The Duty to Die

The whole idea of MAID is to make people believe that they are choosing their deaths when the government wants them to die.

Consider this when one screams that execution by lethal injection is immoral:

Despite tens of thousands of MAID deaths, and concerns over the ever-expanding eligibility criteria, little has been said about how people die, including the drugs and heavy doses used to kill, the sequence in which they’re injected, and what they do to the body.

Canadian senators studying Canada’s new MAID law, Bill C-7, last year heard alarming testimony from Dr. Joel Zivot, an anesthesiologist and critical care doctor at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Ga., who was born in Winnipeg and went to medical school there and who forwarded the suggestion that death by MAID, he suspects, could feel like drowning.

Once the paralyzing drugs are used, the person can no longer move. “All bets are off,” Zivot said. “The outward appearance of calm and peacefulness is not really an evaluation as to what the interior experience of the person that is dying would necessarily have,” he told senators. “It doesn’t mean anything that outwardly it looks peaceful.”

“Canada has vaulted itself to the unenviable front of the line for this,” Zivot said in an interview with National Post. “I think my work is pretty close enough to what is happening in Canada that it warrants some circumspection, and that’s all I’m asking for.”

Zivot is a lifelong campaigner against capital punishment. His work involves studying autopsies of prisoners killed by lethal injection in the U.S. But these executions involve, except for one common sedative, different medications than those used in doctor-administered MAID in Canada. Bonta and other MAID providers say Zivot, who has never performed or witnessed MAID himself, is dead wrong, that his assumptions aren’t anchored in any published evidence and that it’s irresponsible to extrapolate findings from the autopsies of executed prisoners and claim they could be seen in the context of MAID.

In Canada, the law no longer restricts MAID to people whose death is reasonably foreseeable. As of next March, people whose sole underlying condition is a mental illness will also be eligible for assisted death. A joint parliamentary committee is studying whether MAID criteria should be further expanded still, to include mature minors and advance requests.

The latest annual report on medically assisted deaths, which covers deaths in 2021, is due in July. As of the end of 2020, 21,589 MAID deaths had been reported in Canada. In 2020, there were 7,595 cases, accounting for 2.5 per cent of all deaths, and a 34 per cent increase over 2019.

Read the whole ghastly thing.