Summary
Euthanasia accounted for 4.7% of deaths in Canada in 2023, with 15,300 people opting for assisted dying—a 16% increase, though slower than prior years.
Most recipients had terminal illnesses, primarily cancer, and 96% were white, sparking questions about disparities.
Quebec, at 37% of cases, remains Canada’s euthanasia hotspot.
Since legalizing assisted dying in 2016, Canada has expanded access, now covering chronic conditions and planning to include mental illnesses by 2027.
Critics, citing rapid growth and controversial cases, warn of insufficient safeguards, while proponents highlight strict eligibility criteria. Debate continues globally.
Why does length even come into it? This may be an argument from absurdity, but imagine someone born with such a debilitating birth defect that the only way to keep them alive beyond a few minutes is by putting them in a machine that keeps them alive. They have a fully functioning brain but are fully encased in this machine and only experience darkness and pain. At what point does their life become meaningful? 50 years? 80? If doctors can keep them alive for 2000 years, is that life better or worse than if they died after 6 minutes?
What I am getting at is that the length of the life has very little to do with its quality. And when it comes to medically assisted dying, almost nothing to do with it as people have to be over 18 with demonstrably low quality of life.
Why is that a problem? Like, our first priority should be providing good healthcare (and that includes mental healthcare), but if someone doesn’t want to live anymore, why is it anyone’s business but their own? That sounds to me like the most important of human freedoms. Being kept alive against one’s will seems like the most horrible, criminal, torture.
And what do companies have to do with it? Companies don’t come into it at all in MAID.
We live in capitalist countries. Anything and everything will have money involved. Even public healthcare involves money changing hands with private contractors and such. There is no way to get around this fact. And wherever money changes hands it creates the potential for perverse incentives that we are possibly opening the door wide open for.
I see what you’re saying. I think if somebody cannot sustain life by themselves in a practical sense, then it’s a different scenario. For example someone being born in the scenario you outlined would not live without intervention. However, we are talking about the inverse. A body that would otherwise survive (at least for the near future) and we are artificially ending it.
It feels wrong to me in both scenarios. A sort of symmetry in a way.
I think here I need to separate two groups of people. 1) somebody who has a terminal illness and is in pain. I think in these scenarios, I am more open to the idea. 2) people who are depressed or in some sort of chronic pain who otherwise could live a full life
In the 2nd scenario, I think that suicidal thoughts is a mental illness. It’s not something healthy adjusted people think, even when they are in pain. By indulging in their desire, we are doing them a disservice. Like I brought up before, I made the analogy to addiction.
When someone is addicted, they make the conscious decision to use a drug. It’s their body, it’s their choice. They have the autonomy to do whatever they like- even if that choice is going to kill them. For example with fentanyl leading to an eventual overdose.
I think we, as a society, need to take care of these people. We need to provide them treatment and get them off the drugs. The solution isn’t just to put them in a box and give them a ton of drugs so they can use until they die. To me, it feels like we’re throwing away their human dignity in the name of individualism. We should take care of each other, not indulge each other’s worst thoughts and actions.
This is what makes me feel wrong about this.
In this case, corporations oppose MAID because sick and dying people need a lot of very expensive health care (skilled nursing, hospice care, etc) so they would much rather force them to stay alive in order to continue profiting off them.
Just because the body can keep going doesn’t mean it’s a worthwhile life. Imagine yourself lying in a hospital, conscious but unable to move, unable to speak coherently, unable to even control your bowels. Add unending pain to the mix. What life is that? You would condemn a person in that state to perpetual torture just because ending their suffering “feels wrong” to you? Forcing that person to continue living if they don’t want to feels a lot more wrong to me.
These are medical problems that should obviously be treated medically as a first resort. But a lot of those situations have no solution and a full life is not possible. Chronic pain, even when it wont kill you, is incredibly damaging to the psyche and limiting to one’s quality of life. Depression isn’t just someone feeling sad - it’s a physiological condition that there might be no recovering from. If someone (in cooperation with medical professionals) determines that there will never be a significant improvement to their quality of life, who are you to tell them they can’t end it?
Dying with dignity is the main goal of medically assisted death. There is no dignity in living months or years wishing, pleading, praying for death but not dying, or worse: being kept alive against your will.
It’s not like these perverse incentives don’t exist without MAID. Nursing Homes, etc. have an incentive to keep people alive and in their care as long as possible.
sure but it doesn’t take too much imagination to come up with some dystopian futures where human life is not treated with the sanctity that we are used to
i think maybe that’s my key objection here. it uncorks this wine bottle that cannot be resealed. we are forever fundamentally changing our relationship with death and destigmatizing the act of snuffing out a life.
i think it’s something most people have not really put much thought into the long term implications of this ideological shift