Image: "Sarco-pod", invented by Philip Nitschke (source | license).

10,000+ Canadians were euthanized in 2021. As if that isn't shocking enough, the rate of medically supervised deaths is now set to grow, with new legislation coming into effect in 2024 which allows mental health patients, including those with substance abuse issues, to seek "Physician Assisted Death", or PAD. To be elligible the patient need have no physical ailment at all.

I had always thought of Canadians as free spirted, easy going people, a bit like Aussies. It's interesting that these two countries have gone down a similar path in many ways. It now appears Canada has gone a bit further down the path.

When the concept of legal euthanasia was first introduced to the public it was seen only as a last resort for people in extreme pain with terminal illnesses. That is how it was sold, and nobody ever hinted that the criteria would be expanded to include people who were just miserable. Those who opposed legalising euthanasia were painted as religious bigots who value church dogma over human suffering. Euthanasia was presented as a moral and ethical practice, motivated by kindness.

Take for example this Huff Post article from 2016. The article is titled: "Religious Believers Are Trying to Create Barriers to Assisted Dying". The main thrust of this article is to alert us to the threat to the rights of those who want PAD from those doctors who refuse to provide such services or referals.

Imagine a patient on her deathbed who wishes to exercise her right to a physician assisted death. If her doctors refuse to discuss assisted dying or provide a referral, her options are near zero. She is unlikely to have the energy to advocate for herself. And even if she does, what options will she have?

Assisted suicide advocates want us to believe that this practice is ethical, kind and progressive, whereas the opposing view is reactionary and based on archaic religious beliefs. When the arguments were confined to the merits of assisting the terminally ill to die as opposed to letting them die slowly and painfully, they seemed to make sense to many people. In this way the legislation was able to pass into law in many countries.

When a person is dying and suffering greatly, the idea of ending it quicky and "with dignity" indeed seems reasonable, but the problem is that without any spiritual compass, and under the influence of humanistic doctrines and the demand for "equality", the concept of "unbearable suffering" gets expanded to include subjective perceptions. Without a deep religious conviction about the sanctity of life underpinning law, terminating a life has no inherent moral meaning. So, if killing a person "ends their suffering" this is interpreted by humanist thinking as an act of kindness, irrespective of any physical ailments. This is possible because the atheist/humanist perspective does not view the human being as a creature imbued with an immortal soul. In such a perspective, where there is no God to start with, there can be no special sanctity in human life. 

Just as it is not seen as inhumane to shoot a lame horse, helping a hopelessly depressed and useless individual die is eminently reasonable, all the more so because such a defective human is going to be a burden on society - an unnecessary carbon footprint wasting resources. At the end of the day the death is "voluntary", so nobody's rights are being violated.

The arguments for medically assisted suicide at this stage revolve around the concept of "rights" and "equality". Firstly, it is your right to end your life with dignity if you are experiencing "unbearable suffering", and secondly everyone, by law, should have equal access to medical assisted suicide services if they are provided by the government.

Anyone with a religious argument against medically assisted suicide is ultimately confronted with the retort that it is "voluntary", and therefore it's none of your business. However, there is a problem with the concept of "voluntary" when we are talking about people with mental illness. Most countries (including Canada) have provisions in law to incarcerate and forcibly medicate people with severe mental illness. So, in this instance, we are already talking about a category of people who may under existing law be compelled to do things against their will for their own good or for the "greater good" of protecting society from a raging mad person. If the person is incurable, then the best solution may be to let them "die with dignity", even if they disagree, and since they are mentally ill, their non-cooperation may be simply interpreted as a symptom of the illness.

Prior to the new legislation in Canada, the line in the sand we would never cross was euthanasing those who have no organic illness. The new line in the sand "that we will never cross" is euthanasing people against their will. Given the way goal posts have moved so quickly in the last few years, one wonders how long that line in the sand will hold?

After all, there are so many utilitarian justifications for eliminating useless eaters, not the least which being the fact that we are in an unprecedented "climate emergency". Such dystopian horror has unfolded in the past. Under the eugenic policies of National Socialist Germany in the 1930s, the mentally ill were sterilised. A few years later, as Germany went to war and resources became scarce, they were euthanised "for the greater good". 

Writers and thinkers who for many years condemned religion as the cause of all wars and injustice, while upholding "science and reason" as their guiding light, have paved the way for these unfortunate developments. Such influencers also tend to be passionate about protecting the "greater good" by mandating vaccines, or advocating for climate change policies and population reduction goals. As the notion of individual rights gives way to the idea of collective rights under the influence of such "thinkers", governments can suddenly become malevolent in ways that are hard to imagine or predict. This was demonstrated clearly during the covid years, 2020-2022. Masses of people, previously indoctrinated by the concepts of "rights" and "equality", passively endorsed authoritarian, abusive policies because they believed they were protecting the rights of the society as a whole. 

It is in this way that the rabbit hole of voluntary euthanasia may ultimately lead us into the abyss.