Euthanasia for the poor in Canada: the danger of going down a slippery slope

@ElentirENG ES 5·22·2022 · 19:11 0

The promoters of euthanasia and assisted suicide are promoting an infamous and dangerous idea: that there are certain lives that are not worth living.

Lichtenberg: a Catholic martyr arrested by the nazis for denouncing euthanasia
Some brave men sacrificed themselves to save an Europe that thanks them by committing suicide

Getting rid of certain people who are convinced that they are a burden

It is an idea that nazism already promoted and that is now subscribed to by far-left parties, demonstrating that between the ideology of the former and the ideology of the latter there are very few differences morally speaking. Euthanasia is a mean way of getting rid of people who need help, and instead of giving it to them, the state tries to convince those people that they are a burden. Do you think something so monstrous that it is impossible to believe in a democratic country? Well, in Spain we have already seen how the government denies aid to ALS patients while offering them euthanasia as the only way out.

Two homeless women call for assisted suicide in Canada due to lack of help

This same year another example has occurred in Canada, a country that legalized euthanasia in 2016. In just six years an aberrant situation has been reached: in recent months, two homeless women requested assisted suicide for living in a situation of poverty and lack support. What some considered exaggerated and the result of misplaced statements by pro-lifers has already happened. One of those women, Sophia, has already been granted assisted suicide and died on February 22. "The government sees me as expendable trash, a complainer, useless and a pain in the ass," she said before she died. This is what some call "progress."

«She also left behind letters showing a desperate two-year search for help»

The Canadian media CTN News commented on April 13: "She died after a frantic effort by friends, supporters and even her doctors to get her safe and affordable housing in Toronto. She also left behind letters showing a desperate two-year search for help, in which she begs local, provincial and federal officials for assistance in finding a home away from the smoke and chemicals wafting through her apartment," because the woman suffered from a severe sensitivity to chemicals.

The Canadian State and its desire to save money with euthanasia

On April 30, in a scathing article published in The Spectator, Yuan Yi Zhu, a research fellow at Oxford's Nuffield College, posted the following:

"Since last year, Canadian law, in all its majesty, has allowed both the rich as well as the poor to kill themselves if they are too poor to continue living with dignity. In fact, the ever-generous Canadian state will even pay for their deaths. What it will not do is spend money to allow them to live instead of killing themselves.

As with most slippery slopes, it all began with a strongly worded denial that it exists. In 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada reversed 22 years of its own jurisprudence by striking down the country’s ban on assisted suicide as unconstitutional, blithely dismissing fears that the ruling would ‘initiate a descent down a slippery slope into homicide’ against the vulnerable as founded on ‘anecdotal examples’. The next year, Parliament duly enacted legislation allowing euthanasia, but only for those who suffer from a terminal illness whose natural death was ‘reasonably foreseeable’.

Despite the government's insistence that assisted suicide is about individual autonomy, it has also kept an eye on the fiscal advantages.

It only took five years for the proverbial slope to come into view, when the Canadian parliament enacted Bill C-7, a sweeping euthanasia law which repealed the ‘reasonably foreseeable’ requirement – and the requirement that the condition should be ‘terminal’. Now, as long as someone is suffering from an illness or disability which ‘cannot be relieved under conditions that you consider acceptable’, they can take advantage of what is now known euphemistically as ‘medical assistance in dying’ (MAID for short) for free.

Soon enough, Canadians from across the country discovered that although they would otherwise prefer to live, they were too poor to improve their conditions to a degree which was acceptable.

Not coincidentally, Canada has some of the lowest social care spending of any industrialised country, palliative care is only accessible to a minority, and waiting times in the public healthcare sector can be unbearable, to the point where the same Supreme Court which legalised euthanasia declared those waiting times to be a violation of the right to life back in 2005."

Next, apply euthanasia to mentally ill patients and "mature minors"

Yuan Yi Zhu warned at the end of his article that the slippery slope in Canada will only get worse: "Next year, the floodgates will open even further when those suffering from mental illness – another disproportionately poor group – become eligible for assisted suicide, although enthusiastic doctors and nurses have already pre-empted the law. There is already talk of allowing ‘mature minors’ access to euthanasia too – just think of the lifetime savings. But remember, slippery slopes are always a fallacy."