Euthanasia a la Canada

This is a chilling read about Euthanasia in Canada.

This was my perception:

When we think of assisted suicide or euthanasia, we imagine a limited number of elderly people with late-stage cancer or advanced ALS in severe pain. The argument for helping them die is clear: Death is imminent. Why should they be forced to suffer?

But Canada doesn’t have the same safeguards that other countries do:

Over the past few years, doctors have taken an increasingly liberal view when it comes to defining “reasonably foreseeable” death. Then, last year, the government amended the original legislation, stating that one could apply for MAiD [Canada’s euthanasia program] even if one’s death were not reasonably foreseeable. This second track of applicants simply had to show that they had a condition that was “intolerable to them” and could not “be relieved under conditions that they consider acceptable.”

This means that in practice young people, even children are applying for euthanasia based solely on psychiatric problems.

Even more chilling are cases like these, where poor people see euthanasia as the only way out of their poverty:

Les Landry, 65, said he was in the middle of filling out his MAiD application. He was from Medicine Hat, Alberta, in the middle of nowhere, several hours southeast of Calgary and a little north of the Montana line. He received $1,238 every month from the government, but he was always short on cash. He said he’d been abused by his mother when he was four—she put his hand through the wringer of an old-fashioned washing machine. He’d suffered from PTSD, and he’d had three strokes, and he suffered from epilepsy, he said.

“There’s a tipping point where you can’t afford to live,” Landry told me. “MAiD is the new society safety net.”

Something seems terribly amiss in all of this.