At first, Canadians who wanted “medical assistance in dying” (MAID) had to have been declared within six months of natural death. As of 2021, though, even citizens not suffering from “terminal illnesses” are permitted by Canadian law to enlist doctors to help them end their lives.
That year alone, more than 200 Canadians without dire prognoses availed themselves of the country’s MAID program. Since 2016, more than 13,000 medically assisted deaths have been recorded in our northern neighbor.
Careening down the Canuck slippery slope, an amendment to the law, slated to kick in in 2027, will allow Canadians whose sole medical condition is a mental illness to end their lives. In other words, someone with a mental illness, even a treatable one, is considered sufficiently competent to judge that he is better off dead.
In Belgium and the Netherlands, a person’s claim of “intolerable suffering” is sufficient for accessing doctors’ help in ending their lives. And the option is available to children too.
Now, New York’s own “Medical Aid in Dying Act” has been approved by both state legislatures and currently sits on the desk of Governor Kathy Hochul, awaiting her signature or veto. The proposed law is perched higher than Canada’s on the slope—like Canada’s original MAID law, it requires the diagnosis of a “terminal illness”—but the incline is as slimy as ever.
Stories abound in Canada about poor and disabled people being pressured to consider suicide.
But the proposed NYS MAID law is more than just another troubling example of how society has lost its moral bearings—here, the conviction that life is worth preserving only if it meets certain “standards” of liveliness. Societal sanction of ending the lives of “terminal” patients (and all living things since Adam Harishon, of course, have a terminus) may come to endanger the lives of our loved ones, and our own lives, as well.
Dr. Mark D’Souza, a Canadian chronic pain specialist who retired in 2017 when his government refused to protect the right of physicians to decline to help patients end their own lives, has decried the “shaming and censorship of those who disagree with the current orthodoxy on euthanasia.”
He warns that “in our utilitarian and utopian zeal, the right to die today may become the duty to die tomorrow.”
It’s not as outlandish a scenario as it might seem.
In 2015, a California mother of four named Stephanie Packer was told by her health insurance company that chemotherapy drugs prescribed by her doctors would not be covered.Later, her insurance company helpfully informed her that another option, physician-assisted suicide, would be available for $1.20.
She declined (and, incidentally, is still alive), but it’s not hard to imagine insurers concerned with costs regarding the cheap option as the best one. While the New York bill as written prohibits insurance companies from denying treatment and forcing patients to use MAID, the slope, as the example of Canada shows, is undeniably slippery.
Agudath Israel noted in a court brief that its Chayim Aruchim division has handled hundreds of cases where critically ill patients and their families were pressured to allow physicians to withhold lifesaving treatment in end-of-life situations.
In some cases, healthcare facilities have withdrawn nutrition and hydration from patients even over “the adamant objections of the healthcare decision makers for the patient.”
What’s more, even leaving aside healthcare facilities, insurance companies and doctors’ pressures, it can’t be denied that a societal attitude, even a deeply objectionable one, can affect us all, as wider society has fully embraced a “right to die.”
Our mesorah is unequivocal about the fact that life is not about rights but about right—that is to say, about right and wrong, about responsibilities. And it teaches us that life is supremely valuable, and that we have no permission to end it at will.
May Governor Hochul be responsible enough to wield her veto.
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