Legalizing euthanasia corrupts everything — the ethics of medicine, the public’s perception of people experiencing illness, disability, or elder frailty, the media that continually swoon over medics who kill.
This latter phenomenon is on vivid display in a National Post story profiling a doctor who spends half her time legally killing patients by lethal injection, and most of the rest legally killing fetuses. In “This Kindly MAID Doctor Helped More Than 400 People Die: How Many Assisted Deaths are Too Many?” we learn that Dr. Ellen Wiebe loves her work:
For Wiebe, medical assistance in dying (MAID) is “incredibly rewarding” work. She hasn’t faced nearly the same sort of stigma she once faced as an abortion provider and says that while she and her MAID colleagues “all work within the law,” she’s also not as “conservative” as some. . . .
Most recently, Wiebe was featured in the BBC documentary, Better off Dead?, an exploration of the assisted suicide debate by British actor and comedian Liz Carr, an international disability rights activist who doesn’t believe assisted suicide is safe for the likes of her or other disabled people. In a clip that made the rounds on social media, a camera pans over a black leather sofa in Wiebe’s office, a recliner so that people can “snuggle up with their loved ones if they want.” For some people, it’s a good place to die, Wiebe told Carr. Her face lights up as she describes MAID as the most fulfilling work she’s done since doctor-assisted death became legal in Canada in 2016.
Wiebe kills the sick, the disabled, the elderly, and unwanted fetuses:
She sees similarities between MAID and abortion. Both are legal medical procedures that most Canadians believe people should have the right to access. . . .
Most people who choose MAID have cancer, followed by cardiovascular, respiratory and neurological conditions. In 2021, the law was changed so that death need not be “reasonably foreseeable,” so-called Track 2 cases involving people with a chronic, but not terminal illness or disability, like fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome.
To her credit, reporter Sharon Kirkey at least provides a brief counterpoint to the pro-euthanasia narrative, something often entirely missing in euthanasia-boosting media stories:
But others like Trudo Lemmens are troubled by the small number of providers dominating the practice and the “pseudo-spiritual language” some use to describe doctor-administered death.
“When MAID was legalized, it was framed as a practice that was exceptionally required to ease the dying process or give some control at the end of life,” Lemmens, a University of Toronto professor of law and ethics, wrote in an email.
“We have veered very far from that and now uncritically accept the most aggressive provision of MAID and see growing attempts to describe this as the most meaningful form of medical practice.”
I have observed this near-religious embrace of assisted suicide/euthanasia before. Indeed, Wiebe’s enthusiasm for euthanasia reminds me of a Hemlock Society leader who assisted suicides in California before that practice was legal. The assisted-suicide booster, and now practitioner, Lonnie Shavelson, in his book A Chosen Death, said:
I firmly believe now that the most intimate moment you can share with a person is their death. More than sex. More than birth. More than anything. I was at the deliveries of my four grandchildren, and my experience with Naomi’s death was above that.
It’s interesting — and telling — that veterinarians say putting down animals is the most difficult professional service they perform. But apparently putting down people, at least for Wiebe, is the best part. Awful.