In contrast, a Canadian doctor faced with a MAID request from a patient with a curable disease can put aside such an ethic and terminate the patient’s life. Why would well-meaning Canadian doctors discard their professional ethic? Why do they not feel the force of it to guide their practice?CAMAP repeatedly calls MAID a “treatment option” and a “care option” that is “medically effective.” This kind of Orwellian word game has chilling consequences.
Under this ideology, it is as though the Canadian Constitution, through the Supreme Court, invented a magically effective medical product that is always at the ready. This ideology has co-opted and transformed the country’s health care system into the most potent vehicle for MAID delivery in the world – with no safeguard but the personal discretion of providers. It makes it easy to argue for no special oversight beyond personal discretion, since it is just another medically effective treatment.
In the Netherlands, every single MAID case is reviewed by an interdisciplinary committee, and transparent oversight is the goal. For example, in 2013, when psychiatric MAID became a focus of public debate, this committee published anonymized reports of every case from that year. Compare this with some Canadian providers who seemand who privately discuss the problem of poverty-driven MAID but publicly deny it as “clickbait.
Reasonable people may disagree about whether MAID should be legal. But one need not be for or against the procedure to see that it should be considered a tragic last resort, and that calling it a medically effective treatment is an especially cruel form of gaslighting.fact-based policy making nearly impossible in Canada.
Unless its spell is broken, it is difficult to see how a further deepening of the crisis can be avoided, for no set of “safeguards” born from the ideology will be able to protect the society’s most vulnerable from the “helping hand” of medicine.
MAID needs a several year pause.
This is far less ideology than it is upper class arrogance,impatiently set on eclipsing the right of poor and underprivileged people to live out their lives without being constantly harangued by 'care givers' and a patronizing chattering class about opting for assisted suicide
Assisted suicide as a 'treatment' is a horrible dystopian perversion of basic morality and human decency.
It also seems to be a trigger for CONS who are incapable of understanding complex issues!
Didn’t Germany get in trouble for doing this in the 1930’s?