Doctors should be left out of the death-on-demand business

National Post, 19 March 2021

Now that Canada’s legislators have got the medicine out of our suicide regime, it’s time to get the medical profession out, too.

Bill C-7 is now law, expanding what has been called “medical assistance in dying.” That was then; this is now. The new law abolishes the requirement that anyone be “dying,” at least in the sense that death is imminent, or even foreseeable.

The new law permits anyone who is seriously suffering to request a lethal injection. All the supposed safeguards are gone. It can be requested in the morning and be administered before sunset, no need even to wait for the dying of the light.

In two years, the mentally ill — a depressed 20-something, a 50-something with memory loss, an 80-something who’s simply tired of life, perhaps? — will be eligible, even if there are treatment options.

Canada’s assisted suicide regime is no longer about medical treatment, or even about dying. It’s about having the ability to choose death now, rather than later. That is a terrifying departure from millennia-old tradition in both law and the medical profession, but Canada’s Parliament has decided that it is wiser than that tradition. Thousands of Canadians now receive lethal injections each year; in a few years, it could be tens of thousands, encouraged by a medical system that is straining to keep up with demand.

So permit this question: why should doctors do the injecting?

A lethal injection requires a certain technical knowledge to get the right amount of poison into the right vein, but it does not require medical training. After all, the injection has no medicinal purpose, which can be defined as something designed to keep the patient healthy or pain-free. So why should medical practitioners do it?

Continue reading at the National Post.