A woman in Canada was offered the choice of euthanasia or assisted suicide multiple times, including once as she was about to undergo life-saving surgery for breast cancer – a situation that medical professionals have said is not uncommon.
Speaking anonymously, the 51-year-old grandmother and cancer patient from Nova Scotia explained that she was asked if she wanted assisted suicide or euthanasia as she was set to undergo a mastectomy for breast cancer.
She said “I was sitting in two surgical gowns, one frontways and one backwards, with a cap on my hair and booties on my feet. I was shivering and in a hard plastic chair and all alone in a hallway”.
“The [doctor] sat down and went through all the scary things with me. Then he asked ‘Did you know about medical assistance in dying?’”
“All I could say was, ‘I don’t want to talk about that’. I was scared and I was alone and I was cold and I didn’t know what was coming”.
“Why was I being asked about assisted dying, when I was on my way into what I truly believe was life-saving surgery?”
“It floored me… [it was] the most vulnerable I’ve ever felt in my life”, she added.
Even though the woman refused the offer of assisted suicide or euthanasia, she was asked about the topic again before she underwent a second mastectomy nine months later and then again while recuperating in the recovery room following the operation.
Opening Pandora’s box
She said the repeated offers of assisted dying caused her to feel as if she were a burden and that people in her position “were better off dead”.
“I felt like a problem that needed to be [gotten] rid of instead of a patient in need of treatment”.
“I don’t want to be asked if I want to die”, she added.
The unnamed woman had been waiting for a year for her appointment at a specialist pain clinic. “However, if I were to call the MAID hotline this morning, I’d be talking to a doctor tomorrow afternoon”, she said.
Trudo Lemmens, professor of law at the University of Toronto, who has testified before Canadian parliamentary committees on the introduction of euthanasia and assisted suicide and who initially supported Canada’s assisted suicide and euthanasia law, explained that “[t]he law does not prohibit it, and campaign groups have argued that [assisted suicide and euthanasia] should be offered to anyone who could be eligible”.
In 2021, the Canadian Parliament repealed the requirement that the natural death of those applying for euthanasia or assisted suicide be “reasonably foreseeable”. This took place only five years after the original legislation allowing euthanasia and assisted suicide was passed in 2016.
Since then, the number of people ending their lives by assisted suicide or euthanasia has increased significantly. In 2022, the number of people who ended their lives by euthanasia or assisted suicide increased by 31.2% from the previous year, accounting for 4.1% of all deaths in Canada.
Professor Lemmens described Canada’s euthanasia and assisted suicide legislation as “opening Pandora’s box”.
“They basically turned medical assistance in dying into euthanasia on-demand”, he added.
Retired corporal, Christine Gauthier, who competed in the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Paralympics, testified before a Canadian House of Commons Veterans Affairs Committee at the beginning of December 2022 that an unnamed veterans affairs case worker had said, in writing, that Ms Gauthier could be provided with a euthanasia device when all she had wanted was a stairlift to be installed in her home.
Ms Gauthier, 52, said “I have a letter saying that if you’re so desperate, madam, we can offer you MAID, medical assistance in dying”.
At the end of 2022, it was found that as many as five Canadian veterans had been offered assisted suicide or euthanasia instead of the care they actually wanted and needed.
Despite the evidence to the contrary, when asked about the danger of a slippery slope, Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, whose assisted suicide Bill is currently making its way through Parliament, said “Wherever a law has been introduced in other countries and it’s got strict limited criteria with proper safeguards and protections, it hasn’t been widened. So there is a perception that’s the case but it isn’t the case”.
“Where there are countries where the law is broader, that was always how it started. So I think there is a perception around the slippery slope concept, which actually isn’t reality”, she added.
Right To Life UK spokesperson, Catherine Robinson, said “While this case is shocking, sadly, it is not surprising. Once assisted suicide or euthanasia are made legal, those eligible will inevitably be offered it, and for many, this offer will be interpreted as an admission that their life is not worth living or that there is no hope for them”.
“The persistent offer of death is also clearly a form of pressure as it not so subtly tells this woman she really should think about ending her life in this way. As MPs consider legalising assisted suicide next month, we would be naive to think these sorts of conversations and this sort of pressure could not happen here”.
