Quick Takes – Euthanasia in Canada: Killing Kids; Killing The Vulnerable; Killing The Poor

     Another “quick takes” on items where there is too little to say to make a complete article, but is still important enough to comment on.

     The focus this time: Death to the defenseless

     Carrying on…

     What’s worse than a child being killed with their parent’s consent. A child being killed by the state who doesn’t even inform the parents until the kid is dead.

“In a prestigious medical journal, doctors from Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children have laid out policies and procedures for administering medically assisted death to children, including scenarios where the parents would not be informed until after the child dies.

“The article appears just three months before the Canadian Council of Academies is due to report to Parliament on the medical consensus about extending voluntary euthanasia in circumstances currently forbidden by law. The Canadian Council of Academies is specifically looking at extending so-called assisted dying to patients under 18, psychiatric patients and patients who have expressed a preference for euthanasia before they were rendered incapable by Alzheimer’s or some other disease.

“The Sept. 21 paper written by Sick Kids doctors, administrators and ethicists was published in the British Medical Journal’s J Med Ethics and backed by the University of Toronto’s Joint Centre for Bioethics.

“In a flowchart that outlines how a medically induced death would occur at Sick Kids, authors Carey DeMichelis, Randi Zlotnik Shaul and Adam Rapoport do not mention conversation with family or parents about how the child dies until after the death occurs in the ‘reflection period.’”

     It’s almost as if Canada wants to solve its problem with trying to help people by just killing the people it needs to help.

“This is the promise of medical assistance in dying: that vulnerable people who want to die for the wrong reasons will be encouraged to live, as they always have been — while people who want to die for the right reasons will have their autonomous decision upheld. If even a single vulnerable person were pushed into assisted death, it would be a scandal to the system. That is why safeguards were put into place.

“And yet stories describing just this — a system that does encourage the vulnerable to seek medical death — are coming fast and hard lately. A number of recent news articles have reported on Canadians who, driven by poverty and a lack of access to adequate health care, housing, and social services, have turned to the country’s euthanasia system. In multiple cases, veterans requesting help from Veterans Affairs Canada — at least one asked for PTSD treatment, another for a ramp for her wheelchair — were asked by case workers if they would like to apply for euthanasia.”

     Welfare states suddenly become affordable when the people who need the handout suddenly don’t because they are dead.

“Canada’s CityNews reports on Amir Farsoud, a man in Ontario who has applied for ‘medical assistance in dying’ (MAiD). The reason for his application is not that he is terminally ill, or even that he is depressed, but rather that ‘his rooming house is up for sale, and he can’t find anywhere else to live that he can afford.’ In fact, he tells the reporter, ‘I don’t wish to be dead. . . . I still want to be here.’”

     TTFN.

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