Medicine Forgets Its Vocation: Alberta Places Guardrails

Hospital chaplains now face a new need for their counselling services, even from non-believers. Healthcare professionals who are now called on to perform “Medical Assistance in Dying” (MAID) are understandably traumatized by the duty to kill their own patients. It’s not the vocation they chose. One chaplain says that some nurses can keep at it for only a few weeks, before they have to take a leave of absence. 

Even more worrisome are the “care-givers” who are not traumatized by administering MAID. What do we make of those who can inject a patient with poison, and then cheerfully check off another “successful treatment” on their spreadsheets? If they feel satisfaction for “a job well done,” are we not teaching them to enjoy killing their fellow human beings? 

On March 18, Alberta Minister of Justice Mickey Amery introduced into the legislature Bill 18, the Safeguards for Last Resort Termination of Life Act, to provide some much need, regulatory guardrails for the overly-elastic federal MAID legislation. Among other things, the new bill will: 

• Limit MAID to those facing a natural death, reasonably foreseen by two professionals; 

• Prohibit MAID for those under 18, or whose sole disease is a mental illness;

• Allow physicians and facilities to opt out of assessing or providing MAID; 

• Forbid health professionals from first introducing the topic of MAID with patients;

• Prohibit Alberta physicians from making referrals for MAID outside Alberta;

• Restrict public notices or advertisements for MAID;

• Provide training for practitioners and sanctions for violating its regulations.

Some of these new regulatory requirements may suggest that Alberta’s “health care industry” is riddled with the Culture of Death. But the euthanasia movement has been at work in our broader culture for at least thirty years, entirely the product of lawyers and judges, with no real public debate or deliberation. So it’d be unreasonable to expect the health care sector not to reflect the broader culture. It’s the broader culture that’s the real issue. 

What happens to us as a people, a society, when we treat the weak or useless among us as disposable? A journalist once asked a Downs Syndrome case-worker, what’s the purpose of these disabled people? The care-giver answered, “Their purpose is to teach us to love.” And that’s the stark choice before us: we either treat human beings as essentially worthy of love, or we treat each other and ourselves as tools to be discarded when we’re no longer productive.  

Loving the useless may seem an economic liability (versus, say, gambling or pornography). But Western Civilization, in its free association, innovation and family autonomy, was founded on the conviction that every human being bears the image of God, the Imago Dei. Human life is good in itself, the bedrock good. And the cradle of life is the family. 

Economists have always known that the family is the sole institution in society that consistently accumulates wealth, as we lovingly nurture the next generation, children good in themselves. The family is the progressive institution. When we think otherwise, reducing the next generation to utensils in a “zero-sum” calculus, we end in our current demographic disaster.  It’s precisely this bedrock good of the family that’s been ignored in the euthanasia debate.   

As we’ve slowly slipped into a “euthanasia culture,” we’ve lost our grip on the fundamental reality that life itself is good, our good. So we now see lonely seniors considering euthanasia, thinking of themselves as mere utensils, to avoid “wasting their children’s inheritance” by lingering on in a care facility. This ought not surprise us, when the prime minister has encouraged anyone suffering “financial hardship” to consider MAID (ignoring the federal law’s elastic regulations). But, no doubt, the “financial hardship” cases he was considering have no families, so there’s no one to miss them.    

Ironically, the medical euthanasia movement kicked off about thirty years ago, promoted as progress in human dignity. Its advocates claimed to advance human autonomy by giving everyone control over their most important “life decision,” when to die. But it’s had precisely the opposite effect, by ignoring everyone else involved—our loved ones. Suicide has always been traumatic for parents, siblings, children and grandchildren. And it’s been corrupting for our friends, neighbors, and even fellow citizens. People always wonder, why couldn’t you stick around for us?  By treating suicide as something purely private, MAID has trivialized life and death decisions to the status of a choice between Cancun and Mazatlán. 

Don’t people always have a right to kill themselves? For all its restrictions, the new Bill 18 fully accommodates anyone fearing the final degeneration of a fatal disease (though these days, pain is almost always manageable, and loneliness the real issue). Anyone swamped by clinical despair may want to die, but they can almost always be helped to rediscover the good of life. Anyone wanting to die from boredom or nihilism, though worthy of pity, can hardly be stopped, given an easy overdose of household medications. Anyone claiming the right to an execution, as either a convenience or ideological stance, must simply be told, no. Life is good, whether they see it or not. We’ll leave the cost of hospital care and self-justifying ideology of the (few?) committed, MAID practitioners out of this deliberation.

That leaves the real issue: the vast majority of MAID victims, commonly cajoled into dying, by the convergence of a depressing disease, the fear that they’re burdening their families, and the cultural prejudice that they’re now economically worthlessness. We’ve seen the assumption on the part of their families, that their loved one really has a right to abandon them, because the choice for death over life is theirs alone. Yet, how often is that MAID candidate simply waiting for someone to stay, “No, please stay. Stay for our sake, because we love you.” And their loved ones don’t say it, because they don’t think they have the right to interfere in a private decision? 

So what happens to us as a people, a society, when we treat the weak or useless among us as disposable? We become indifferent to life itself. No living culture can survive, indifferent to the choice between life and death. When Moses led the children of Israel to the border of the Promised Land, he told his people, “Today, I set before you life and death; choose life!” You wouldn’t think we’d need to be told that, but apparently we do. So it is a good thing that the new Bill 18 provides new Safeguards for Last Resort Termination of Life.