling.
Through counseling, she came to understand that her family valued who she was, not what she did for them. She decided not to go through with ending her life, at least for now.
That Christmas, her family gathered and she sat proudly at the table while others did the cooking and serving.
Rodin and Li said they are not opposed to legalized assisted dying, but they warned that Canadian law does not require clinicians to guide patients toward other help before people are killed.
Assisted suicide is intended as a “dignified” last resort, typically for people who are terminally ill, they wrote. In recent years, “too many people are receiving the procedure without the opportunity for careful reflection about it with a health provider.”
“In some cases, patients are being approved who should not be,” they added, citing reports of approvals for patients claiming loneliness or poverty.
Canada’s assisted-dying program called MAID began in 2016, supposedly limited to patients whose natural death was “reasonably foreseeable,” such as those with terminal cancer. Parliament removed that requirement in 2021 and it was being abused anyway.
Patients without a life-threatening illness must wait 90 days. The law does not require them to try treatment, and it does not require clinicians to explore the meaning of the request. Nor, the doctors wrote, does it specify adequate safeguards for vulnerable people whose decision may be affected by social disadvantage.
They said the system is now “one of the most permissive in the world, allowing assisted dying for almost any form of subjectively intolerable suffering that had a medical basis, or even for medically unexplained physical symptoms.” The deadly euthanasia now accounts for more than 5 percent of deaths in Canada.
“Many doctors have come to see their primary role to be making sure their patients meet the legal eligibility requirements to qualify for assisted dying,” Rodin and Li wrote. “The problem is that there has become far more focus on whether patients can get an assisted death and not enough on whether they should.” One provider described his role as a “conduit” for a patient’s “desires and choices.”
Another said the degree of suffering “is entirely up to the patient — 100 percent.”
“Unfortunately, psychological care of this kind for patients requesting assisted dying is not routinely offered by doctors or other health care providers, nor is it routinely covered by insurance,” the doctors wrote. “It should be the standard of care and fully funded.”
They added, “A society that permits assisted dying should also ask whether it has done enough to help people sustain their sense of dignity and meaning in life. Death must not become the only kind of relief people can imagine.”
The warning comes as Parliament is set to vote Oct. 7 on Bill C-218, which would permanently bar doctors and nurse practitioners from providing assisted death when a mental disorder is a person’s only medical condition.
Sponsor Tamara Jansen asked colleagues to back the bill.
“The measure of a compassionate society is not how efficiently it helps people die,” she said. “It is whether, in the moment when someone can no longer see the value of their own life, the rest of us are prepared to see it for them. Our answer to suffering should be care. Our answer to despair should be hope.”
Canada has already ended the lives of people who were not dying of a terminal disease.
Donna Duncan qualified for assisted death during a mental-health crisis that followed a car crash and worsened in Covid lockdown. She was diagnosed with concussion, a psychosomatic disorder and severe paranoia, and she had attempted suicide days before her death. Her daughters, Alicia and Christie Duncan, were given 48 hours’ notice.
She was discharged from a psychiatric ward without their knowledge and died by lethal injection two days later.
“There was nothing that we could legally do,” Alicia Duncan said. “If the safeguards aren’t strict, there will be fatalities for people that should not have died, who just needed help to live. They needed help to live, not help to die.”
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