How does the unthinkable become not only thinkable, but seemingly inevitable? How do we normalize things we recently considered not just abnormal, but horrifying?
The question arises because a major Canadian medical organization is pushing the idea of allowing doctors to do something that’s long been considered unthinkable and abnormal: killing infants who are born with conditions that make survival impossible.
To be clear, the college’s proposal involves only newborns with severe malformations whose chance for life is “basically nil.” It wouldn’t be a license to kill babies. But let’s also be clear about this: authorizing doctors to actively euthanize infants — rather than allowing nature to take its course — does cross a line once thought inviolable.
Now, Canada’s laws on MAID have long been stretched far beyond the original (and praiseworthy) concept of sparing terminally ill people from unnecessary agony at the end of their lives, allowing a so-called “death with dignity.” When the law was passed in 2016 it didn’t specify that a person must be terminally ill to qualify for a medically assisted death, and last year it was amended to remove the requirement that death be “reasonably foreseeable.”
The system is about to be expanded even more. In March, the rules are to be changed to allow a person to qualify for MAID if they’re suffering from a mental illness alone. And the debate on extending it to those “mature minors” is an active one. The prospect of a badly depressed 16-year-old being euthanized in this country can no longer be dismissed as just the nightmare of those “slippery slope” thinkers who always feared that MAID would turn into death on demand.
But that is indeed the direction we’re headed. Once the debate focuses exclusively on personal “autonomy,” i.e. the right to decide for yourself what to do with your own life, then why not let people whose suffering is psychological rather than physical, or who haven’t reached the age of adulthood, or whose deaths may still be years away, demand that a doctor end their suffering?
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The government seems to be swept along by this logic, unable or unwilling to find a reason to draw a line anywhere. But as the law is widened, the danger of abuse is becoming ever more apparent.
Extending MAID to those with mental illnesses carries obvious risks, given that suicidal thoughts can be part and parcel of some psychological conditions. Advocates for the disabled warn that widening the MAID criteria makes their lives seem more disposable than others, and worry people with disabilities will feel pressure to go that route.
We’re hearing about more and more cases of people driven to despair by poverty and chronic illness, who can’t get the help they need from a badly stressed health system. Will some turn to MAID as a way out? In February, a 51-year-old Ontario woman chose to die because she couldn’t find affordable housing that wouldn’t aggravate her chemical sensitivities. Global News reports on the case of a 65-year-old man named Les Landry who’s considering MAID because he’s fallen into poverty and doesn’t see another solution.
This is no fringe issue. Death by doctor is far from rare in Canada now. Some 31,600 people have gone that way since 2016, and MAID accounts for 3.3 per cent of all deaths in Canada — close to five per cent in Quebec and B.C.
To state the obvious, or what ought to be obvious: we should not have a system that kills people because they’re desperate or disposable or too costly to keep alive. But right now we’re heading toward something like that, and it seems we don’t know how to stop.
