Thread by @AlexanderRaikin

Silencing whistleblowers. Laughing about sedating a patient into euthanasia. Expanding MAID to the vulnerable, homeless, and children, especially Indigenous children.

The next cover story for @NRO tries to answer: how did death care replace health care?

nationalreview.com/magazine/2023/…

@NRO Consider a 2021 seminar from the leading group of "MAID providers" in Canada, a group that is funded by the gov't to train clinicians nationwide.

"How would folks interpret someone who... [is] shouting, pulling their arm away as one tries to insert the IV to provide MAID?"

@NRO So what does the ethicist say? What did MacLean mean by "conversation and calmness"?

The answer is blunt: he administered hydromorphone, an opiate, in order to skirt the law around consent with euthanasia—and the advice is to consider doing it covertly.

In Canada. In 2021.

"Good."

No one in the panel, no one in the audience, objects. Welcome to the world of death care.

Patients with conditions never considered to be valid reasons to die are now being helped to die by willing physicians: hearing loss, autism, sexual exploitation by a psychiatrist

In every jurisdiction that legalized euthanasia, the number of deaths at the hands of physicians or nurses is ballooning as safeguards are rescinded.

Last year, the number of deaths in California increased by 63%. In Canada, over the last 7 years, there was a 1,300% (!) growth

Health care facilities in Australia and Canada that do not allow euthanasia on site are being defunded, threatened, and even nationalized.

Calvary Public Hospital in Canberra, a Catholic hospital, was forcibly acquired by the gov't: all because it refused death care in medicine

Physicians in both countries are being censured, demoted, and forced to leave medicine for voicing their concerns.

A physician in Quebec was even targeted by his medical college... for his testimony to a parliamentary committee warning about the dangers of expanding MAID.

This is all by design. The Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers discussed in their 2018 convention how their goal is to fundamentally change medicine—not just offer death care as an alternative option to those that want it.

They even tried to hide this document:

Palliative medicine is meant "to neither hasten nor delay death," precisely to reassure vulnerable patients—as everyone at end-of-life is—that their physician won't end their life (or smother them with a pillow, as happened in Belgium last year).

CAMAP's goal is to undo that:

Should only healthcare workers provide health care?

Well, someone at CAMAP even claimed that they are a veterinarian who is also a MAID provider.

No, I have no idea what this means either. Read it for yourself:

Moreover, CAMAP discussed a lot about providing MAID to vulnerable communities because of poverty.

Now remember: Justin Trudeau promised that no one will receive MAID “because you’re not getting the supports and cares that you actually need.” CAMAP denies it is happening

@CharlieAngusNDP, you said there's no chance that MAID will be expanded to children.

But look how @CAMAPCanada in 2018 advocated to expand MAID to Indigenous children, to Indigenous people driven by poverty, and pushed against church-run homeless shelters

@BCANDS1

Even a hypothetical patient with fixed delusions was considered potentially eligible because "it doesn't matter what he wants it for: You can request MAID due to psychological suffering and if that's what caused his changed state, it would be reasonable"

In 2018. Before Bill C-7

CAMAP claims they're not an "advocacy organization." And yet they discussed how they needed to push through "politics" to get MAID-free spaces out of healthcare—which in Canada mostly means faith-based hospitals.

Instead, they described MAID as "sacred".

CAMAP, I should add, is also an organization that teaches how age alone "helps qualify for MAID", even though Quebec's monitoring agency claims that is illegal

"Advanced age and the problems associated with aging does not constitute a serious and incurable illness"

But the largest impact is not on physicians or hospitals. It's on people with disabilities, who as @mssinenomine told me, need "MAID-free" spaces to get health care.

When this doesn't happen, as I found out with 'Rachel' and 'James', it means that MAiD becomes the only option.

@mssinenomine Rachel told me that when she tried to call the suicide prevention hotline, she was told to visit Dying with Dignity's website.

Let me be clear: She tried to get help for thoughts of suicide, and instead she was being offered advice for how to die from assisted suicide.

@mssinenomine Rachel eventually managed to beat the odds and find a bed by showing up at CAMH’s ER, a mental health hospital that doesn’t allow MAID on site.

James isn’t so lucky.

@mssinenomine There is plenty more in this story. Read on here:

Thank you to @RameshPonnuru and the great editors and fact-checkers at @NRO for giving the proper attention to this storynationalreview.com/magazine/2023/…

@mssinenomine @RameshPonnuru @NRO And of course, it goes without saying, thank you to @tamaraberens for putting up with all of my euthanasia-related small talk at dinner parties now.