Of Daniel Payne

CNA staff, 1 Nov 2024 / 15:25

Quebec’s provincial government will now allow assisted suicide for people who cannot give consent at the time of the procedure, in what a pro-life lawyer calls a “dehumanizing” policy that “devalues” people with diminished mental capacity.

Provincial Government website states that “advance applications” for medical assistance in dying (MAID) can be made by people who have been “diagnosed with a serious and incurable disease leading to incapacitation” such as Alzheimer’s disease.

The request “must be made while the person is still capable of consenting”, the government says, although it acknowledges that the lethal procedure will be carried out “when it becomes incapable of (giving consent)”.

Some lawyers applauded the move. Cathy Barrick, CEO of the Alzheimer Society of Ontario, told the media this week that assisted dying “should be accessible to people with dementia”.

Meanwhile, Sandra Demontigny – spokeswoman for the Quebec Association for the Right to Die with Dignity, who herself suffers from Alzheimer’s – told the press that she has “waited for this day for many years”.

“I want to take care of myself, my body… I don’t want to rely on people,” she said.

New rule ‘devalues ​​people with memory loss’

Amanda Achtman, who promotes ethics education for Canadian Physicians for Life, argues instead that the policy “inevitably devalues ​​people with memory loss, as well as those who may be unable to give consent for various reasons, such as cause of a certain disability”.

“The basic anthropology supported by a regime of advance death requests is that personhood diminishes with the loss of memory and cognition,” she told CNA. “This is a dehumanizing view.”

Achtman, who also operates the nonprofit I’m dying to meet younoted that Quebec’s expanded criteria are actually illegal under the national criminal code, but “the federal government is unlikely to prosecute any of these crimes in Quebec for political reasons,” she said.

Euthanasia was already available in a limited context for Canadians suffering from dementia, Achtman said. Almost 1 in 10 Canadians receiving MAI in 2022 had dementia; were able to obtain proceedings under a narrower waiver of consent.

Quebec’s new “broadened criteria” — and the government’s likely non-judgment of it — “show how Quebec can push the limits of the law in matters of life and death without repercussion,” Achtman said.

Assisted suicide in Canada has become increasingly popular since it was first legalized in 2016.

Government statistics in 2022 indicator that MAI was the sixth leading cause of death in Canada, with 13,241 “MAI dispositions” reported that year, accounting for 4.1% of all deaths nationally.

Activists have made regular efforts to expand MAID. A group of pro-euthanasia advocates sued the federal government in August to allow physician-assisted suicide for those suffering from mental illness.

The government at the beginning of the year interrupted a planned expansion of the program that would have included the mentally ill though said would consider the policy again in three years to allow provinces to “prepare their health systems” for the expansion.

(Story continues below)

Subscribe to our daily newsletter

In March, meanwhile, a judge ruled that a woman with autism her request to die by assisted suicide could be granted, nullifying the woman’s father’s efforts to stop the deadly procedure.

Achtman said pro-life advocates “must restore a proper view of the human person, insisting on the immutable dignity of every person, no matter what.”

She quoted Pope Francis, who described euthanasia as “a failure of love” and “a reflection of a throwaway culture”. Pro-life advocates, she said, “are responsible for promoting a positive alternative vision in which every human person is valued and belongs.”

“We must be prophets of hope,” she said, “who never tire of remembering that our deepest identity and destiny lies in the limitless human potential to love and be loved, and that this is unshakable.”

Daniel Payne is a senior editor at the Catholic News Agency. He previously worked at College Fix and Just the News. He lives in Virginia with his family.