White Coat euthanasia: A License to Kill in the Name of Care?

Caryn Lipson

September 15, 2024

Preface:

This article is the first of several delving into MAiD (medical assistance in dying) in Canada. MAiD includes both euthanasia — when the doctor kills the patient and assisted suicide — when the doctor provides the patient with the means to kill themselves. Ostensibly, this is a compassionate way of ending someone's intolerable and untreatable suffering.

MAiD was legalized in Canada in 2016. Assisted suicide and even euthanasia have been made legal in several countries so far; other governments are working towards passing such laws in their own countries or expanding the ones that do exist. Canada's MAiD, however, has seemingly run off the rails and is now available to those who are not terminally ill, whose death is not foreseeable. It is now regarded as a medical choice which doctors are required to offer to patients as they would any other treatment.

Healthcare practitioners are required to notify the appropriate organ donor organization when a patient's death is imminent, including those of individuals who are considering MAiD; hospices, even religious ones, cannot refuse to kill their patients. Today, Canada leads the world in harvesting organs from people who have let the medical establishment kill them.

While there have been numerous articles and videos published on the topic over the years, they have been spread out over a long period of time and they cover many different related aspects. This makes it difficult to see the forest — the enormity of what is actually transpiring — for the trees — the many different changes and aspects related to MAiD and organ donation. This series, to a large extent, attempts to reveal the broad picture of the rapidly expanding practice of legal killing.

Among the issues discussed/raised are:

How has the definition of murder changed to allow for MAiD?
Is it compassionate to help/encourage someone to agree to being killed?
Can a person's life expetancy be reasonably predicted?
Is brain death a reasonable means of declaring death?
How do people who are killed by MAiD die?
What is different about MAiD in Canada that enables it to lead all other countries in organ donations following euthanasia and assisted suicide?
How do MAiD victims who agree to donate their organs die?
How are doctors compensated for killing their patients?
Are there monetary incentives to encourage people to allow themselves to be killed and donate their organs and would this be akin to the CCP's organ harvesting program?
What resemblance does MAiD have to euthanasia in Nazi Germany?

As you follow the series you might consider the following:

How prevalent are euthanasia and assisted suicide
Can/should morality and ethics change with the times?
Is MAiD okay because that's what people want and nothing needs to change?
Does it need to be stopped and how can that happen?

MAiD to kill

Behind the veneer of medical respectability and personal choice, doctors and nurses can legally kill patients through MAID (medical assistance in dying), Canada's euphemism for euthanasia and assisted suicide which became legal in the country in 2016.

Canada legalized euthanasia in June 2016. In March 2021 Canada passed Bill C-7 that removed the "terminal illness" requirement in the law, created a two-tier law by removing the waiting period for people who were terminally ill and adding a 90-day waiting period for people who were not terminally ill and allowing euthanasia for mental illness alone. Euthanasia for mental illness alone remains contentious and has currently been delayed until March 2027.

Euthanasia Prevention Coalition‍‍

‍"If it's not a doctor doing it, it's murder"

Since 2021, when Canada removed the prerequisite for the victim to be terminally ill, the country's assisted suicide laws have become progressively more liberal to the point that MAiD is being offered to people who want to live but need assistance, which the government is reticent to provide, as reported by The Gold Report.

To explore questions about MAiD, Unveil TV's Kooman Brothers have produced a documentary series, "MAiD in Canada." For the documentary titled "If it's not a doctor doing it, it's murder," they interviewed ARPA (Association for Reformed Political Action) Canada lawyer John Sikkema who explained why in any other context MAiD would be murder.

John Sikkema, a legal counsel, highlights the strange line between medical procedure and murder as he describes the progression of MAiD in Canada in just a few short years and how MAiD allows patients to choose murder over suicide.

In the interview Sikkema describes (@19:34) the thin line between legal and criminal actions created by this law. Before 2016, it was a crime for someone to encourage or help someone commit suicide and actually doing it for them was homicide, i.e., murder.

Kooman brothers:

Previous to the 2016 enactment . . . what would the verbiage be? Would it be homicide or murder to do what is being done in assisted suicide or euthanasia? How would that fit within the criminal code context?

Sikkema:

There are two offenses at issue in the Carter case [a 2015 euthanasia case which was the impetus for the 2016 law]. One was assisting suicide, so it's a crime to assist someone in committing suicide. It's also a crime to counsel or encourage someone to commit suicide even if you don't practically help them do so in some way.

The other law was homicide; intentional homicide, right, Homicide is simply ending a person's life or causing someone's death. And, actually, the vast majority, I think close to 99% in Canada of the cases, the euthanasia cases which are the MAiD cases are euthanasia. That is, were it not for exceptions in the criminal code they would be homicide, they would be murder.

People are more reluctant to kill themselves than to allow a doctor to do it:

Intentional homicide is, in the criminal law, murder, and that's because in most cases people choose to have the doctor euthanize them rather than to use the option of getting the lethal prescription and taking it themselves. Right? It's essentially easier to be passive, to show up and tell the doctor, yes you may end my life now, and to passively receive that, have the doctor do that to you. And in fact, in regimes where only assisted suicide is legal, the numbers are actually considerably lower, suggesting it's more difficult to kind of go through with it yourself, pressing the button or squeezing the ball that kind of adds the poison to the IV is more difficult to do it yourself. (Emphases added.)

Killing as a "moral duty?"

In 2019, Quebec was entertaining the idea of loosening the restrictions on euthanasia from allowing it only for people whose death was expected in the "foreseeable future" (an undefined term) to include people who had "cases of Alzheimer’s Disease, dementia, or other illness/disease that causes an individual to lose their faculties." As Suzanne Hamner wrote for The Sons of Liberty, the government was, at that time, also threatening to shut down a non-faith-based hospice if they didn't allow for euthanasia on site.

Along with this was the Trudeau government’s legalization of human euthanasia in June 2016 that is now being used to threaten penalties against a non-faith-based hospice if the hospice fails to follow the government mandate and allow its patients to be “killed” on-site through the medically assisted death program.

Hamner pointed out to readers that the argument had already been made that "[o]nce government can decide or determine when life begins or when newborn life is acceptable to murder, then government can decide or determine at what point life should end." She also reminded readers that Canada has government-controlled health care.

She quoted the Montreal Gazette regarding the purported call by Quebecers for better access to death as a moral duty.

A committee of experts is recommending the government expand the framework of a medically assisted death to include the concept of prior consent for serious and incurable ailments.

But Quebec will nevertheless launch a non-partisan public consultation process before deciding whether to proceed with the change, Health Minister Danielle McCann announced Friday.

“We have heard the heartfelt appeal of Quebecers who are suffering and calling for a widening of the rules,” McCann said at a news conference. “Quebec society is evolving on this sensitive issue and we have a moral duty to respond. all together.” (Emphasis added.)

. . .

The recommendation follows a Sept. 11 Superior Court ruling that granted two Quebecers the right to seek medically assisted death despite the fact they had been turned aside by physicians.

The judge, Christine Baudouin, gave the government six months to modify its law. It currently stipulates a person can have assisted death only if they are near an “end of life” state.

No matter what you call it, murder is murder

Hamner concludes with what would have once been the reaction of most of the population, that no matter what you call it, it is still murder.

Anyone else wondering how many “Quebecers” actually contacted the government because of their suffering and are now calling for government to murder their loved ones or themselves? This is absolutely insane! Regardless of some pretend law, no medical professional should even consider participation in this Nazi-style population purge because it is illegal, since it is murder disguised under some terminology that has a hint of health care, and it is unethical. If this is what Quebecers call “evolving”, it certainly is evolving toward evil, not good. (Emphasis added.)

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Learn more about euthanasia:

Below is the first documentary in the series about MAiD in Canada, by UnVeil TV's Kooman brothers.

Life on Film presents MAiD in Canada, Episode 1, MAiD for the Vulnerable - A new Canadian docuseries by Vancouver-based Unveil Studios. . . . Unveil TV interviews Canadian medical experts, disability advocates, legal experts, veterans and other leading voices to uncover the truth about doctor-assisted suicide. Filmmaker Kevin Dunn interviews the producers of the film, The Kooman Bros. from Vancouver as they present this first powerful episode in the series

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Check back for the next article in this series, entitled "Is euthanasia compassionate if offered to those who don’t want to die and doctors misjudge imminent death?," when The Gold Report reports on the experiences of chronically ill or disabled people who have been offered MAiD and the uncertainty surrounding doctors' declarations of imminent death.

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