CANADA'S SATANIC DEATH CULTURE

National Review

 

Canada’s Dystopian Death Culture

By MADELEINE KEARNS

December 4, 2022 6:30 AM

 

First the dying, then the sick, now the poor and the mentally ill — Canada’s rapidly expanding assisted-suicide program sounds very much like the slippery slope many people warned it would be.

 

In 2016, Canada legalized euthanasia for adults whose natural death is “reasonably foreseeable.” Last year, the country expanded this to include adults whose natural death is not “reasonably foreseeable,” meaning those with nonterminal illnesses and disabilities. By March 2023, those with mental-health conditions will also be eligible.

 

In 2021, the number of Canadians who ended their lives by assisted suicide increased by over 32 percent from the previous year. CityNews reported on Amir Farsoud, an Ontario man suffering from chronic back pain and therefore eligible for MAID (medical assistance in dying). Farsoud told the reporter that his pain wasn’t the reason he applied. “I don’t want to die,” he said, but explained that, facing the prospect of homelessness, he felt he had no other option.

 

After his story went viral, Farsoud received an outpouring of public support, including a GoFundMe that raised over $60,000 (CAD). He later told CityNews, “The first time we spoke, I had nothing but darkness, misery, stress and hopelessness. Now I have all the opposite of those things.” Most people can agree that Farsoud’s death would have been tragic. He didn’t really want to die. But it wasn’t the act of willful death itself that was framed as the tragedy; it was his lack of freedom to choose something else. Among those who support MAID, the thinking goes that, if he’d been enthusiastic about dying, it could have been celebrated. For instance, Canadian fashion retailer Simons released a video, “All Is Beauty,” romanticizing the doctor-assisted death of a 37-year-old disabled woman, Jennyfer Hatch.

 

The slippery-slope argument is that there is no way to accommodate the wishes of someone like Hatch without also leaving someone like Farsoud vulnerable to external pressure. This is true. It is worth considering why it is true.

 

Arguments for euthanasia fundamentally misunderstand human nature. People do not make these kinds of choices in isolation. When faced with suffering, they are typically scared, ambivalent, and confused. They look around to see what other people in their situation might be doing. Moreover, their thinking is influenced by social and moral expectations that they did not choose.

 

In December 2020, Sarah Zhang wrote an essay for the Atlantic tilted “The Last Children of Down Syndrome,” detailing why it is that over 95 percent of pregnant women who discover their child has the condition, which the author describes as “very much compatible with life — even a long, happy life,” choose abortion. She concluded that:

 

The introduction of a choice reshapes the terrain on which we all stand. To opt out of [prenatal] testing is to become someone who chose to opt out. To test and end a pregnancy because of Down syndrome is to become someone who chose not to have a child with a disability. To test and continue the pregnancy after a Down syndrome diagnosis is to become someone who chose to have a child with a disability. Each choice puts you behind one demarcating line or another. There is no neutral ground, except perhaps in hoping that the test comes back negative, and you never have to choose what’s next.

 

Who ever said life would be easy? In many respects, our ancestors suffered far more than we ever will — they did not have the benefits of central heating, advanced medicine, or sanitation systems, to name just a few modern advantages. Still, historically, killing yourself had two major deterrents. First, the potential eternal consequences: The belief that we are created beings and that, just as we didn’t choose to begin our lives, it is not for us to decide to end them. Obviously, this has been weakened by secularization and the rise of moralistic therapeutic deism — the belief that sin doesn’t exist, or if it does, that it doesn’t really matter since Heaven is guaranteed for everyone who isn’t Hitler.

 

But the second deterrent was the act itself. Self-administering death painlessly is no small task. Assisted suicide is dangerous because it offers to remove the self-administration as well as the pain. It presents the choice as being between a difficult life and an easy death. It undermines the motivation for individuals such as Amir Farsoud to keep going, as well as the motivation of others to help him.

 

The CEO of Simons, in a video released along with the one promoting assisted suicide, explained his thinking: Companies ought to “help build the communities that we want to live in tomorrow,” he said, by promoting “human connection.” What he doesn’t seem to realize is that suicide is one of the most profoundly antisocial things you could ever do.

 

When a suicidal person says, “Because I suffer, my life is not worth living,” in a society in which suicide is legalized or subsided by the state, the message is basically, “Yeah, you’re onto something.” It is in this way that suicide affects all of us since, to a greater or lesser extent, we can expect to suffer. Terminal illness was always an arbitrary line in that, in some sense, we are all terminally ill. The disease is mortality. There is no cure.

 

If we accept there are certain things we cannot (or should not) choose, then we are free to focus on where we can make the most difference in our choices. In Man’s Search for Meaning, the psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl argued that “the last of the human freedoms,” after everything else has been taken away, is “to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”

 

Legalized assisted suicide appeals to human weakness and encourages the worst of human choices. It lionizes despair and encourages callousness at the expense of the vulnerable. The lesson that other countries should learn from Canada’s example is to choose life.