Posted on 07/23/2023 6:07:11 AM PDT by DoodleBob
The literal suicide of the West continues apace in Canada.
Starting in March 2024, people with mental illness will be able to avail themselves of medically assisted suicide.
That represents the latest expansion in the Medical Assistance in Dying, or “MAID,” law that launched in 2016. Some Canadians are getting ready to take advantage of the forthcoming law.
On Saturday, Reuters reported how a 47-year-old woman with anorexia will be allowed to kill herself with state assistance next year when the law changes.
“Every day is hell,” Lisa Pauli said. “I’m so tired. I’m done. I’ve tried everything. I feel like I’ve lived my life.”
It’s a tragic story, but suicide isn’t the answer. And government authorities certainly shouldn’t be normalizing and encouraging suicide as the answer to problems.
Canada’s embrace of assisted suicide has put the country in a death spiral, literally.
In 2016, Canada launched its Medical Assistance in Dying program, which was restricted to people dying of a terminal illness. Since that time, it’s expanded enormously both in raw numbers and scope. It has become the sixth-leading cause of death in Canada. In 2021, it represented 3.3% of all deaths in the country.
As an aside, the news service Agence France-Presse “fact-checked” the reality that assisted suicide has become the sixth-leading cause of death and called that statistic misleading.
But the report merely concluded that the “national statistics agency does not consider [state assisted suicide] an official cause of death, and most cases involve people with serious underlying health conditions.”
Oh, so a government agency simply doesn’t categorize the suicide as the “official” cause of death, so it suppresses the numbers.
A recent estimate bumped the total number of suicides up from 10,064 in 2021 to an estimated 13,500 in 2022.
Some of these people appear to have been killed by authorities operating outside the law.
Reuters reported that between 2020 and 2021, “Quebec found 15 assisted deaths, 0.4% of the total, did not follow the rules. … In six of those cases, the person did not have a serious and incurable condition, according to a provincial commission.”
Of course, having the MAID law to begin with is what opened the opportunity for those illegal assisted suicides to take place. It doesn’t help that some doctors are bringing up the idea of suicide before patients do.
I can only imagine how this conversation will go in the future:
Hey, you say you’ve got a bum shoulder, and it’s been bothering you for years? As your medical professional, I’d like to recommend this new advanced treatment. It’s called ‘death,’ and is vastly cheaper than surgery and other drug alternatives.
Is this sort of attitude that far off?
A hyper-individualistic ethos, combined with a system of partially or almost entirely socialized medicine in an aging society, means that there are huge incentives to nudge patients toward choosing suicide.
Canadian authorities advocating for assisted-suicide laws insist that they’ve taken “prudent steps” to get to this point.
“We have gotten where we are through a number of very prudent steps,” Canadian Justice Minister and Attorney General David Lametti said in an interview, according to Reuters. “It’s been a slow and careful evolution. And I’m proud of that.”
How comforting. The road to hell is apparently being traversed with many prudent steps in Canada.
But that pace is quickening.
Jack Elbaum noted in the Washington Examiner that “polls show 50% of Canadians believe [MAID] should be expanded to those with disabilities, and 41% of young people want MAID to be made available to anyone in poverty.”
“Last year, the Quebec College of Physicians even said it believes babies up to the age of 1 should be killed if they have ‘severe malformations’ and ‘grave and severe syndromes,’” Elbaum wrote.
So, Canada will likely be exterminating more of the poor and mentally ill.
The bottom line is that the floodgate has been opened, and it’s unlikely to abate unless the program is shut down. Canada’s example provides a dire warning to the U.S., where some states have adopted assisted-suicide laws.
The West was once known as a culture that embraced the value of life, but no longer. We are establishing a new norm. There are even assisted-suicide promotional books for kids in Canada just to make sure everyone knows this is all good and normal.
Every year a new frontier is opened in the march to ensure that everyone has access to state-sponsored death in the name of “autonomy.” How long until suicide on demand for any reason is not just seen as acceptable in Canada, but a positive good?
This is the result of metastasized social liberalism.
An anonymous account on Twitter had it right: There’s something “demonically saccharine” about assisted-suicide laws, where we can clinically dispose of human life.
We now have policies that increasingly resemble something you’d expect in the Third Reich. But instead of being delivered by a storm trooper sporting swastikas and skull-and-crossbones badges, they will come from a smiling health professional in a white medical lab coat.
A good friend's father was recently hospitalized with a heart attack and hooked up to machines. The attending doctor didn't think the old man would make it. My friend, respecting Dad's wishes to not be on machines, signed a paper approving the de-machining and putting the Dad on "comfort care" which (IN GENERAL) is basically no curative care.
That was ok - that was the Dad's wishes.
The old man pulled through, but the hospital refused to put Dad back on fluids or nutrition because - you guessed it - "comfort care" IN THAT HOSPITAL and for THAT DOCTOR is effectively Terri Schaivo-style starvation and dehydration.
They said, food and water was a medical treatment and thus "curative" and AGAINST the rules of "comfort care."
My friend was stunned. And the attending and her team wouldn't budge. For the next few days, my friend and siblings heard from scores of nurses etc that withholding fluids was effectively "the right thing to do"....very Terri Schaivo-like. They also threw in “Dad live a good long life” and “he will never come back the way he was.”
It took a virtual miracle whereby a different doctor intervened, said the father clearly wasn't terminal, and put the old man back on nutrition and fluids.
While my friend's Dad passed away peacefully in his sleep a few weeks later, it was Dad’s terms.
It’s also worth noting that the siblings were split on “comfort care.” There WAS a view that it was ok for Dad to dehydrate to death. Someone even said that dehydration is painless; I hear the total opposite during the Schaivo murder.
Euthanasia is, technically, illegal. And I know many people would be OK if fluids were withheld when it is THEIR time to go. Fair enough.
But euthanasia can be made legal if you're not careful with Fine Print or vetting the "mercy killing" mindset of the attending.
I have a somewhat similar situation, I am the guardian for an Aunt that has no children and has been a widow for about 7 years.
I take care of all her financial matters, make sure her bills get paid, taxes get filed, etc., a niece is a also guardian, she takes of scheduling all her Doctors appointments, etc.
My aunt is a about a month short of being 95 years old and has been in assisted living for about 6 years, the last 3 years in memory care.
Recently a lump in her left breast was found during a CT scan, it could be nothing, it could also be breast cancer. A biopsy has been scheduled to find out what the lump is.
The question is, how do you treat a 95-year-old woman for breast cancer, would the treatment kill her quicker than the cancer and all the side effects if she underwent chemotherapy or some other treatment. Would the medical professional even recommend treating someone of her age.
She still has the mental ability to make a few decisions but won’t remember them after 10 minutes or so.
The niece and I have medical power of attorney for her, the struggle we are going through is, do we follow her wishes if she refuses treatment and basically force the treatment on her.
Even if she is treated and cured of the cancer, how much longer can a 95-year old woman expect versus refusing treatment and letting the cancer run its course, making her as comfortable as possible during the process.
Of course, she might not have cancer and the issue is moot or she could refuse treatment which is likely considering her past decisions, she is a very strong Christian lady and takes the view that she’s lived a good life and wants to go home and be with her husband.
comfort care sounds so gentle, its all in the labeling
In the situation about which I wrote, the whole matter sort of hinged on what is CURATIVE CARE.
In my heart attack saga, the father was significantly weakened and the treatment likely would have hastened his demise. Plus the Dad didn’t want heroic measures if he was actively dying.
I’m not a doctor or lawyer nor do I play one online. But…In your Aunt’s case, at 95 years of age, if it’s cancer it’s possible that the treatment would also hasten her demise. It MAY not be curative. Again, I’m no doctor…this is just one dopey FReeper’s opinion.
Now, that doesn’t mean, if it IS cancer, that you let the authorities deny her food and drink. Nutrition isn’t curative.
I’ll say a prayer for everyone.
+ srmanuel
In the situation about which I wrote, the whole matter sort of hinged on what is CURATIVE CARE.
In my heart attack saga, the father was significantly weakened and the treatment likely would have hastened his demise. Plus the Dad didn’t want heroic measures if he was actively dying.
I’m not a doctor or lawyer nor do I play one online. But…In your Aunt’s case, at 95 years of age, if it’s cancer it’s possible that the treatment would also hasten her demise. It MAY not be curative. Again, I’m no doctor…this is just one dopey FReeper’s opinion.
Now, that doesn’t mean, if it IS cancer, that you let the authorities deny her food and drink. Nutrition isn’t curative.
I’ll say a prayer for everyone.
In your situation, “I” would follow the Aunt’s wishes...the “treatment” could be very painful..plus if she does NOT want it, why force it? (I had a cousin who died of breast cancer that got “treated”...she was in her 40s). JMHO...I do not envy you having to deal with this.
Follow her wishes. You are her fiduciary
My mom lived out her life on palliative care. I was grateful for it. She had a raging cancer that was inoperable. It releaved her pain. Made her final days easier
And Mo folks the medical profession isn’t trying to kill you lived one
This is why you wishes should be in writing
The way the hospital system has evolved, comfort care is an essential escape hatch.
I have cared for terminally ill patients for 49 years. The old way was, on the whole I think, better but no one who is hospitalized today is cared for by their own personal physician.
No one, no family member, should be forced to acceed to comfort care. But “forced” is a term with varying meanings.
For myself, when I believe a treatment or procedure has a decent chance of letting someone get home or getting some critical function restored, I tend to be encouraging about it. When I believe a treatment or procedure has a decent chance of compounding agony or suffering before nature takes its course, I say so.
People usually follow my lead. Not always, of course.
When I tell the truth about the likely outcome of a procedure, and a DPOA elects “comfort care”, am I “forcing” them?
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