In Part I of this series, we discussed the fact that physicians are taught to “first do no harm.” To assist someone in committing suicide is a violation of that training and neither noble nor natural. It is actually playing God, since God is the creator of all life and only He should have the last word on when life ends. All those who live by the values of Judeo-Christian teaching and the Bible would agree.
But some disagree. Assisted suicide is now available in ten states plus the District of Columbia. The late great Washington Post columnist, Charles Krauthammer wrote in 1997, “When you see someone on a high ledge ready to jump, you are enjoined by every norm in our society to tackle him and pull him back from the abyss.” “We are being asked to become a society where, when the tormented soul on the ledge asks for our help in granting him relief, we oblige him with a push,” wrote Krauthammer when reflecting on the oral arguments of Vacco v. Quill, in which the Supreme Court eventually ruled the Constitution doesn’t create a right to that procedure.
But Canada has pushed even farther down this slippery slope than the United States. Nicholas Tomaino, writing in The Wall Street Journal, tells us the Canadian Parliament has made it easier than ever to obtain assisted suicide, dropping safeguards such as the minimum 10-day assessment period between request and provision. It also proposed mental illness as an eligible condition, the implementation of which the government has delayed until 2027. It seems their message is “If you want to die, you needn’t wait.”
But there are consequences to this policy. The consequence, Ethics and Public Policy Center fellow Alexander Raikin notes in a new study, is that what was meant to be exceptional has become routine. Using two government data sets, he estimates the program is at least the fifth-leading cause of death in Canada, claiming a reported 13,241 lives in 2022, up from 1,018 in 2016.
Mr. Raikin notes the government believed doctors wouldn’t merely rubber-stamp applications. Yet in 2022 more than 81% of petitions resulted in death, including for “vision/hearing loss” and “diabetes.” He documents that the percentage of denied written requests has been falling for years, from 8% in 2019 to 3.5% in 2022, even as the number of applications has increased. The upshot has been that 44,958 people have been put to death between 2016-22. One estimate, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2020, predicted that “approximately 2,000 euthanasia” cases could be expected annually. The MAID toll that year was 7,611. Thus “either in absolute numbers or when weighed as a percentage of deaths,” Canada has the “fastest-growing assisted-dying program” in the world.
Roger Foley, who suffers from a degenerative neurological disorder, cerebellar ataxia, has witnessed MAID since its infancy. In 2009, as Mr. Foley’s condition worsened, he resigned from his job at the Royal Bank of Canada. After several years in home care, in which he claims he was mistreated, he was placed in a mental-health ward.
“I became extremely suicidal,” Mr. Foley, 48, says in a Zoom interview from his bed in the hospital, where he’s lived since 2016. After he shared those thoughts with staff, he says they began to float the idea of euthanasia. That alarmed him, so he began to record conversations secretly. He later shared them with Canadian journalists.
In one, a hospital ethicist threatens Mr. Foley with denial of insurance coverage and says it would cost him “north of $1,500 a day” to stay in the hospital. When Mr. Foley protested, the ethicist retorted: “Roger, this is not my show. My piece of this was to talk to you about if you had interest in assisted dying.” He didn’t. “I have a passion to live,” Mr. Foley says. He wants to volunteer and write songs. Many people like to “use the term ‘end suffering,’ ” he says. In practice, that means “Don’t help the sufferer, end the sufferer. “ ”I deal with a lot of pain every day,” he says, “but you can’t give up at the point of any problem—you’re still of value, your life has value.”
Mr. Tomaino says, “Mr. Foley isn’t religious, but to my Catholic ear, it sounds as if he’s saying life is sacred. Canada’s healthcare system wants not only to give up on him, but to compel him to give up on himself.”
Congratulations to Mr. Foley for standing up against those who would push him into assisted suicide – for their own misguided agenda. Yet as he rejects MAID, others seek to open its doors wider still. On August 19, an organization called Dying With Dignity filed suit in Ontario Superior Court, claiming that preventing assisted dying for mental illness is discriminatory. Tomaino warns, “That may not sound dignified – but, as Krauthammer saw, it is logical.”
The plain truth is when man decides to play God, there is no limit to what evil he can do.
