Nothing is more telling than the rhetorical sleights of hand which attempt to keep modern immoral practices out of sight. Before vivid ultrasound images made the lie utterly untenable, the humanity of the unborn child was concealed by the verbal screen of a “clump of cells.” In a political context, at the height of the Global War on Terror, a range of techniques, such as simulated drowning, were used on suspected terrorists. At the time, these practices were euphemistically referred to as “enhanced interrogation;” humanitarian groups took a different view, describing them as torture.
Canada’s depraved regime of euthanasia has now spawned a similar range of evasive terms, and for a similar purpose. Of course, the mantra of “dignity” was always a farce, since there is nothing dignified in exposing the vulnerable and the infirm to the fear of future pain and then presenting assisted suicide and involuntary physician-directed death as reassuring solutions to the spectre of worst-case what-if scenarios. With the approval of so-called “Track 2,” a pathway which permits MAiD for patients where natural death is not reasonably foreseeable, even the evasive acronym, “Medical Assistance in Dying,” is no longer accurate, since the pretense of “assistance” has been entirely dropped.
Unquestionably, the most conspicuous rhetoric mainstay surrounding euthanasia and assisted suicide bears on the pleasant, peaceful, and painless end that it putatively promises. The gentle, sleep-like passing imagined in the reveries of Romantic poets who were “half in love with easeful Death” and thought fondly of ceasing “upon the midnight with no pain” is the alleged end that MAiD proffers. But new reporting suggests that Canadians driven to take the desperate choice of ending their own lives—and those on whom euthanasia is summarily imposed—actual meet with horrific, prolonged, and agonizing deaths.
Given the similarities between the regimen of drugs by which the lives of our countrymen are being ended and the slow, torturous deaths of inmates executed by lethal injection in America, an anesthesiologist testifying before our Senate has asserted that the fatal ends which the Canadian state sanctions or imposes “could be exceedingly painful and more akin to drowning.” To be clear, then: the same practices which some U.S. states have deemed too tortuous to allow even for criminals condemned to die have become one of the leading causes of death for Canadians.
Because the drugs administered in the course of MAiD induce paralysis but are not actually anesthetic in their effects, the horrifying experience of drowning could be greatly protracted in the very same way that a simulated version of drowning — the so-called practice “waterboarding” — was employed during the interrogators of terrorists. But, in the case of death by MAiD, there is no simulation, and its paralyzed victims have been deprived of the ability to signal any kind of distress. Thus, it appears peaceful. In other words, it is very likely that those who die by means of MAiD — which, at present may total well over 100,000 just in official, documented cases — experience long, terrifying, and utterly excruciating pain. Moreover, the inconceivable panic and horror of the hapless recipients of MAiD is not only being suppressed by the drugs involved: evidence of this torture is being destroyed by medical practitioners who have not conducted any fact-finding autopsies to determine what those who are being exterminated experience in their final moments.
Thus are the parallels between the agonizing inhumanity inflicted through MAiD and the violent and bloody murder of the unborn through abortion unmistakable. In both cases, the specious language of human rights cloaks the most egregious transgressions against them. At least the technology of ultrasound provided the opportunity for Bernard Nathanson, the one-time-abortionist-turned-pro-life-hero, to detail the atrocity of abortion with his shocking 1984 film, The Silent Scream. In the case of MAiD, the screams of its tortured victims can only be surmised because of the suffocating, drug-induced silence in which their last agonies are shrouded.
Yet “nothing is hidden that will not come to light” (Lk 8:17), and the medical professionals who are raising the alarm about the effects of MAiD’s sadistic protocols cannot be ignored forever. Indeed, even if Canadians continue to turn a blind eye to the cruelty of MAiD’s methods — and, even more, to the depravity of the practice itself — the wider world is watching, and is aghast at Canada’s descent into inhumanity. It is very likely, for example, that the United Kingdom’s recent decision to buck the larger global trend — tragically followed by countries like the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, and, most recently, France — to legalize euthanasia had much to do with the shocking case-study that its former colony now offers.
We are quickly becoming a scandal to the world, a morbid cautionary tale which offends the consciences of the others while we ourselves remain ignorant of — or indifferent to — our own monstrous changes. But, in a perverse way, this makes sense: euthanasia is not only liquidating the weakest and most vulnerable in the most wicked way imaginable, it is also killing our own self-understanding. After all, it is not just the weakest who are exposed to long-extended but otherwise invisible torment; we all are entering into the same process at a spiritual level, with a torpor of our surface-level complacency masking the death of our moral sensitivity.
We must, therefore, commit ourselves to the defense of the victims of MAiD, and enact the self-defense which they are unable to mount. We must oppose the forces that spread the paralyzing poison of indifference throughout our culture, and affirm that life is worth living, inflicting painful deaths is absolutely intolerable, and the attitudes that place human life at the mercy of a doctor’s whims have no place in a civilized society.
In fact, ours is a country in need of being re-civilized with public repentance for the gravity of its depravity. “I have set before you, life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live” (Deut 30:19). We have already strayed too far down the dark path of death. We need to retrace our steps if the path of life is ever to be found.
