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.

Is Human Organ Harvesting Behind Push to Legalize “Assisted Suicides”?

My first anti-assisted suicide article, in 1993, warned that the practice would lead to conjoining organ donation with euthanasia “as a plumb to society.” That is happening now in Netherlands and Belgium — including people with mental illnesses, no less. Now, very alarmingly, the United Network for Organ Sharing seems to be opening the door to letting those planning to commit assisted suicide become living organ donors before taking the lethal pills. From its proposed changes to the ethics of living organ donation to allow the terminally ill to participate: "We recommend that individuals with certain fatal diseases be allowed to donate their organs prior to an assisted suicide, but only in those U.S. states where physician assisted suicide is legal and individuals meet the criteria for physician assisted suicide."