The harsh reality of euthanasia: Exposing the myth of a peaceful passing
This article follows from "Euthanasia by the numbers: Canadian doctors have already killed the equivalent of a small city."
If you have not read the first article in the series, "White coat euthanasia: A license to kill in the name of care?," please read the preface.
Euthanasia:
[T]he act or practice of killing or permitting the death of hopelessly sick or injured individuals (such as persons or domestic animals) in a relatively painless way for reasons of mercy.
The word comes from the Greek euthanatos, which means “easy death.” In English, euthanasia has been used in exactly this sense since the early seventeenth century, when Francis Bacon described the phenomenon as “after the fashion and semblance of a kindly & pleasant sleepe.” Nowadays, the word usually refers to the means of attaining such a death.
A profound way to die?
The definition of euthanasia, above, calls it a merciful, painless way to die. That was what Julie, a US hospice nurse, perceived when she sat with a patient and family members to witness and support an assisted suicide in Canada— it had the "semblance of a kindly & pleasant sleepe." Before the patient mixed and drank the fateful concoction (which would have been illegal to do in the US), she said the family was with them laughing and telling their family member, who would soon commit suicide, how much they loved them and were there for them. Julie called it a profound experience. She made the video clip below to share her experience, during which she said:
I have witnessed this before, but never has it been like this where I was like with them before, during, and after. And something about that really hit me. Nothing has felt this profound, I don't think, in my hospice career.
To Julie, it appeared to be quick and pain-free.
Truly, I mean quickly, you drink it. Three to five minutes you are asleep, you're out, and then within the next few minutes your body starts actively dying. It's that quick. You're awake, you drink this drink, you fall asleep, three to five minutes later you're actively dying. At no time during this time did this person look like they were scared, or in pain, or uncomfortable. Their families surrounded them for the next 45 minutes to an hour until this person died.
Could Julie be mistaken?
Toxic effects of MAiD drugs disputed
Canadian senators – we don't see a problem
In February 2021, four Canadian senators, Senator Kutcher, Senator Mégie, Senator Moodie, and Senator Ravalia, authored a brief maintaining that Canada’s use of Midazolam for MAiD is inherently different than its use in the United States for carrying out a death sentence by lethal injection, stating that there have been no reported adverse effects during a MAiD death from the use of midazolam.
Within Canada midazolam is administered for MAID in doses that are designed to provide comfort to the person, not to cause death. . . . In Canada, using the established protocols, there have been no reports of midazolam causing a harmful effect during a MAID death. (Emphasis added.)
At the end of the document, the senators wrote that the information was peer-reviewed by a variety of healthcare professionals.
Peer review conducted of the information used in this brief by numerous physicians (anesthesia; primary care; internal medicine; palliative care; MAID provision, emergency medicine, pediatrics), nurse practitioners and pharmacists from Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador, Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia.
Dr. Joel Zivot – has evidence that patients may be drowning to death
Dr. Joel Zivot, a Canadian living and working in the U.S., has two and half decades of experience using the drugs that the senators mentioned in their document (in addition to midazolam), on over 50,000 people.
“. . . board certified in Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine by the American Board of Anesthesiology. I have been a practicing anesthesiologist and intensive care medicine specialist for the last 26 years. I am an expert in the use of the drugs mentioned in this brief. I estimate I have provided anesthetics and sedation to over 50,000 people.
Dr. Zivot penned a letter to Canada’s senators refuting their claim that the deaths are peaceful and painless. He provided the senators with 20 reasons why their brief “misses the point, fails to address critical questions or is wrong,” including (emphases added):
9. In the United States, Midazolam use in lethal injection has been associated with the findings of lung congestion as seen on autopsy.
10. The report of Midazolam not causing harm in the setting of MAID is a claim without evidence and is unverifiable.
11. MAID provider reports that death by MAID appears peaceful reflects a serious lack of understanding on the part of those providers about the mechanism of action of muscle relaxants like rocuronium.
14. Propofol has not been used for lethal injection in the US but in the clinical setting, patients complain of a burning sensation in the injection site when injected with a dose that is 1/10th (100 mg) the dose used in MAID.
15. Propofol injection at a dose of 1000 mg as used in MAID very likely causes burning in the lungs and tissue destruction. . .
16. Muscle relaxants, when injected in MAID, will produce an outwardly observed stillness as a consequence of muscle paralysis than has wrongly and repeatedly been described as a state of peacefulness.
17. Muscle relaxants when used in MAID will produce death by suffocation.
18. The MAID protocol very likely causes lung congestion in a similar fashion to that which has been shown in over 200 cases of lethal injection in the US.
19. The only way to refute the hypothesis that the MAID protocol causes pulmonary fluid accumulation and death akin drowning is by obtaining Canadian data through autopsy studies on at least 200 individuals put to death by MAID.
Four years earlier, in 2018, Dr. Zivot gave evidence for his contention that, in reality, MAiD patients drown to death (see points 9, 17, 18, and 19 above) during a TEDx talk he gave. He noted the similarities between execution by lethal injection in the United States and Canada’s MAiD protocols and his review of 200 autopsies of individuals executed in the U.S., which showed that their lungs were twice the normal weight, a sign of pulmonary edema.
And so you ask yourself, how is it that that happened? If execution and lethal injection killed people instantly then the body would be unperturbed. There would be none of this organ failure, and I want to tell you that I've left off other organ systems here that also fail in the consequence of execution.
. . .
Now, medical assistance in dying is actually configured to be quite a lot like lethal injection. The same kind of medications that are used sometimes in a very similar fashion injected intravenously, or taken as pills, of the same class of drugs. Now, we don't, of course, do autopsies on people who died . . . as a consequence of medical assistance. Why would we? But if we did, I suspect that what we would see would be a picture quite similar in fact to lethal injection. Of course, I say, there's no autopsy, but my impression, again, is that it would be very similar to what lethal injection would show.
To listen to Dr. Zivot, click on the link in Becky Sue Jenkinson's tweet of Dr. Zivot's Ted X talk below, "Medical assistance in dying: not as easy as it looks."
Cruel and unusual death
Canadian veteran Kelsi Sheren sat down with Jordan Peterson in May 2024 (video below), at which time she reviewed Dr. Zivot's findings. She passionately argued that the manner of death experienced by those medically killed is akin to being waterboarded for many minutes to several hours, depending on whether the victim received a lethal injection or took deadly pills on his/her own. The US government, she points out, was forced to stop waterboarding at Quantico since it was considered cruel and unusual punishment.
So that means that, when it's done by IV, it takes 10 to 15 minutes that person could be literally drowning. Well they are, they're drowning to death, but they could be screaming if they weren't under a paralytic. They're drowning to death. We watered boarded people in Quantico. There's a reason we had to stop. It falls under cruel and unusual punishment. Yet, we are having people like Dying with Dignity say that this falls under compassion and empathy when you're drowning people chemically to death. (Emphases added.)
Please check back for "Is organ harvesting driving euthanasia? The ugly truth about why Canada leads in MAiD organ donor transplants" when The Gold Report looks at the reasons Canada leads other countries in organ transplants from euthanasia victims.
Related articles:
- Euthanasia by the numbers: Canadian doctors have already killed the equivalent of a small city
- Is euthanasia compassionate if offered to those who don’t want to die and doctors misjudge imminent death?
- White coat euthanasia: A license to kill in the name of care?
- Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) - a cruel way to die but not to the onlooker
- Disabled in Canada? Doctors may pressure you to end your life
