Posted on 10/17/2024 7:41:03 AM PDT by DFG
A woman undergoing life-saving cancer surgery in Canada was offered assisted suicide by doctors as she was about to enter the operating room.
The case comes as the number of people opting to end their lives under the country’s medical assistance in dying (MAID) program has risen thirteen-fold from 1,018 to 13,241 in 2022.
Assisted dying, which was legalised in Canada in 2016, is now the fifth-leading cause of death in the country.
The case will sound alarm bells in the UK, where a bill on assisted dying is set to be brought forward in parliament this month. If it passes, it would pave the way for the practice to be legalised.
Although details of the British bill have not yet been finalised, it is expected to propose granting terminally ill adults who have six months or less to live access to medical help to end their own lives.
Sir Keir Starmer has said he is “very pleased” that MPs will get the chance to vote on the issue. It will be a free vote and the Government will remain neutral on the subject, but the Prime Minister has previously supported an assisted dying bill and said that he thinks there are grounds for changing the law.
Canada now has the fastest-growing assisted dying program in the world. Only the Netherlands has a higher rate of such deaths.
The increase in deaths has sparked fears disabled and unwell people with complex needs are being put under pressure to choose to end their lives.
‘I was scared and alone’
Speaking anonymously, the 51-year-old cancer patient said of the moment she was offered death instead of surgery: “It floored me... [it was] the most vulnerable I’ve ever felt in my life”.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
They end up getting a good half hour detailing from her about the Canadian health care system based on her and her families’ experience with it (e.g. waiting 2 years to get arthroscopic surgery for a knee repair in Nova Scotia)
Give me the pistol and the bullet and some idiot is going to die.
I read decades ago that when the Netherlands made suicide legal that elderly people feared going to the doctors as the doctors might decide on their own the patient had “no quality of life left” and just kill them without permission.
Look up the T4 program in nazi Germany; that was the beginning of the holocaust.
Exactly.
Look up Leo Alexander’s article “Medical science under dictatorship”; it is in the July 14 1949 issue of the NEJM.
The writer Walker Percy explained it well:”Tenderness leads to the gas chamber.
Tenderness is the first guise of the murderer.”
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