Medics who helped to implement Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) programme warn that too many people are being euthanased “without the opportunity for careful reflection”.
Writing in the New York Times, Madeline Li and Gary Rodin, professors of psychiatry at the University of Toronto, believe more practitioners should be encouraging patients to pause and reflect on their decision rather than hastening them to their deaths.
Since legalising euthanasia in 2016, Canada has already abolished the requirement for a person to be terminally ill. Those who are deemed to have an ‘incurable’ condition, even if they also suffer from a mental illness, can be killed.
Li and Rodin have both assessed whether patients are eligible for MAID. While they state that it is not their place to dissuade others from seeking medical help to kill themselves, they argue that Canada’s system “is no longer an option of last resort”.
They continued: “Too many people are receiving the procedure without the opportunity for careful reflection about it with a health provider. In some cases, patients are being approved who should not be.”
Reflecting on the prevailing situation, they wrote: “Today, Canada’s system is one of the most permissive in the world, allowing assisted dying for almost any form of subjectively intolerable suffering that has a medical basis, or even for medically unexplained physical symptoms.
“This latitude may contribute to Canada having the fastest growth rate of assisted dying in the world, increasing 16-fold in the eight years since legalisation.”