Here’s an excerpt from Unnatural Death: Medicine’s Descent from Healing to Killing (Discovery Institute Press 2024), Richard Weikart’s latest book on the way that medicine is currently embracing a death culture.

From the Publisher: In this wide-ranging history of euthanasia and assisted suicide, historian Richard Weikart takes us from the ancient Jews, Greeks, and Romans to the contemporary scene—where the urge to help people kill themselves has intensified, even to the point of pushing the reluctant towards death. How did we reach this place?

These excerpts, which discuss the rapid growth of euthanasia in Canada, are taken from pp. 143–45.

In late 2022 Christine Gauthier, a retired corporal, paraplegic, and former Paralympian, testified before a Canadian parliamentary committee that she had been having a long battle with Veterans Affairs Canada to try to get them to install a wheelchair ramp at her home. Without this ramp, she had to crawl to get out of her house. In 2019, when she stressed her dire need for this ramp, a Veterans Affairs case manager replied, “Madam, if you are really so desperate, we can give you medical assistance in dying now.”

Gauthier was outraged by this offer of death; she explained, “I was like, ‘I can’t believe that you will… give me an injection to help me die, but you will not give me the tools I need to help me live. It was really shocking to hear that kind of comment.” Even Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who is a keen supporter of euthanasia and assisted suicide, was angered by the case manager’s response and promised to rein in such abuses.¹

How did Canada reach this point, where euthanasia and assisted suicide are not only legal and acceptable, but urged on people who simply need basic alterations to their homes? And how did some states in the US come to legalize assisted suicide? It didn’t happen overnight…

Canada Lunges Forward

Canada’s move toward legalizing assisted suicide and euthanasia began in 2015, when the Canadian Supreme Court argued that the ban against assisted dying was unconstitutional. The following year the Canadian parliament legalized both assisted suicide and euthanasia, calling them collectively Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD). Under this new law adult Canadian patients who have a “grievous and irremediable medical condition” can request assisted suicide or euthanasia. The law clarifies that the qualifying medical condition must be “in an advanced state of irreversible decline wherein the patient is experiencing intolerable suffering and whose natural death has become reasonably foreseeable.” Two physicians or nurse practitioners must confirm that the patient is eligible, and after the patient’s request there must be a ten-day waiting period, unless the patient has less than ten days to live.⁴⁵

In 2017, the first full year that MAiD was in effect, 2,838 patients ended their lives with the help of a physician or nurse. The numbers dying under MAiD have increased dramatically every year, reaching 10,064 in 2021, which constituted about 3.3 percent of the total deaths in Canada. This brought the total number of Canadians dying under MAiD since its legalization to 31,644. The Canadian government has also expanded eligibility for MAiD. In 2019 a court in Quebec ruled that the requirement that a patient’s death must be reasonably foreseeable was illegal. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his government, who are strong proponents of MAiD, decided not to appeal the court case, but to bring Canadian law into line with the court ruling. Thus, in 2021 Canada dropped the requirement that a person must be terminally ill, and 219 people who died under MAiD in 2021 were not terminally ill. The 2021 MAiD law also opened the door for MAiD for patients who are suffering only from a mental illness, though it delayed that eligibility until March 17, 2023. Because of widespread concern and opposition to allowing MAiD for people with mental illnesses, the Canadian government announced that it would delay implementation for another year, pushing it back to March 2024.⁴⁶ Then, in February 2024, the Canadian government voted to again delay implementation, this time to March 2027. ⁴⁷

Death as a Cure for Poverty

Canadian government surveys of people requesting MAiD show that the “intolerable suffering” that the law mentions as an eligibility requirement is usually not physical pain. Rather, the most commonly cited reason for MAiD was “loss of ability to engage in meaningful activities” (86 percent in the 2021 survey), followed closely by “loss of ability to perform activities of daily life” (83 percent).48 In a few high-profile cases in Canada, people with various illnesses have requested MAiD not because of the illnesses they have (which only serve as the excuse to gain them eligibility), but because they lack housing or social services. In 2022 a fifty-four-year-old man, Amir Farsoud, who suffers considerable pain from a back injury, applied for MAiD. His painful condition would likely qualify him for MaiD. However, he was not applying because of his physical pain, but because the home he was renting was up for sale and his income was too meager to find other housing. As he explained, “I don’t want to die but I don’t want to be homeless more than I don’t want to die.”⁴⁹

In 2023 a homeless man in Ontario, 37-year-old Tyler Dunlop, also applied for MAiD because his homelessness brought him to despair for his future and caused him to suffer social isolation. Dunlop is not physically ill in any way, but he explained, “I looked at my future, and I said, ‘What am I going to be in the next 10 years?’ Same thing: wandering around homeless.”⁵⁰ Thus, some desperate Canadians view MAiD as a way to escape poverty, homelessness, or other problems spawned by inadequate income or social services.

Creeping Forward

Until the late twentieth century euthanasia and assisted suicide were illegal everywhere in the US and Canada. Oregon broke that taboo in 1997 by legalizing assisted suicide—but not euthanasia—for those with terminal illnesses.

Since then, ten states plus Washington DC have legalized assisted suicide. Assisted suicide is still illegal in forty states of the US, but assisted suicide proponents are actively lobbying in many states to overturn the prohibitions on assisted suicide. Polling in the US suggests that many Americans support assisted suicide for those with terminal illnesses, so unless public opinion shifts, it seems likely that more states will eventually legalize assisted suicide.

Canada has gone even further by legalizing euthanasia and assisted suicide in 2016. Further, since 2021 Canadians don’t even have to have a terminal illness to qualify for euthanasia. They only have to get two physicians to certify that they are suffering intolerably.

Based on the track record of the past few generations, the cultural movement towards death would seem to be a slippery slope. In the chapters to follow I will seek to show that it is, but not quite an inevitable one. Indeed, the trend can be reversed.

Euthanasia’s End Game…

In the spring of 2023 a young woman, Kathrin Mentler, sought help at the Vancouver General Hospital’s Access and Assessment Center. She was suffering from depression and anxiety, and in the past she had repeatedly attempted suicide.

“That day,” she explained, “my goal was to keep myself safe. I was thinking of maybe trying to get myself admitted to hospital because I was in crisis.” The counselor who met with her told her that the mental health system was overwhelmed, so she would not be able to get help immediately. Then the counselor shocked her by asking if she would like to apply for euthanasia based on her mental suffering.

Mentler, who was hoping for help resisting suicidal thoughts that day, described how the counselor’s advice affected her: “That made me feel like my life was worthless or a problem that could be solved if I chose MAiD [i.e., euthanasia].”

The story is distressing on multiple levels. It shows how the euthanasia option can and does become a means of sidestepping the hard work of providing care to the suffering. And since the story involves euthanasia being offered to someone merely because the person was in emotional crisis, it illustrates how the circle of people deemed eligible for euthanasia or assisted suicide keeps widening, confirming the validity of worries that, once a line has been crossed, the culture of death will tend to spread.¹

Feature image credit: Jeremy Wong – Unsplash