Canadian doctors and nurse practitioners have reported that they have killed almost 4,000 (3,714) patients since euthanasia was legalized in Quebec in December 2015 — after which it was legalized throughout the country by Supreme Court fiat — an act of judicial hubris quickly formalized by Parliament.

Nearly 2,000 were killed in 2017, not including a few territories that did not report figures and assuming all euthanasia deaths were reported. All but one of these deaths resulted from a lethal jab — homicide — at the patients’ request. See the “Third Interim Report on Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada.”

Note that as is the usual case, the number of doctor-facilitated deaths has increased steadily since legalization. For example, there were more than 200 more such deaths in the last six months of last year than the first.

Trend Without End

The report notes that some euthanasia requests were refused because the patient wasn’t competent or the deaths were not reasonably “foreseeable” — the wording of the national law passed by Parliament.

But even these weak limitations are likely to be discarded soon. Canada is already debating whether to permit people to order themselves killed if they ever become incompetent with dementia.

Moreover, the “foreseeable” limitation is likely unconstitutional — cases have already been filed — as the Supreme Court made it explicitly clear that the positive right to receive euthanasia it conjured was not to be limited to the dying. If (when) these court challenges succeed, Canada’s euthanasia numbers will spike even higher.

A Shocking Enthusiasm

It is shocking how enthusiastically Canada has embraced the culture of death — to the point that little dissent is allowed. For example, Ontario passed a law requiring all doctors to either kill a legally qualified patient or procure a doctor willing to commit the homicide, a law specifically approved by a court even though the judge acknowledged it violated the Charter-protected religious and conscience rights of dissenting physicians.

If we in the United States ever jump off the same moral cliff — considering that Canada has about one-tenth of the U.S. population — we would be looking at tens of thousands of medicalized homicides per year. That is why we must resist assisted-suicide legalization without flagging.

Photo credit: Kuebi = Armin Kübelbeck [GFDL or CC BY-SA 3.0 ], from Wikimedia Commons.

Cross-posted at The Corner.