“They built the high places of Baal in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, to offer up their sons and daughters to Molech.” (Jer 32.35)

Canada’s “Medical Assistance in Dying” regime is truly ghastly. Advocates imply that they are offering “death with dignity” to people whose lives are unbearable, emphasizing the laws’ applicability to the terminally or seriously chronically ill. Death, they argue, should be available to those with the capacity to choose it, even if it requires active (not passive) medical assistance.

When the laws were passed in 2016, MAID was open only to those whose deaths were “reasonably foreseeable.” In practice, eligibility for MAID expanded quickly, and people began to choose medically assisted suicide for combinations of financial and emotional considerations, or because had have chronic but NOT serious illnesses.

Or even because they were suffering from mental illness, which clearly brings into question their capacity to choose death over life freely.

In the past two years:

These cases may have been outliers, but Canada is now on the verge of explicitly extending MAID provisions for the mentally ill and even “mature minors”. Pushback appears to have put the brakes on this expansion temporarily, but only that.

Human beings have dignity and worth that comes from being created in the image of God. What are our responsibilities to the mentally ill, the destitute, the incarcerated, etc., in the light of their being bearers of the image of God? All kinds of lives are inconvenient for us, inconvenient for society. Do we wash our hands of them?

From National Review:

For more on this topic, see Brooke Medina’s excellent article at https://blog.acton.org/archives/124195-maid-in-canada.html.