"Is euthanasia compassionate if offered to those who don’t want to die and doctors misjudge imminent death?"
This article questioning the claim of compassion as a legitimate reason for doctors to help people die (assisted suicide) or kill them themselves (euthanasia), follows from the first article in the series, "White coat euthanasia: A license to kill in the name of care?" If you have not read it, please read the preface.
Canada offers MAiD (medical assistance in dying) to people who are terminally ill (since 2016) and to those who are chronically ill or disabled (since 2021). In Canada, euthanasia is presented as a medical intervention like any other treatment or therapy.
Is MAiD compassionate?
The Canadian group Dying with Dignity says Canadians are so compassionate that they want to end people's suffering and discrimination by killing them, as reported by the Daily Mail's James Reinl. How this ends discrimination is unclear and not addressed in the article to which Reinl linked.
Canadians by wide margins support euthanasia and the campaign group, Dying With Dignity, says procedures are 'driven by compassion, an end to suffering and discrimination and desire for personal autonomy.'
Not everyone believes that's true, however. Unveil TV's Kooman brothers expresses the opinion, in the video clip below, that ending someone's life prematurely devalues life.
. . . It's, it's not about, um, it's not about kindness, it's not about compassion, it's not about stopping suffering. That's what the front is, that's what, that's what the words are that are being used. But look at the words, they're being manipulated. MAiD, medical assistance in dying. Well, in 2021 they took away the meaning of that language while we were in a pandemic and nobody was in Parliament, nobody. They voted with a, a fraction of the government in place and are pushing through, um, just a redefining of terms, right? But, so using the wrong terms isn't, isn't right, isn't good. And this is about, it is a life issue, it's about valuing life until the very end. And suffering, we all deal with it regardless. Like everybody is going to deal with suffering on a certain level but, it's, um, “Are you going to live your life to the fullest?” That's the question. I think that's the better question that people need to ask themselves.
"Not compassionate but devastating"
In an interview Andrew Kooman had with Amanda Achtman, whom he called "[a] clear voice of reason and hope," she explained how offering suicide to a person essentially determines the outcome:
The counselling of suicide at the time of a person’s vulnerability is devastating. Often, the notion is raised subtly, disguised by dissembling acronyms and euphemisms; but patients usually know what is being suggested. To be offered euthanasia, in a sense, already kills the person. It deflates a person’s sense of worth and shatters their confidence that the people to whom they have entrusted themselves will actually fight for them.
Amanda tweeted her interview, below, with Roger Foley, about "feeling . . . pillaged" after been offered MAiD instead of the assistance he needs to live safely at home.
Roger Foley, a Canadian man with disabilities, says he's been offered euthanasia "multiple times. "Listen to him speak out against being devalued as he fights for the support he needs to live.
"Treating people like they don't need to exist"
Canadian war veteran Kelsi Sheren, in a conversation with executive director of Euthanasia Prevention Coalition Alex Schadenberg, spoke about the case of Tracy Polazuck, who was being pressured to let them kill her because she has spina bifida, a broken leg, and pain.
Schadenberg:
What about the story about uh Tracy Polazuk in Montreal. Spina bifida she has, and she was pressured she says, she was pressured twice to ask for euthanasia. Think about this. So you're going through serious health [not clear]. She says, she, she, her husband and her were — remember she's married. People think these people with disabilities have no life. She's a married woman, okay. She, she has a life, absolutely. They got into a car accident and she had a broken leg. Now you imagine having spina bifida and then getting a broken leg. So what happened is it didn't heal properly. So she is going through pain and she's being pressured to euthanasia. She says "pain sucks. We all agree it's terrible. I'm in pain 24/7. It never stops. I can survive that. I cannot survive being treated like a sack of meat.
Sheren:
Mmhmm. But that's what they are treating people like. They are treating people like they don't need to exist, like they're an inanimate object, like there's no soul, or nobody loves them, or nobody should be around them, or no one's going to miss them. That's what they're forgetting is they're targeting people with families.
Podcasting but qualifies for MAiD
In a solo podcast about the expected expansin of MAiD to include depression as grounds for assisted suicide or euthanasia in March 2024 (subsequently pushed off till March 2027), Sheren explained that she would be eligible for MAiD based on her medical record of "post-traumatic stress disorder, major depressive disorder, ... postpartum depression, as well as . . . traumatic brain injury . . . [and] hearing loss." It took her 10 years to recover and she says that in 2009 had someone offered her MAiD she would have taken it. Initially playing devil's advocate she asks,
"Kelsi, if somebody is struggling so hard with depression that they can't fathom getting out of bed again, you don't know what that feels like."
Her answer is that of one who knows, who has been there and has overcome her challenges.
Yes I do. I've been right there, and if somebody would have given me the option in 2009 to take MAiD I would have. Thank God no one did. Isn't that what's wild? You have to remember this, right. I'm somebody who talking about mental health, talking about it because I've been there and I've walked this walk and I've gotten to the other side and I've seen the light and the hope that is there.
The government is the problem, she argues.
But when the government tells you it's easier to die than it is is to live in Canada, we have a problem here people . . .
Some euthanasia pushers have a different opinion from Sheren about MAiD for depression, such as Dying with Dignity Canada's CEO Helen Long, as reported by Lynne Cohen for C2C Journal in January 2021.
Helen Long, CEO of Dying With Dignity Canada, recently argued in the Toronto Star that even this one modest limitation [excluding depression as a reason for MAiD] “will continue to deny some Canadians their right to MAID.” The right to kill oneself must presumably be offered to all without limit.
A solution for poverty and homelessness
A 2022 article by Telesure English titled "Canadians Turn to Euthanasia as Solution to Unbearable Poverty" raised the alarm that people were opting to die because they couldn't afford to live.
Canada has some of the lowest social care spending of any industrialized country, palliative care is only accessible to a minority, and waiting times in the public healthcare sector can be unbearable," Oxford Nuffield College researcher Yuan Yi Zhu said in an article published by The Spectator, which explains why poor citizens who cannot improve their living conditions started applying for the MAID program.
Examples of impoverished individuals ensnared by MaID, provided by the Daily Mail, include Jennyfer Hatch, a woman suffering from Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS) who tried for two years to get the care she needed to live and Amir Farsoud, who was accepted for MAiD because he couldn't face homelessness.
Hatch's plight was reported on by Lewis Pannock. A commercial was made by a Canadian fashion giant about her "sacred" last breaths" with no mention of the two years she tried, unsuccessfully, to get treatment.
A chronically-ill woman who featured in a controversial commercial about euthanasia in Canada had complained months earlier that she wanted to live but couldn't access healthcare.
Jennyfer Hatch, 37, was the subject of a campaign by Canadian fashion giant La Maison Simons which documented her experience with end-of-life care before her death in October.
The jarring 'All is Beauty' commercial - which included audio of Jennyfer talking about her 'sacred' last breaths - was fiercely criticized over claims it glorified suicide.
Farsoud's story had a happier ending, as Alex Olivera recounted his story. With his house being sold and living with untreatable back pain, he did not want to become homeless. After applying for MAiD and being accepted, his story made the news and a stranger set up a "go fund me" campaign for him. The $60,000 raised was enough to enable him to find new housing and change his mind about being killed.
When Farsoud was still applying for euthanasia, he said he didn't want to die but that he didn't want to be homeless more.
'I don't want to die but I don't want to be homeless more than I don't want to die,' he told City News. 'It's not my first choice.'
Farsoud's survives off of social services, but the stipend is so low he is left with just $7 daily for food, and next to nothing to pay for rent.
. . .
But after Farsoud's story made headlines, an anonymous woman named Effy set up a GoFundMe for him. The $60,000 was enough to put a roof over his head and change his mind over ending his life.
'I'm a different person,' Farsoud said. 'The first time we spoke, I had nothing but darkness, misery, stress and hopelessness. Now I have all the opposite of those things.'
Compassionate for an imminent death?
Unless one would have outlived the prognosis
In 2007, Frank Greve, writing for MCClatchity DC, found that many people who enter hospice don't die. In fact, he stated that approximately 100,000 hospice patients could be expected to get new leases on life that year.
While no one could give definite reasons for why this would be true, one theory is that some patients weren't declining, their care was. Given the care they needed in hospice, they were able to recover.
One theory is that many patients only appear to be dying. Actually, they're "suffering from the dwindles," as True Ryndes, head of a coalition called the National Hospice Work Group, put it. "The patient isn't in decline; their caregiving is in decline." Given the focused attention of hospice doctors, nurses, social workers and spiritual counselors, the patients get their minimum meds adjusted and take them regularly. They get painkillers adequate to assure a night's sleep. They eat regularly, and their loved ones get some help and relief. "Often, just taking away the pain and enabling them to sleep through the night gives people a second wind," said Fillebrown, clinical director of the Lehigh Valley Hospice in Allentown, Pa.
A Guardian article publishef in 2015 (the same year that a Canada court decision led to the euthanasia law took place), entitled "Why doctors get it wrong about when you will die," included the story of a young intern who was gladly mistaken about the prognosis of a very ill 85 year old woman.
In my first week as an intern, I spoke to the family of an 85-year-old patient, Nora. She lay gasping, racked by sepsis, her skin bruised from intravenous drips, her legs swollen from heart failure, her consciousness clouded from all of it.
“How long has she got, doctor?”
“We’ll be lucky if she’s here in the morning,” I replied.
We were indeed lucky the next morning. We were also lucky for the next week and the month after that, at which point Nora went home, happy and healthy.
It takes experience to know that sometimes you don’t know.
Another reason the Guardian gives for why it's becomming more difficult to give a proper prognosis is because of new technologies and treatments.
Assuming the diagnosis is right in the first place, prognostication is further complicated by medical advances – the very advances designed to improve prognosis. Algorithms used following cardiac arrest are no longer universally valid. Walk into an intensive-care unit and you might see a comatose patient swaddled in cooling blankets, surrounded by ice packs, a drip running cold fluids through their veins. Therapeutic hypothermia aims to protect the brain from a lack of blood flow. Before this technique, neurologists could start to ascertain prognosis in a comatose patient even by day three. Watch if the pupil dilates with light, see if the eye blinks as a wisp of cotton wool touches the cornea. But for comatose patients who have been rendered hypothermic, everything changes. Dropping core temperature by just five degrees entirely alters the brain’s reaction to these tests. The old algorithm falls apart. A new one takes its place. Don’t pull the plug. (Emphasis added.)
What if the diagnosis is not right in the first place?
Patients often agree to euthanasia when their doctor has told them they have a terminal illness and will soon die. But what if the doctor(s) made a mistake? What if their illness was highly curable? Perhaps misdiagnosis is not an exception to the rule?
British Dr. Vernon Coleman has been writing extensively about this topic. Expose News author Rhoda Wilson carried his reprint, with permission, of an essay from Dr. Jack King's book on the subject, "Why they want to kill us." Among the many arguments was the real concern of misdiagnosis.
Some advocates of euthanasia claim that candidates for suicide must have a fatal illness. And some euthanasia programmes begin by saying that a patient must be expected to be dead within six months. Campaigners say that this excludes patients who might live for years. They’re wrong, of course. They’re wrong because prognoses are subjective and they are wrong more often than they are right. I could fill London with people who have been told to prepare themselves for death but who have lived for many years. The advocates for euthanasia assume that it is possible to decide that an illness is fatal. Anyone (doctor or nurse) who announces that an illness is fatal is a fool. I doubt if I am alone in having seen patients who have been told that they were incurable, recover and enjoy long lives – not uncommonly outliving the physician who had told them they were dying. . . .
Dr. Vernon Coleman has described how he was wrongly diagnosed with kidney cancer and given six months to live. That was nearly 40 years ago. In fact, the radiologists who had made the diagnosis were wrong. Dr. Vernon Coleman has described how he was wrongly diagnosed with kidney cancer and given six months to live. That was nearly 40 years ago. In fact, the radiologists who had made the diagnosis were wrong.
Two more of the several examples Dr. King provided of misdiagnoses included a woman misdiagnosed with a fatal liver tumor and a man who was told that the adverse effects he was experiencing from statins (medicines that are prescribed for high cholesterol levels) were actually due to a fatal motor neuron disease.
A 45-year-old mother of two was told that she had an inoperable tumour on her liver. With no family present, she was told that she had between two months and two years to live. (How any doctor can offer such a bizarrely wide prognosis is difficult to understand.) In fact, she had a benign liver tumour. She was not told of the error for a month. It was a year before the woman had recovered from the trauma of the mistaken diagnosis. But what if she had been persuaded to accept euthanasia? . . .
A 65-year-old man was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease and told that he was terminally ill with just six months to live. He was told to choose a hospice. He later found that his symptoms were actually caused by the statins he was taking. When he’d been told he was terminally ill, he stopped the statins and his symptoms disappeared.
As Dr. King argues, people should raise objections to medically assisted dying in the same way that they object to capital punishment because of the fear of making a mistake.
Points to ponder
- Is it not murder if you're pressured to end your life?
- Considering the above, should the whole idea of MAiD be reconsidered?
- Today, governments pay doctors to do what they would have put them in jail for just a few years before. Family members or anyone else who helped kill them in an assisted suicide would have been jailed as well. But now it's okay?
- Did right and wrong, good and evil, suddenly change?
Check back for "Euthanasia by the numbers" when The Gold Report counts how many lives were snuffed out by doctors in the eight years since MAiD became legal and taxpayer funded in Canada.
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