The Collapse of Consent in CanadaCanada’s surging number of assisted suicides reveals that consent is a weak and malleable thing.
Declan Leary
Nov 19, 2022
Amir Farsoud is going to be murdered. The 54-year-old Canadian, whose story went viral online this week, is in the last stages of approval for “medical assistance in dying” (MAID), the neat bureaucratic euphemism for our northern neighbor’s rapidly advancing euthanasia program. In 2016, the country authorized physicians to kill their patients in cases of terminal illness or “reasonably foreseeable” death; Farsoud is being euthanized for back pain.
At least, that is the medical justification being given. In reality, he is struggling financially and about to lose his home. As Farsoud sees it, he has run out of options. He told Toronto’s CityNews: “I don’t want to die. But I don’t want to be homeless more than I don’t want to die.”
Farsoud feels pushed to this decision, and it is not hard to see why. Yet others have been nudged toward MAID by far more direct means. Roger Foley has dealt with medical troubles for most of his life, and a chronic illness has left him confined to a bed and in full-time hospital care for the last six years. He is currently suing Victoria Hospital, where he has been treated in that time, for encouraging him to seek MAID against his stated wishes. Their reasoning, Foley claims, is that it is much too expensive to keep him alive.
Alan Nichols’s case was different. In 2019 Nichols, then 61, was hospitalized in British Columbia “over fears he might be suicidal.” Inexplicably, a commitment meant to prevent Nichols from suicide led in short order to euthanasia. Nichols had a long history of depression, but the medical justification given for his killing was “hearing loss.” His brother Gary and other family members claim he was not mentally competent at the time of his supposed decision, and that hospital staff inappropriately assisted in his request for MAID. Gary reported the misconduct to police, and says that “Alan was basically put to death.”
* * *
And these are just the people on whom it didn’t work—those who rejected the coercion and went public about it (or, in Nichols’s case, those whose family spoke out, even once it was too late). There is no telling how many of the tens of thousands of Canadian victims of euthanasia were successfully talked into it by death-cult witch-doctors or death-panel bureaucrats, and went to their graves without ever making that part of the story known.
No doubt, much of the problem here is exactly what Foley and his allies suggest: budget calculus. Keeping people with chronic illnesses alive is expensive work, and in a socialized health care system like Canada’s all incentives operate in the direction of limiting such costs.
But there are deeper evils at work as well, as made evident by Canada’s pending expansion of MAID to people dealing exclusively with mental illness. Not only is “reasonably foreseeable” death no longer a requirement; starting next year, no physical ailment at all will be needed to justify euthanasia. Plain and simple suicide is becoming a state-sanctioned practice.
* * *
Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-collapse-of-consent-in-canada/
