Barely two generations later, we’re poised to go from making to MAiDing babies.
If a call from the Quebec College of Physicians is heeded, and recent history shows there’s every reason to be terrified it will be, pressure will increase to the point of acceptance so that severely “malformed infants” less than a year old should be eligible for medical assistance in dying.
In fact, the Quebec College issued the call almost a year ago, but it was revived last week during a House of Commons committee studying the current MAiD legislation. Committee witness Dr. Louis Roy reiterated the organization’s position that doctor delivered death would be appropriate where life expectancy for a newborn is “basically nil.”
The College — par for the course — also called for “more discussion” on extending MAiD to the elderly who are “tired of living” as well as to teenagers aged 14 to 17. The “come let us have a necessary conversation” gimmick has become a staple of MAiD ideologues. They have used it repeatedly since the 2015 Carter Supreme Court decision to push ever further into cohorts eligible for medicalized homicide, and rationales for novel uses of lethal injection as health care.
The Canadian Catholic Bioethics Institute captured the consequences aptly in a response to the “gravely evil” proposal.
“The original ‘safeguards’ in Canada’s legalization of euthanasia (MAiD) required those who qualify for the procedure to be of legal age and of sound mind. It must now be clear to many more people that those cautions were quite deliberately made as the thin edge of a wedge to allow initial legislation to be passed, lulling people into a false sense of security,” the CCBI wrote. “That was as recently as 2016, yet government proposals for extensions have followed rapidly, removing the requirement for showing death as imminent, paving the way for giving advance consent in cases of people diagnosed with early dementia, moving towards allowing euthanasia for those with certain forms of mental illnesses, and raising the possibility, as yet resisted, of euthanizing minors.”
Giant step by giant step, we’ve descended to the grounds of justifying killing babies not only in the womb but because they are born with imperfections. What we’re doing collaterally in the process, the CCBI warns, is eviscerating the fundamental protection of informed consent foundational to our way of life.
“(W)e need to realize that the legal necessity for consent as a form of protection of the individual is being… eroded. This is being done gradually and quietly, while most people either do not realize or suspect this or are not concerned about the implications,” it warns.
Those implications are that medical death can be administered from, well, birth to death, meaning MAiD will turn t