In an op-ed in The New York Times, two Toronto psychiatrists expressed their concerns about Canada’s legalized medical assistance in dying. They see it as unsavory. People are helped to die using any excuse.
The doctors work with cancer patients. They have counseled patients about the procedure and assessed their eligibility. At least one of the doctors has administered the drugs to end patients’ lives. They have researched what leads people to choose this option. They also helped create an institutional framework to determine how Canada’s largest medical centers would respond to requests for assisted death.
However, Canada’s system for assisted death is no longer an option of last resort. 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 because they’re poor or lonely, raising concerns that they may feel they have no other options. In other cases, including many of their cancer patients, medical assistance in dying may be the right choice eventually, but there’s a risk of rushing into it and shortening what could be a meaningful period in patients’ lives.
The problem is a change made by Parliament. The MAID, Medical Assistance in Dying program, had a proviso in 2016 which kept dying as a last resort for patients who faced a “reasonably foreseeable” natural death. But in 2021, Parliament got rid of that requirement. Activists influenced them, arguing that dying is a human right.
Now, to qualify for assisted dying, you only need “almost any form of subjectively intolerable suffering that has a medical basis” and approval from two clinicians — a pretty low bar that could explain why Canada has the fastest growth rate of assisted dying in the world, they said.
While the majority of these folks do have life-threatening illnesses, doctors aren’t necessarily guiding the decisions or having “deeper conversations” with patients. In other words, some are electing to die, for example, way too soon, without trying any options.
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 contributes to Canada having the fastest growth of assisted dying in the world. It has increased 16-fold in eight years since legalization. It accounts for 5% of all deaths in the country.
People have options. Is a counselor going over the options with them? It doesn’t sound like it.
Suffering is part of the human condition, but it’s mostly temporary. Rushing people into death is not moral. Many religions also oppose it. The government, with its “free” healthcare, could have very unsavory motivations. I’m just saying.