This Bill has arrived at our doorstep, and we have done nothing. To be at a place where our own government will fund the killing of our most vulnerable – and who will face immense pressure to make this "decision" – is a disgrace. The claim is that this is only for those with six months left to live and no one else. But we all know the reality of what opening up this particularly insidious can of worms will lead to.
In Canada, despite no democratic vote on the matter, their judiciary suddenly decided that not having a right to kill yourself in a way that is visually more comfortable for others was <em>against</em> their constitution. They of course drummed up the usual narrative, claiming safeguards will be rigorous and the scope small. Though inevitably, after such a clear and steady proclamation, they have been on a hard and fast mission to rip down all safeguards that stand in their way in the name of the ability to kill as many as they can.
Now, they are about to legalise euthanasia for the mentally ill. Meanwhile they have already been able to justify killing their own citizens due to anorexia, PTSD or simply because someone doesn't own a home at the time.
In what is clearly an unrelated point, the euthanasia business has boomed in Canada from a <em>zero</em>-dollar industry at the start of 2016 to what is now a <em>multi-million</em>-dollar industry – from a Google search you will easily find out how much the industry might save in future healthcare costs, but you will be hard pressed to find out exactly all the money that has been made. This is what no one talks about, that killing people actually makes a lot of money.
The military-industrial complex has known this for a long time, but those investing outside of it are just starting to wake up to the incredible profit margins behind convincing your elderly loved one or neighbour that it is better to die than to live. The legalisation in Canada – and in increasing numbers of jurisdictions around the world – means investors have a new avenue for cash flow, and the only way to make more money is to either convince more people to kill themselves within the legal bracket available, or to expand the supply of customers.
Since passing legalisation, every country that has done so has chosen to expand that supply. The power of normalisation and encouragement from those wanting this blood money, whether they are the inheritance-ready relatives or those indirectly making a big sack of profit from everything related to the killing, is already evident. In 2019, Canada’s MAiD programme was already accountable for one out of every 50 deaths; this scaled up hard and fast by 2023 to more than one in every 25 deaths.
The commoditisation of death is there for all to see, even in the waiting rooms of hospitals where it is advertised on TVs to potential customers, convincing them to take the path to an early grave. To put that in perspective, euthanasia in Canada is now responsible for more deaths than are caused by car accidents, influenza or pneumonia, and is well on its way to establishing itself as one of the main causes of death in Canada.
Or to put this another way, even the pre-2019 numbers of deaths caused by privatised suicide in Canada <em>surpass</em> an exaggerated count of the number of deaths caused by Covid-19 at its peak. Numbers, lest we forget, that the UK government used to justify a nationwide lockdown to protect those that the Bill on assisted suicide seeks to open the doors of death to anyway. What an upside-down world we live in.
Euthanasia, as we know, already takes place in too many of our European partners. But in many cases, it is already far worse. In the Netherlands it is now justifiable to kill a newborn baby because others conclude that its life is seen as “unbearable and with no prospect of improvement” (does that sound similar to what what someone suicidal might say on the edge of a bridge, before others go to try and stop them?).
In Oregon, held to be the "gold standard" by assisted suicide legislators in the UK, post-legislative expansion led to “terminal illness” to cover hernias, arthritis or diabetes. In Switzerland they have recently produced death pods to asphyxiate people and streamline their way to an environmentally friendly "biodegradable" grave.
This all sounds like a steady but inevitable march to something even more terrifying and ultimately inevitable if we continue down the dark path we are currently on. Where this path leads to is hinted at by the situation in Belgium and the Netherlands, because of the fact that these newborns, as mentioned above, may be killed if it seems appropriate to those who decide on their behalf. <em>Those who decide on their behalf</em>.
The flip has switched and the lights are on: the true nature of this culture of death has revealed itself. If this is decided <em>on their behalf, </em>then it cannot be that this is about what <em>they </em>think and what <em>their </em>choice is. In this case of the just born, of course, it is about what others decide because babies cannot decide such important things for themselves. But here we can still see that it takes on an "I know better than you" attitude, which can just as easily be applied to adults.
The danger is that it becomes a situation where if another <em>knows better</em>, then what they decide must trump what the person themselves decides.
And this is what is revealed – that it never was about “individual choice”. It has always been about what has been decided about who should die. It comes from the same idolatry of the self: that same self who has the final say on the facts no matter what is put forward. This idolatry of the modern world means that the very act of deciding must be taken as the highest good and therefore must be followed.
It is in many ways a toddler’s attitude to life, but only more inventive in the reasons given for doing so. The sort of assertion as: “1+1=3, because I have decided so and, also, more than that, because I have decided it is better for everyone if we just agree on this."
Justification of evil comes in all forms, but its worst and most dangerous type is the excuse that cites the "good outcome" that is claimed will come from its chosen evil of the day. The justification wears a mask "good" enough for the naïve to mistake it as something it is not, and for long enough that Pandora’s Box may be opened. For once such safeguards such as our inalienable value as human persons is taken away and each person is no longer seen as inherently valuable, then little justification is needed to do any number of evils on those who inconvenience you.
This cannot be allowed to happen. We must remember as a society the inherent value and dignity of human life. We must remember that this same dignity is above any ideas around being “productive” and is something both much deeper and intangibly more important. Let us hope that egregious concepts around human "productivity" are not authorised by our Parliament, and that it turns back again – just in time – to the true source of <em>why </em>we truly matter.
<a href="https://thecatholicherald.com/uk-catholic-medical-association-statement-on-assisted-suicide-bill/"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color"><strong><em>RELATED: UK Catholic Medical Association statement on assisted suicide Bill</em></strong></mark></a>
<em>Photo: A woman behind a placard shaped like a gravestone at a demonstration against assisted suicide, London, England, 16 May 2025. (Photo by Carl Court/Getty Images.)</em>
<em>Timothy Mayer is a young Catholic man, lawyer and writer.</em>
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