(LifeSiteNews) — Another nightmare euthanasia case in Canada has made international headlines.
“Canadian woman was euthanized ‘against her will’ after husband was fed-up with caring for her,” the Daily Mail reported on January 22.
“An elderly woman was euthanized within hours of her husband claiming she changed her mind after insisting she wanted to live,” wrote U.S. senior investigations reporter Nic White. In Canada, patients can receive “same-day euthanasia” on request, as long as they are approved by a “MAiD assessor” so long as the euthanasia practitioner deems the case urgent.
A report by the Ontario MAiD Death Review Committee, which LifeSiteNews previously reported on here, revealed a number of horrifying cases that constituted “questionable deaths” (virtually all of the terminology surrounding so-called “medical assistance in dying” is profoundly Orwellian).
“One case study was that of a woman in her 80s referred to as ‘Mrs B’ who had complications after a coronary artery bypass graft surgery,” wrote White. “She went into severe decline and opted for palliative care, and was sent home from hospital with palliative support and her husband caring for her. But as her condition got worse, her elderly husband struggled to care for her even with the help of visits by nurses.”
According to the family, Mrs. B said she wanted euthanasia. Her overworked husband contacted a “referral service” immediately. Mrs. B, however, changed her mind when the assessor arrived, stating that she “wanted to withdraw her request, citing personal religious values and beliefs.” She said that she wanted inpatient hospice care instead.
As is so often the case, in-patient hospice care was unavailable and the family’s request denied the following day. Her husband “was experiencing caregiver burnout,” and despite his wife being assessed as stable by physicians, requested an “urgent second MAiD assessment” that same day. The new assessor stated that she was eligible for euthanasia, even though the original assessor, when contacted “as per protocol,” disagreed.
“This MAiD practitioner expressed concerns regarding the necessity for ‘urgency’ and shared belief for the need for more comprehensive evaluation, the seemingly drastic change in perspective of end-of-life goals, and the possibility of coercion or undue influence (i.e., due to caregiver burnout),” the report stated. The assessor asked to meet Mrs. B the following day, but this “was declined by the MAiD provider as ‘the clinical circumstances necessitated an urgent provision.”
In short: the euthanasia practitioner rejected delaying killing the woman even by a day, claiming, despite doctors assessing the woman as stable, that it was an “urgent” situation.
READ: Euthanasia advocate unveils plan for AI-powered suicide pod that fits 2 people
A third assessor was called in and signed off on the second assessor’s eligibility finding. The woman was killed that same evening.
“Ontario MAiD Death Review Committee members raised concerns about how Mrs B’s case was handled, in the report released by the Office of the Chief Coroner,” White reported. “Many members ‘believed the short timeline did not allow all aspects of Mrs B’s social and end-of-life circumstances and care needs to be explored.’”
These included ‘the impact of being denied hospice care, additional care options, caregiver burden, consistency of the MAiD request, and divergent MAiD practitioner perspectives’.
‘Many members brought forward concerns of possible external coercion arising from the caregiver’s experience of burnout and lack of access to palliative care in an in-patient or hospice setting,’ the report noted.
Members were also concerned that Mrs B’s spouse was the main person advocating and navigating access to MAiD, and there was little documentation that she actually asked for it herself. The MAiD assessments were completed with her husband present, which raised additional concerns that she felt pressured to go along with it.
Coercion is an increasing reality in Canada’s euthanasia regime; last month, a BC judge had to intervene to prevent a husband from carrying out a “double-euthanasia” death plan for his wife, who had been deemed non-eligible for euthanasia due to her dimension. The husband had planned to kill his wife himself in a “do-it-yourself” euthanasia and then end his own life. A judge removed the woman from her husband’s guardianship, but critics pointed out that even the judge treated the situation not as a murder plan but as a violation of MAiD protocol.
“‘Euthanized against her will’ = cold blooded murder,” wrote former Alberta premier Jason Kenney in response to the news. “This is the inevitable result of Canada’s dystopian ‘medical assistance in dying’ regime. When I predicted this outcome over years of debates in Parliament, pro-euthanasia advocates would dismiss it as ‘fear mongering.’ It turns out that fear of desacralizing human life is entirely rational.”
It remains to be seen if those who approved the woman’s killing—and the physician who carried it out—will face any criminal consequences.
