A Canadian doctor who has killed more than 400 people through euthanasia and assisted suicide has boasted that she helped to kill one man who was previously deemed not to meet the requirements.
In recently obtained recordings of seminars held by The Canadian Association of MAID Assessors and Providers (CAMAP), Dr Ellen Wiebe explained that the anonymous man was previously refused so-called ‘Medical Assistance in Dying’ because he did not have a serious illness or “capacity to make informed decisions about his own personal health”.
But after finding another assessor to approve his application, she confessed: “I picked him up at the airport, brought him to my clinic and provided for him.”
Poor and lonely
Canada legalised euthanasia in 2016, but has already scrapped the requirement for a person to be terminally ill.
Responding to the public journal The New Atlantis which reported the findings, Wiebe claimed: “It is rare for assessors to have patients who have unmet needs, but it does happen. Usually these unmet needs are around loneliness and poverty.
“As all Canadians have rights to an assisted death, people who are lonely or poor also have those rights.”
‘Value’
Dr Stefanie Green, co-founder and President of CAMAP, and a colleague of Wiebe, told the journal she has also helped to kill more than 300 people via euthanasia and assisted suicide, calling it “one of the most therapeutic things we do”.
Green, who is also an obstetrician, said she uses the term “deliveries” to both describe helping women to give birth and helping people to kill themselves.
When asked if she finds it easier to perform euthanasia and assisted suicide than she did at first, she claimed that “it’s oddly okay for me to be doing that. I don’t find it shocking anymore, but the events are still extraordinary”.
Alexander Raikin, who interviewed Green for The New Atlantis, said that “what we hear are the cries of people in despair asking for help. Just a few years ago they would have been textbook candidates for what a just society would say: Your life has value. In Canada today they hear something else: Your death will be beautiful.”
Scotland
The Scottish Parliament is in danger of replicating Canada’s “hideous” approach to assisted suicide, a Scottish political commentator has warned.
Writing in The Times, Alex Massie argued that Holyrood was incapable of legislating “prudently” in such a contentious area and risked inflicting the “dystopian” model unravelling in Canada on the people of Scotland.
Under Liam McArthur MSP’s Assisted Dying (Scotland) Bill, anyone aged 16 or over who is deemed terminally ill and has been resident in Scotland for 12 months would be allowed to receive help to kill themselves.
Consultations on euthanasia and assisted suicide are also underway for England and Wales, Jersey and the Isle of Man.
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