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Canada Is Ready to Let MDs Kill the Mentally Ill

The term “culture of death” describes a society that accepts suicide and mercy killing as an acceptable response to suffering. In the wake of the country’s Supreme Court creating a right to be made dead, Canada’s ruling class, medical intelligentsia — and if polls are to be believed — population have enthusiastically embraced the culture of death (culture de la mort) for people with physical maladies and disabilities.

Now an official government panel has issued recommendations that urge lethal-injection euthanasia and self-administered assisted suicide (“medical aid in dying,” or MAID) be also a right for the diagnosed mentally ill. From the Report of the Special Joint Committee on Physician-Assisted Dying:

The Committee recognizes that there will be unique challenges in applying the eligibility criteria for MAID where the patient has a mental illness, particularly where such an illness is the condition underlying the request. However, where a person is competent and fits the other criteria set out by law, the Committee does not see how that individual could be denied a recognized Charter right based on his or her mental health condition.

Not only that, but the Committee recommended that the mentally ill suicidal — as with all other categories — should be entitled to decide for themselves whether their suffering requires killing:

That physical or psychological suffering that is enduring and intolerable to the person in the circumstances of his or her condition should be recognized as a criterion to access medical assistance in dying.

In other words, mentally ill patients can refuse the very treatment that could make them not want to be dead, and still be entitled to a lethal injection.

Some might cling to the desperate pretense that regardless of what happens in Canada, our own gestating culture of death will be limited to the terminally ill. Don’t bet on it: Many in the U.S. see Canada as the exemplar of the kind of country we should be.

It is also worth nothing that Compassion and Choices — the George Soros assisted-suicide advocacy group — lauded the Canada Supreme Court ruling. Make no mistake. Our own assisted-suicide pushers want us to institute the same radical lethality that Canada is on the verge of instituting. They are just too dishonest to admit it.

Cross-posted at The Corner.

Image credit: © cassis / Dollar Photo Club.

Wesley J. Smith

Chair and Senior Fellow, Center on Human Exceptionalism
Wesley J. Smith is Chair and Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism. Wesley is a contributor to National Review and is the author of 14 books, in recent years focusing on human dignity, liberty, and equality. Wesley has been recognized as one of America’s premier public intellectuals on bioethics by National Journal and has been honored by the Human Life Foundation as a “Great Defender of Life” for his work against suicide and euthanasia. Wesley’s most recent book is Culture of Death: The Age of “Do Harm” Medicine, a warning about the dangers to patients of the modern bioethics movement.

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