New York, halt assisted suicide — the ‘death cult' won't stop with the terminally ill
It's done under the guise of humanitarian empathy, but in practice it merely cheapens and devalues life.
Advocates say that enabling a speedy death is a kindness for those in pain. They claim it'll only be employed in the most devastating of circumstances, where a terminally ill patient has just a short time to live and wishes to 'die with dignity.'
These are the same people who want us to kill our babies if they're inconvenient and sterilize our children to placate an adult fantasy that they can swap their sex.
That's not humanitarianism, it's selfishness. And so is assisted death.
From 1998 to 2020, more than 5,300 Americans died by assisted suicide in Oregon, Washington, DC and Hawaii, three places where it was then legal.
A 2022 study found that 95% of them were white, mostly college-educated. Almost all, 85%, had cancer or a neurological disease and were in hospice or palliative care.
That's the image the 81 New York Assembly members who voted last week to legalize what they euphemistically call 'Medical Aid in Dying' want you to believe.
Yet the experience of Canada paints a far more disturbing picture.
When Canada first legalized assisted death in 2016, it was strictly limited to the terminally ill — but that wasn't enough for the suicide advocates, who sued to stretch the rules.
Today, Canadians can request MAiD even when 'death is not reasonably foreseeable' — and nearly 50% of those requests come from the poor and the vulnerable.
The totals are startling: 10,000 Canadians died by assisted suicide in 2021 alone — the same year the program was opened to those with incurable, but not terminal illnesses. In 2022 the number rose to more than 13,000.
One of them, a 51-year-old woman called 'Sophia' in a 2024 report from the Ontario Coroner's Office, chose to die because her chemical sensitivities made life in her apartment unbearable.
'The government sees me as expendable trash, a complainer, useless and a pain in the ass,' Sophia said.
An Ontario psychiatrist offered death to a man diagnosed with inflammatory bowel disease who had a history of mental illness and drug use.
'You should do the right thing and consider MAiD,' a nurse told Heather Hancock of Alberta, who has cerebral palsy. 'You're being selfish. You're not living, you're merely existing.'
The British Columbia oncologist who diagnosed Allison Ducluzeau's abdominal cancer in 2023 offered her death — but refused to authorize surgery or chemotherapy through Canada's single-payer health-care system. She paid for out-of-pocket treatment in the US, and lived.
In Quebec, doctors can issue 'advance directives' for dementia patients so they can essentially be euthanized.
Now the Dignity with Dying advocacy group wants Canada's program extended to terminally ill 'mature minors' under age 18.
By 2027, Canada's mentally ill will become eligible to end their suffering by assisted suicide for that reason alone.
Canada's government gone so far as to create a coloring book for children to help adults explain that they're going to kill themselves.
It's a death cult, plain and simple.
Assisted suicide is the worst idea since child sacrifice. Sacrifice is exactly what it is.
We don't want to comfort our sick or pay for their care. We don't want to look in their faces and acknowledge what death is.
We're so afraid of confronting the end of life that we want to hasten it as it approaches.
Yet the consciousness of death is part of what makes us human. Tending to our dying is an honor — one we were deprived of, and agonized about, during COVID.
There's nothing humane about turning our healers into merchants of death, or in giving sick people the idea that killing themselves is their best and noblest option.
New York voters must realize that MAiD for the terminally ill is just where it starts.
Vermont's law mandated that only state residents could obtain assisted suicide — but in 2023, a Connecticut woman sued and won the right to end her life there. Oregon, too, has abandoned its residency requirement.
Just as Canada started with strict limits, whatever boundaries Albany may erect will surely lapse.
Each of us gets our short time on Earth with hope for connection to each other, to ourselves, to the universal great beyond in which every culture in some form or another believes.
The truth is, no matter what our challenges, we must face every day we're given with as much strength, courage, love and kindness as we can muster.
Life is not optional. It is not for us to determine how long our lives get to be, or how short.
California, Maine, Colorado, Hawaii, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, DC and Washington state have fallen for legislation that rejoices in a culture of death.
Don't let New York be next.
Libby Emmons is the editor-in-chief at the Post Millennial.
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