Breast Cancer Victim Offered Euthanasia

A woman undergoing life-saving cancer surgery in Canada was offered assisted suicide by doctors as she was about to enter the operating room.

The case comes as the number of people opting to end their lives under the country’s medical assistance in dying (MAID) programme has risen thirteen-fold from 1,018 to 13,241 in 2022.

Assisted dying, which was legalised in Canada in 2016, is now the fifth-leading cause of death in the country.

The case will sound alarm bells in the UK, where a bill on assisted dying is set to be brought forward in parliament this month. If it passes, it would pave the way for the practice to be legalised.

Although details of the British bill have not yet been finalised, it is expected to propose granting terminally ill adults who have six months or less to live access to medical help to end their own lives.

Sir Keir Starmer has said he is “very pleased” that MPs will get the chance to vote on the issue. It will be a free vote and the Government will remain neutral on the subject, but the Prime Minister has previously supported an assisted dying bill and said that he thinks there are grounds for changing the law.

Canada now has the fastest-growing assisted dying programme in the world. Only the Netherlands has a higher rate of such deaths.

The increase in deaths has sparked fears disabled and unwell people with complex needs are being put under pressure to choose to end their lives.

Speaking anonymously, the 51-year-old cancer patient said of the moment she was offered death instead of surgery: “It floored me... [it was] the most vulnerable I’ve ever felt in my life”.

The patient, a married grandmother from Nova Scotia, explained she was set to undergo a mastectomy operation for breast cancer when a physician asked her if she knew about medical assistance in dying (MAID).

“I was sitting in two surgical gowns, one frontways and one backwards, with a cap on my hair and booties on my feet. I was shivering and in a hard plastic chair and all alone in a hallway,” she said in a video for the Christian Medical and Dental Association.

“The [doctor] sat down and went through all the scary things with me. Then he asked ‘Did you know about medical assistance in dying?’

“All I could say was, ‘I don’t want to talk about that’.

“I was scared and I was alone and I was cold and I didn’t know what was coming.

“Why was I being asked about assisted dying, when I was on my way into what I truly believe was life-saving surgery?”

The grandmother, a store manager, has struggled with lupus, fibromyalgia and migraines since she was a child, but has always managed her disabilities. 

In September 2022 she found a lump on her breast and was diagnosed with breast cancer, with her first mastectomy to take place the following month.

Despite declining the offer of the MAID program, the woman was asked about assisted dying again before undergoing her second mastectomy nine months later and spoken to a third time while recuperating in the recovery room after that procedure.

She said the repeat offers made her feel like a burden to doctors and that people in her position “were better off dead”.