MAID

A couple of weeks ago, Andrea Widburg wrote an article in American Thinker about Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying program. This policy of assisting the sick to themselves seems to be more horrifying than I had imagined.  Canada has made suicide relatively painless, and that is far from a good thing.

Nowadays, thanks to modern medicine, suicide really is painless. People are knocked out, given numbing agents to prevent even subconscious pain from the final shot, and then killed. However, unlike The Painless Pole, you can’t “take or leave it” as you please. Once you sign on, it’s a one-way ticket out of life.

And in Canada, where it’s been legal for nine years, euthanasia is extremely popular. In a chilling essay at The Atlantic, Elaina Plott Calabro takes us to the annual Euthanasia Conference, which has the cheerful normalcy of any other medical conference, complete with seminars and networking.

I began reading the essay at The Atlantic and discovered that I could not continue past a certain point, about a third of the way through. As I read, I became increasingly aware of a growing horror, a sense that I was approaching something evil. Perhaps it was paragraphs like this;

It is too soon to call euthanasia a lifestyle option in Canada, but from the outset it has proved a case study in momentum. MAID began as a practice limited to gravely ill patients who were already at the end of life. The law was then expanded to include people who were suffering from serious medical conditions but not facing imminent death. In two years, MAID will be made available to those suffering only from mental illness. Parliament has also recommended granting access to minors.

or this

The details of the assisted-death experience have become a preoccupation of Canadian life. Patients meticulously orchestrate their final moments, planning celebrations around them: weekend house parties before a Sunday-night euthanasia in the garden; a Catholic priest to deliver last rites; extended-family renditions of “Auld Lang Syne” at the bedside. For $10.99, you can design your MAID experience with the help of the Be Ceremonial app; suggested rituals include a story altar, a forgiveness ceremony, and the collecting of tears from witnesses. On the Disrupting Death podcast, hosted by an educator and a social worker in Ontario, guests share ideas on subjects such as normalizing the MAID process for children facing the death of an adult in their life—a pajama party at a funeral home; painting a coffin in a schoolyard.

This is evil. No matter how they try to sugarcoat it as relieving suffering, it is evil. It is worth exploring, however, just why it is evil.

To begin with, despite the claims of patient autonomy and the pervasive idea that our lives are our own to do with as we please, the fact is that we do not, in fact, belong to ourselves. We did not create ourselves. If we were given conscious control of the myriad biochemical processes that sustain our lives every instant, we would die within seconds. We did not choose the manner of our beginnings nor the means by which our bodies function. We do not have the right to choose the manner of our ending. We belong to our Creator, and only He has that right.

But perhaps this argument is too theological for our secular world. We require practical arguments. Very well. Here is the most practical argument I can think of against promoting euthanasia. It is cheaper and easier to kill the sick than it is to cure sick people.

Any health care system in which suicide is a viable option is going to begin to encourage patients suffering from long-lasting and expensive illnesses to pursue that option. It doesn’t matter whether it is a system based on private insurers or a single-payer health care plan. As expenses mount, they will have to seek ways to reduce expenses. One of the easiest ways to reduce the expense sustained by the very sick is to simply not treat them. And we should note that the administrators who prepare such policies are not evil people. It is perfectly sensible to reserve the bulk of healthcare resources for the young and healthy whose lives can be improved rather than waste the resources on the old and sick, only prolonging their suffering. This is the logic on which the road to Hell is paved.

The slippery slope argument is considered to be a logical fallacy. Yet, I think the argument can be applied to Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying. In fact, I think Canada has already slid far down the slope and is accelerating towards the abyss. At first, this mercy was extended only to people already dying. Then, people with chronic but non-fatal illnesses were considered. Then to people with any painful condition, to people suffering mental anguish. And now they are proposing permitting the mentally ill and minors, people who cannot be held responsible for their decisions, to participate.

The waiting period for the dying has been eliminated. There is same-day service now. I suspect the procedures for ensuring whether patients truly wish to die have been streamlined. Perhaps before too much longer, suicide kits will be sold over the counter in Canada.

I have given what I believe are logical reasons to oppose Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying. They may or may not be good reasons. They are not my reasons for opposing it. The horror that I felt upon reading about pajama parties to normalize suicide had nothing to do with logic. Life, in all its forms, has a strong instinct to preserve itself. The antelope does not lie down and allow the lion to devour it. The animal caught in a trap will chew its own leg off to cheat the trapper. Even plants evolve defenses against the animals that kill and eat them. We all have to die, but while we live, our natural instinct is to fight for life, even against hopeless odds. Surrendering to death seems unnatural, against life’s instinct. A society that encourages this kind of surrender is fundamentally anti-life and may well end with a sort of national suicide. Hopefully, Canada will change its pro-death policies before it is too late.