Playing god
Some nations abusing assisted dying laws
Protesters against the assisted suicide bill passed by the British Parliament are pictured outside the UK Parliament in late November. Benjamin Cremel/Agence France-Presse via France24.com
Several Western nations and states in the U.S. and Australia have doctors and health bureaucrats playing god.
They are willing participants in the deaths of people, stemming from laws sanctioning euthanasia, assisted suicide, or medical assistance in dying (MAiD). No matter the name or health protocols, it’s lipstick on a pig, virtue signaling about “death with dignity” and giving people a “choice.”
Britain likely will be added to the ranks this year. Also, Canada has gained much scrutiny for their 2016 law.
Countries with government-funded healthcare, such as Canada and Britain, have government employees killing citizens. Private medical professionals may do the same thing with euthanasia. They destroy human dignity by claiming moral superiority of “compassion and empathy” for people in pain.
Death is a natural process and shouldn't be artificially accelerated by anyone. They’re destroying intrinsic human dignity, the value of human life, and the purpose of medicine: Do no harm. Euthanasia, assisted suicide, or MAid is the definition of doing harm.
In late November, assisted suicide won a comfortable margin in the British Parliament. One of the emerging criticisms of these laws is that abuse occurs, which has gained attention in The Netherlands and Canada.
Since 2016, 19 nations or states in Europe, America, or Australia, have authorized euthanasia, or assisted suicide for the terminally ill. The tame term of Medical Aid in Dying is fashioned to make a grotesque practice more palatable to the masses.
Britain stands to be the 28th nation or state added to the list engaging in these decisions, according to the World Federal of Right to Die Societies. Between 1871 and 2009, six nations and three U.S. states, Oregon, Washington, and Montana, approved euthanasia or assisted suicide. Ten states plus Washington, D.C. allow MAiD. The order via how soon laws were passed include: Oregon, Washington, Montana, Vermont, California, Colorado, D.C., Hawaii, New Jersey, Maine, and New Mexico.
This image from CARE, or Christian Action, Research and Education, in the United Kingdom is a Christian organization focused on palliative care for the ill. Image via care.org.uk
The British Parliament’s action gained a notable critic in Lord Jonathan Sumption, a former British justice. He wrote in The London Times approaching the issue from morality and the legal perspective. He wondered about “progressive normalization”:
Why should we feel queasy about a result which in principle we support? Part of the reason is that, having crossed a significant moral barrier, there will be less to restrain us when people start to campaign for a looser test, as they inevitably will. It is unlikely that the principle of autonomy will stop where this bill leaves it.
The result of allowing assisted suicide is bound to be its progressive normalisation as an available exit route. This poses significant risks for the old and ill, who are among the most vulnerable members of our society. The statutory tests can offer them only partial protection. Experienced medical practitioners can make a reasonable assessment of a patient’s expectation of life and mental capacity, but that is the easy bit.
Sumption’s concerns about “progressive normalizations” have manifested themselves elsewhere in Europe and with our neighbor to the north.
The Guardian’s Senay Boztas reported in June 2019 about the law in The Netherlands:
The investigations have raised alarm, according to Dick Bosscher of the NVVE, the organisation that campaigned for the euthanasia law. ‘We think doctors are holding back more, although we can’t prove it,’ he said. ‘Last year, for the first time in years, there were fewer euthanasia cases in the Netherlands. Whether things are clear for doctors is a difficult question, as unbearable suffering is different from one person to another.’
The issue has divided doctors: last year, 450 put their names to a full-page advertisement saying they would not give a deadly injection to an incapacitated patient. One ethicist, Berna van Baarsen, resigned from a regional euthanasia committee in protest at the growing role of advance directives for people unable to express their wishes.
Cases involving psychiatric suffering and dementia are, however, relatively rare. In 2018 there were 6,126 cases of euthanasia (compared to 6,585 in 2017): 1% involved psychiatric conditions, and 2.4% dementia. Two-thirds were requested by people with terminal cancer.
In Canada, the scrutiny falls on Ontario, the nation’s most populous province with 13.5 million. Dirk Huyer leads Ontario’s Office of the Chief Coroner. Alexander Raikin wrote for The New Atlantis in November 2024.
‘Every case is reported. Everybody has scrutiny on all of these cases. From an oversight point of view, trying to understand when it happens and how it happens, we’re probably the most robust in Canada.’
In the exclusive report, Raikin revealed the opposite:
After more than four hundred identified issues with compliance, ranging from broken safeguards to patients who were euthanized who may not have been capable of consent, Huyer’s office has failed to alert the public or take any steps to prosecute offenders. Whether or not these hundreds of ‘issues’ are in fact violations of criminal law is unclear precisely because none of them have been referred to law enforcement for investigation. Instead, Huyer’s office has deemed virtually all of them as requiring nothing more than an ‘informal conversation’ with the practitioner or an ‘educational’ or ‘notice’ email. Even in one egregious case, in which the practitioner was found to have violated multiple legal requirements, and which Huyer himself described as ‘just horrible,’ his office reported the case only to a regulatory body instead of the police.
Oversight of euthanasia is meant to be ‘protecting vulnerable people from abuse and error,’ according to the Supreme Court of Canada. Instead it is protecting euthanasia providers from their abuse and error coming to light.
Any law is ripe for abuse in some way because humans are sinful creatures, but every law is not life and death like euthanasia, assisted suicide, and MAiD.
England will join this death cult, and soon, we will learn of abuses there too. The only things that will be different are the names and the circumstances encountered.
