Canadian euthanasia regime guilty of ‘rushing people to their deaths’

Medics who helped to implement Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) programme warn that too many people are being euthanised “without the opportunity for careful reflection”.

Writing in the New York Times, Madeline Li and Gary Rodin, professors of psychiatry at the University of Toronto, believe more practitioners should be encouraging patients to pause and reflect on their decision rather than hastening them to their deaths.

Since legalising euthanasia in 2016, Canada has already abolished the requirement for a person to be terminally ill. Those who are deemed to have an ‘incurable’ condition, even if they also suffer from a mental illness, can be killed.

Permissive

Li and Rodin have both assessed whether patients are eligible for MAID. While they state that it is not their place to dissuade others from seeking medical help to kill themselves, they argue that Canada’s system “is no longer an option of last resort”.

They continued: “Too many people are receiving the procedure without the opportunity for careful reflection about it with a health provider. In some cases, patients are being approved who should not be.”

Reflecting on the prevailing situation, they wrote: “Today, Canada’s system is one of the most permissive in the world, allowing assisted dying for almost any form of subjectively intolerable suffering that has a medical basis, or even for medically unexplained physical symptoms.

“This latitude may contribute to Canada having the fastest growth rate of assisted dying in the world, increasing 16-fold in the eight years since legalisation.”

Dignity and meaning

They fear that many doctors “have come to see their primary role to be making sure their patients meet the legal eligibility requirements to qualify for assisted dying” and warned that the focus has become more “on whether patients can get an assisted death and not enough on whether they should”.

The professors said that in their clinical experience they had seen “how beneficial it is to pause and reflect” with their patients. They recounted the case of a woman in her seventies who had “sought and received approval for assisted dying after she lost the ability to cook. She felt she had lost her value to her family.

“Through counseling, she came to understand that her family valued who she was, not what she did for them. She decided not to go through with ending her life, at least for now. That Christmas, her family gathered and she sat proudly at the table, while others did the cooking and serving.”

The article concluded: “A society that permits assisted dying should also ask whether it has done enough to help people sustain their sense of dignity and meaning in life. Death must not become the only kind of relief people can imagine.”