Alan Nichols was “basically executed” in a Toronto hospital, his brother Gary told The Associated Press. Nichols was 61 years old, with a history of depression. When he was hospitalized and put on a suicide watch, he asked his brother to “kick him out” as soon as possible.
According to the AP story, “His euthanasia application listed only one medical condition as the reason for his request to die: hearing loss.”
In the report, the director of the Canadian Institute for Inclusion and Citizenship at the University of British Columbia — not a right-wing institute — was quoted as saying that Canada’s current euthanasia law is “perhaps the greatest existential threat to people with disabilities that by the Nazis”. program in Germany in the 1930s.
If you have a disability under Canadian law, you can choose death. There have been news reports in recent months of Canadians not receiving adequate health care or housing assistance instead of seeking assisted suicide.
In a 2019 New Atlantis article titled “First, Don’t Take a Stand,” Aaron Kheriaty, a psychiatrist and fellow at the Center for Ethics and Public Policy, argued that medicine has paved the way for the current legalization of assisted suicide, as medical associations would often do. take “disingenuous” neutral positions when confronted with state or national legislation. California and Canada are both examples. “The story is a growing scandal for the medical profession,” Kheriaty wrote. “But it’s not too late to undo it.”
“A neutral position,” he argues, “is not really possible on the legal question of whether assisted suicide should be permitted. To say that some physicians may perform it if they wish, while others may choose to abstain, is to take a position in favor of allowing the practice.
Nichols’ story offers us an opportunity to reexamine how we treat our most vulnerable people. The debate about culture and law, however, cannot be separated from the more pervasive loneliness that plagues our culture. A study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2017 found that 56% of physician-assisted suicide deaths in the Netherlands were related to loneliness.
Harold Braswell, in his book The Crisis of US Hospice Care: Family and Freedom at the End of Life, wrote about the importance of doing more for people with terminal conditions. He argues that whatever one’s position on assisted suicide and euthanasia, there is room for common ground, particularly in the care of dying patients who lack family support.
He points to Our Lady of Perpetual Help Home in Atlanta, which provides long-term hospital care for dying people. It is run by the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, a Catholic religious group, and works with a lay hospice to care for patients who become too expensive for standard care. The two staffs “worked together because they had a common goal: to provide dying people with the best possible care,” Braswell wrote. Such partnerships on the ground show how to truly increase freedom when caring for the dying, Braswell argues.
Assisted suicide is a divisive topic. But we must not let politics and economics drive these debates. Increasing donations to the Dominican Sisters and institutions like them is one way to do this. The future of how we care for each other requires a renewal of how we care for the dying and a prioritization of that work in families and in our systems of care. This is noble work.
The Nichols family was horrified that Alan’s death appeared to have been approved based in part on his hearing loss. But the hospital, police and provincial government say nothing went wrong, according to the law. Rethinking and limiting these laws should be a human, not a partisan, priority.
(Kathryn Jean Lopez is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, editor-in-chief of National Review magazine, and author of the new book “A Year with the Mystics: Visionary Wisdom for Everyday Life.”)
