Canada’s Death Option: Using euthanasia to backstop your spotty universal health care system.

It is easy to sympathize with Hatch’s desire to end her painful life on her own terms. And her bespoke ritual attempts to recapture elements of what used to be normative before atomized modernity—dying well-loved in the embrace one’s family and community. Anyone’s sincere effort to grapple with suffering and achieve meaning deserves sympathy. But what Simons sells as autonomy’s final victory over debilitating illness was really a concession to bureaucratic apathy. The National Post reports, “Hatch’s case fits into an ever-expanding constellation of Canadians who want to live, but applied for medically assisted death out of desperation after failed attempts to seek appropriate care.” British Columbia’s healthcare system would not even provide her with palliative care once her disease became terminal. It promptly approved her request for MAID, however.

Three weeks before Simons released its slick propaganda piece, the Canadian House of Commons entertained the question of whether it should be permissible to euthanize infants up to the age of one. On October 7, Dr. Louis Roy testified on behalf of the Quebec College of Physicians that death by lethal injection is suitable for children “with severe deformations and…very grave and severe syndromes…whose life expectancy and level of suffering are such that it would make sense to ensure that they do not suffer.”

The College’s position represents a further radicalization of Canada’s MAID movement, whose most recent victory ensures that, beginning next spring, even depression will qualify one for euthanasia. Dr. Roy’s comments echoed the College’s previous suggestion that Canada should adopt the Netherlands’ Groningen Protocol, which established legal guidelines for medical infanticide. The Protocol emphasizes the presence of “hopeless and unbearable suffering” alongside the informed consent of the parents. The child, of course, is as incapable of giving consent as she is of confirming her hopelessness or her ability to endure suffering, so these must be determined by others.

The sophistication of the human brain notwithstanding, we simply cannot know the subjective experiences of other people. We can imagine our way into experiences not our own, but the irreducibility of subjective consciousness ensures that our imaginings are at best educated guesswork. At worst, however, our assessment of another’s suffering is really an expression of our own: I cannot tolerate watching you suffer, therefore your suffering must be intolerable. It is the broken logic of psychological projection.

The idea of parents “consenting” to their child’s killing is no less incoherent. Can a mother and father “consent” to selling their daughter as a sex slave? Whatever moral meaning the term possesses in the case of slavery, it possesses even less with respect to euthanasia. We may permit or will something to be done to a person in our care, and we may do so in accordance with that person’s expressed wishes, but we cannot perform or determine an act of subjective consciousness for (as) anyone but ourselves.