Canada Is Not Only Euthanizing Persons but Personhood Itself

From The Public Discourse.com (Dec. 10, 2023):

In 2016, Canada legalized euthanasia for adults suffering severely and incurably near the end of life. Four years later, it legalized euthanasia for adults even if death is not “reasonably foreseeable.” Next year, euthanasia is set to become legal also for adults whose sole medical condition and source of suffering is mental illness. Recommendations have been made to legalize euthanasia for minors whose death is “reasonably foreseeable.” The organization that regulates physicians in the province of Quebec has suggested that euthanasia should be available for infants with severe disabilities or illnesses that render them unlikely to survive.

Between 2016 and 2022, close to 45,000 Canadians died through what is officially termed “medical assistance in dying,” or MAID. As of 2022, euthanasia was virtually tied with cerebrovascular disease as the fifth-leading cause of death in Canada (with only accidents, COVID-19, cancer, and heart disease causing more deaths). In each of the preceding years starting in 2016, the number of deaths by euthanasia grew significantly. Between 2019 and 2022, the average increase was just over thirty-one percent per year.

These statistics reveal disturbing truths about what happens when a society legalizes euthanasia. Canadians have been told by advocates, legislatures, and courts that euthanasia is a basic good. But in truth, euthanasia teaches that human dignity is degradable rather than enduring. It creates hierarchies of personhood by calling into question the worth and value of certain individuals based on their strengths and abilities—things that, by nature, are mutable. This is always and everywhere a fundamental injustice. In Canada, this injustice is surfacing in deeply damaging ways.

These warnings are not new. When, in 2021, Canada was about to expand euthanasia to scenarios in which death is not near, three UN officials—including the special rapporteur on the rights of persons with disabilities—wrote to the Canadian government to express concerns about how this step would affect individuals in Canada living with disabilities. The authors noted that if euthanasia is “made available for all persons with a health condition or impairment, regardless of whether they are close to death, a social assumption might follow (or be subtly reinforced) that it is better to be dead than to live with a disability.”

This point is accurate, but it has a broader reach. When euthanasia is legalized, the social assumption that it is better to be dead than to continue living takes hold in all the scenarios in which euthanasia is legal. And one must ask: what factors would lead us to think that it is better to be dead than to continue living in these scenarios? Advocates for euthanasia will point to quality of life, autonomy, dignity, pain, and suffering. But the deeper message embedded in these advocates’ words is that some of us are no longer persons. If we find ourselves eligible for euthanasia, we are not really living anymore. And if that is true, euthanasia seems like a sensible choice. [read more]

Canada has become a death cult. Sad.