(LifeSiteNews) — On this week’s episode of the Van Maren Show, Jonathon explores three arguments against the Canadian Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) program that he compiled with Blaise Alleyne, President of Toronto Right to Life and Outreach Director for the Canadian Centre for Bioethical Reform, in a book called A Guide to Discussing Assisted Suicide after debating the issue on college campuses.
Jonathon begins by pointing out the real distinction between assisted suicide and euthanasia, and that Canada’s MAID program, while billing itself as assisted suicide, is really a euthanasia program. Describing the language used in Canada as “Orwellian,” Jonathon argues that the MAID program consists of “medical professionals who are actively killing patients.”
Describing the difference between the two practices, Jonathon uses the laws in California and Oregon as an example, pointing out that assisted suicide entails that the one seeking to die would have to administer the drugs leading to his death himself, regardless of whether or not someone was in the room with him.
The Canadian program, however, strictly entails that medical professionals kill those seeking death through lethal injection, something that has resulted in people viewing the practice as “end-of-life care,” giving “a lot of people moral permission to actually opt for euthanasia, because it doesn’t seem like euthanasia.”
The second argument Jonathon lays out deals with the issue of human rights. According to Jonathon, however, the way MAID is practiced precludes any conception of human rights. “Nobody is suggesting that suicide actually become a universal right that applies to all Canadians,” Jonathon points out, explaining that the MAID program acts like a eugenics program, whereby “there are those who the government has predetermined are so worthy of life that if they apply for assisted suicide, they will receive not suicide assisted, they will receive suicide prevention. It is illegal for them to kill themselves, and it is illegal for somebody to help them kill themselves.”
Continuing his argument by positing the inherent contradiction in the argument favoring the MAID program as a “human right,” Jonathon states that “in Canada, you don’t get to decide [to die] the way that you want to; people that the government has decided ahead of time have lives not worth living, get to decide how they get to die. Nobody else does.”
As the sanctity of human life is degraded around the world, we are seeing a particularly horrifying phenomenon – the euthanasia of children.
As if killing adults is not bad enough, giving lethal injections to children was first legalised in Belgium in 2014, and the Dutch health minister has recently announced that the country is expanding eligibility for children to be given lethal injections, from infants and older teenagers, to include children aged one to twelve. In both countries, there were reports that these so called mercy killings of children occurred before it was legalised.
Sign our petition to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, calling on them to take action against states that permit this horrific practise.
In The Netherlands from 2005 to 2018, official reports indicate that 14 children between the ages of 12 and 18 were actively euthanased; that is, about 1 per year. However, a death certificate study in 2001, of children aged 1 to 17, in found that there were about 5 cases per year (0.7% of all deaths of minors; narrowly defined as only those with a request from the child).
Importantly, another 15 children per year (2.0%) were actively euthanased with no specific request from the child, but instead one from the parents. This 2001 death certificate study occurred before the law changed to permit euthanasia of minors, hence illegal euthanasia of minors (older or younger than 12) was happening.
In Belgium in 2007/2008, a death certificate study revealed that while there were no cases of active euthanasia narrowly defined as by request only, 7.9% of all deaths were in fact active euthanasia (by lethal drugs) without an explicit request from the child, amounting to about 10 per year in Flanders alone. Again, this occurred at a time when euthanasia of minors was illegal in Belgium.
Reports from Belgium and Holland up until 2010 show that between 7% and 9% of all infant deaths involved active euthanasia by lethal injection.
This push to kill sick children is not just happening in Europe. In Canada, a parliamentary committee has recommended that Medical Aid in Dying (MAID) should be extended to ‘mature minors’.
This Report of the Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying, recommended that ‘the government of Canada amend the eligibility criteria for MAID set out in the Criminal Code to include minors’, with the stipulation that, without lethal intervention, their death should be ‘reasonably foreseeable’.
The committee emphasised that ‘MAID should not be denied on the basis of age alone’ and therefore, it should be accessible to any child whom doctors believe has ‘requisite decision-making capacity’. What child has the capacity to make a life or death decision?
Horrifyingly, the report further recommended that, ‘where appropriate, the parents or guardians of a mature minor be consulted in the course of the assessment process for MAID, but that the will of a minor who is found to have the requisite decision-making capacity ultimately take priority’. This means that parents would be powerless to stop an anxious teenager who wants to be euthanised from being killed by doctors.
Sign our petition to stand up for sick children and their parents.
We are calling on the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child to make a statement condemning the euthanasia of children, and to take action against state parties who practise it.
The Declaration of the Rights of the Child states that “the child, by reason of his physical and mental immaturity, needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection, before as well as after birth”. The Committee on the Rights of the Child, as the body responsible for monitoring implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, has a clear duty to take action to protect children from being killed by the state.
Sign the petition now!
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Jonathon further states that this is the argument that has worked best on campuses, explaining that medical students have told him that upon hearing the argument their instructors, other students, and medical professionals have changed their minds on assisted suicide.
The final argument Jonathon posits against assisted suicide deals with its claim that it alleviates suffering.
Jonathon states the argument in two parts. First, he posits that it is impossible to have a state without a state religion, in contradiction to a state’s claim that if it is confessionally secular, it is neutral. “There is a throne at the center of every culture, and something is sitting on that throne,” he says. “And if you don’t have the God of the Bible on that throne, you will have something else.”
“When you make the argument that assisted suicide alleviates suffering … you are premising that argument on the idea that there is nothing after death,” Jonathon notes. “You’re not neutral at all. You’re actually making the case that there is no heaven, there is no hell, and when people die, this is all there is, because when you say that assisted suicide alleviates suffering … there’s nothing else. Their pain is over.”
Beginning the second part of the argument, Jonathon posits that assisted suicide compounds suffering, based on the fact that people do not subsist as individuals, but as members of communities and families.
“This idea that a suicide … alleviates suffering flies in the face of everything we not only know about the human condition, but it flies in the face of everything we know about human family,” Jonathon begins.
“And … the stories that are coming out in the Canadian press and stories I’ve been hearing personally really highlight the fact that assisted suicide does not alleviate suffering, because we’re actually starting to now see accounts come out from the various family members of those who have died by assisted suicide,” he continues.
“These people are not only heartbroken, they feel angry and betrayed because the medical establishment, the very establishment they trust their family members with, have in some cases betrayed them by offering them the right to assisted suicide.”
For more on Jonathon’s trio of arguments against assisted suicide, tune in to this week’s episode of The Van Maren Show.
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