MAY 4, 2023
I’d like to walk with you through one battlefield in the current crisis of liberalism, to show you how liberalism is now threatened by an extreme version of itself, and how we might recover a better, more humane liberalism—something closer to what the Mills had in mind in the first place.
In 2016, the Canadian government
legalized medical assistance in dying. The program, called MAID, was founded on good Millian grounds. The Canadian Supreme Court concluded that laws preventing assisted suicide stifled individual rights. If people have the right to be the architect of their life, shouldn’t they have the right to control their death? Shouldn’t they have the right to spare themselves needless suffering and indignity at the end of life?
As originally conceived, the MAID program was reasonably well defined. Doctors and nurses would give lethal injections or fatal medications only to patients who met certain criteria, including all of the following: the patient had a serious illness or disability; the patient was in an “advanced state” of decline that could not be reversed; the patient was experiencing unbearable physical or mental suffering; the patient was at the point where natural death had become “reasonably foreseeable.”
To critics who worried that before long, people who were depressed, stressed, or just poor and overwhelmed would also be provided assistance to die, authorities were reassuring: The new law wouldn’t endanger those who are psychologically vulnerable and not near death. Citing studies from jurisdictions elsewhere in the world with similar laws, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared that this “
simply isn’t something that ends up happening.”
But the program has worked out rather differently. Before long, the range of who qualifies for assisted suicide was expanded. In 2021, the criterion that natural death must be “reasonably foreseeable”
was lifted. A steady stream of stories began to appear in the media, describing how the state was granting access to assisted suicide to people who arguably didn’t fit the original criteria...
Within just a few years, the number of Canadians dying by physician-assisted suicide ballooned (the overwhelming majority of them by lethal injection). In 2021, that figure was more than 10,000, one in 30 of all Canadian deaths. The great majority of people dying this way were elderly and near death, but those who seek assisted suicide tend to get it. In 2021, only 4 percent of those who filed written applications were deemed ineligible...
Back in 2016, critics of the MAID law saw this coming. They warned that soon enough, people in anguish and near death wouldn’t be the only ones given assistance to die. That warning turned out to be understated. Within a few years, Canada went from being a country that had banned assisted suicide to being one of the loosest regimes in the world...
As assisted suicide has become an established part of Canadian society, the complex moral issues surrounding the end of life have drifted out of sight. Decisions tend to be made within a bureaucratic context, where utilitarian considerations can come to dominate the foreground. Or as the president of the Quebec College of Physicians, which regulates medical practice in the province, put it, assisted suicide “is not a political or moral or religious issue. It is a medical issue.” A materialist cost-benefit analysis, for some people, crowds out affirmations that life is sacred, and socioeconomic burdens weigh heavily in the balance...
These trends have not shocked Canadian lawmakers into tightening the controls on who gets approved for MAID, or dramatically ramping up programs that would provide medical and community-based help for patients whose desperation might be addressed in other ways. On the contrary, eligibility may expand soon.
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Originally Posted by Ares
