In Canada, Medical Doctors Killed Thousands in 2018

Canadian doctors committed thousands of homicides in 2018. According to an interim report published by the government, in the first ten months of last year, doctors lethally injected 2,613 patients (with one assisted suicide) — and that doesn’t include the homicides committed by doctors in Quebec, Northwest Territories, Yukon, and Nunavut. The report says that about 1.12 percent of all Canadian deaths were caused by euthanasia, a number that is increasing every year. No wonder. Efforts are increasing to normalize lethal injection as a way of death — and soon we are likely to see the killable caste expanded in Canada to include children, people whose deaths are not “foreseeable,” those with dementia who asked to be killed in an advance directive, and perhaps, the mentally ill (as happens regularly in the Netherlands and Belgium). If 1.12 percent of our deaths in the U.S. were doctor-homicides, it would amount to nearly 30,000. These statistics are stark, but they don’t tell the whole story. Because these radical policies have only been in effect for a relatively short time, we don’t yet know the moral costs of allowing doctors to kill sick patients or assist their suicides.