Canadian woman approved for MAiD because she could no longer cook Sunday dinner

The narrative that Canada’s euthanasia regime is carefully regulated, largely restricted to the dying, and that the regularly reported horror stories are merely sensationalist anomalies has received yet another blow. On October 5, psychiatrists Gary Rodin and Madeline Li laid out their fears in a New York Times op-ed titled “We Implemented Canada’s Assisted Dying Law. We’re Concerned.”

Rodin and Li emphasize that they are both supporters of assisted suicide in principle. Both have “counseled patients about the procedure and assessed whether they were eligible,” and one has “administered the drugs to end patients’ lives.” More than that, they wrote, “together, we created an institutional framework that determined how one of Canada’s largest medical centers would respond to requests for assisted death.” Now, they have fears – and their analysis is devastating to the defenses of Canada’s regime.

“But Canada’s system for assisted death is no longer an option of last resort,” they wrote. “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. Reports have emerged of people seeking assisted death in the context of poverty or loneliness, raising concerns that they may feel they have no other options.” Even for their cancer patients, they state, “there’s a risk of rushing into it and shortening what can be a meaningful period in patients’ lives.”

That is carefully worded, but read it again. People are being rushed into euthanasia. People who should not be approved are being approved. People are seeking lethal injections because they cannot get what they need, because they are poor, because they feel as if they are a burden. That is precisely what those of us who oppose euthanasia said would happen a decade ago, and what we have been reporting on ever since.

Rodin and Li noted that Canada’s regime is now “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 has resulted in a euthanasia rate that amounts to 5 percent of Canada’s annual deaths. Since 2016, we have seen a silent, sterile bloodbath in this country. Rodin and Li noted that in their view, this is because assisted suicide activists have largely been in the driver’s seat when it comes to policy. Other medical professionals, they stated, share their concerns.

Rodin and Li cited the example of a woman in her 70s who was approved for assisted suicide because she had lost the ability to cook for her family. She had enjoyed cooking big Sunday dinners for her family and felt that she had lost her value when she could no longer do so.

“She sought and received approval for assisted dying after she lost the ability to cook,” Rodin and Li wrote. “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.”

She should never have been approved in the first place.