Canada is a distinctive nation in a lot of ways. Canadians have a lot to be proud of.
Being a haven for escaped slaves arriving on the Underground Railroad.
Hockey.
And a pretty awesome political commentator named Kira Davis.
That’s a lot to brag about.
Now, Canada has one more distinction, and it isn’t exactly a great one. Our neighbors to the north have the honor of being the nation that has harvested the most organs from patients who committed suicide with the help of the government.
The Canadian government passed their MAID (medical assistance in dying) program in 2016. It’s legalized suicide, but even worse than that, MAID is an actual department within the government that will, as the moniker suggests, assist Canadians in ending their lives. They provide the drugs and instructions, Canadians provide the bodies.
It was initially meant to be a program offered to those suffering from debilitating, terminal diseases. The blood of those “patients” has turned that slippery slope into a slip ‘n slide and now anyone who claims to suffer from mental illness or mental distress may apply for MAID in the Great White North. Recently, a disable veteran complained to her veteran affairs department that she was still waiting for a chairlift for her home after years of requests. She simply wanted to get up and down her stairs without pain. The government offered to euthanize her instead.
But nothing surpasses the creepiness of how the organ market has been booming since the MAID program passed. The Canadian news outlet CTV ran an excited profile of the first-of-its-kind report on the four nations that have adopted assisted suicide over the past decade.
“We saw everyone is working in different directions. And then we said ‘OK, well, let’s start an international (discussion) of all the countries involved,'” said Dr. Johannes Mulder, a physician and MAID provider in Zwolle, Netherlands, in an interview with CTV News.
Data collected for the paper shows that in Canada, Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain, combined, 286 assisted-death recipients provide lifesaving organs for transplant to 837 patients in the years up to and including 2021.
Doctors in Canada, where medical assistance in dying (MAID) was decriminalized in 2016, performed almost half of the world’s organ transplants after MAID for that period (136), according to the publication.
“I was rather proud that Canada has done so well in terms of organ donation by MAID patients,” said Arthur Schafer, director of the Centre for Professional and Applied Ethics at the University of Manitoba, in an interview with CTV News.
Schafer calls the bump in available organs “a wonderful opportunity for someone facing death to make something significant out of the end of their life.”
Naturally, government and medical representatives in Canada promise that MAID will never pressure their patients to offer their organs. It should be noted the Canadian government also poo-pooed the notion that MAID would ever expand beyond those who were physically, terminally ill, with no hope of recovery. Now, the government will send suicide tools to a person who says he/she is depressed.
Add to that slippery slope the medical and financial benefits for the nation in having access to more and more healthy human organs for transplant, and you’ve got a recipe for a terrifying dystopian future…one in which a government begins to push its own undesired citizens towards death for the “greater good.” Canada endures an overwhelmed universal healthcare system. The most infirm are the most costly. Imagine what happens when the government can create a steady flow of healthy organs that can go to the strongest patients, while simultaneously eliminating the “burdens” like the Canadian veteran who had the audacity to ask for a chair lift.
This cannot end well, no matter what reassurances this current crop of politicians and doctors try to give. It’s already gone sideways.
That is because the northern nation now offers government workers to come directly to a person’s home to observe the “medication” intake, and swiftly transport that person to a hospital to harvest the organs while the body is still alive – which is the ideal procedure.
The MAID recipient is given the medications in their home, and then transported by ambulance to a nearby hospital to have the procedure completed and organs harvested.
Dr. Shemie described the case of a patient in Ontario, saying that “with a lot of help from paramedics in the fire department …we were able to facilitate that.”
Let’s review. Canada went from:
“Patients suffering terminal, painful illness have the right to die with dignity.”
To:
“The government will provide the means for those people to commit suicide.”
To:
“The government will provide those means to anyone who experiences discomfort, physical or mental, and wishes to die.”
To:
“The government will give you the means to sedate yourself in your home before transporting you to a hospital to harvest your living organs and then will finish you off, somehow, once they’ve gotten what they need from your body.”
What incentive does the Canadian government have to remain neutral on end-of-life sentiments? It has none. It has already demonstrated it has no moral incentive. It has no financial incentive to keep paying cradle-to-grave benefits for a citizen who would rather not be alive at all. It has no ethical incentive…in fact, the powers that be in this case seem to have convinced themselves that helping even a physically healthy human being to commit suicide in order to harvest those organs is indeed the ethical thing to do.
The next time someone tries to convince you that assisted suicide is just a matter of liberty, and is none of your business if it’s not something you would engage in, remind them of that slippery slope. When the government gets to be involved in your decisions of when and how to end your life, there is no way to rein in that power. These are not decisions that should belong to a bureaucracy.
The result is moral anarchy and deep oppression.
