Paul Tuns: Prior to the House of Commons debate on C-314, the Mental Health Protection Act, the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition held a press conference on Oct. 3 featuring three speakers supporting the bill. Anike Morrison spoke in favour of Bill C-314, saying that if euthanasia for mental illness was available when she suffered her worst depression, she might not be here [...]
Paul Tuns: The unanimous support of all Conservatives, Green, and NDP MPs, joined by a handful of Liberals, was not enough to save Bill C-314, the Mental Health Protection Act, from being defeated in the House of Commons, on Oct. 18, in a vote of 167-150. The private member’s bill was introduced by Conservative MP Ed Fast (Abbottsford) in March to turn [...]
Interim Staff: The B.C.-based Delta Hospice Society has launched a national program called Guardian Angels to provide vulnerable patients with a personal advocate in order to help them avoid being ensnared by the euthanasia trap. The Society says its new initiative is a “national health care advocacy program that partners our compassionate, trained volunteer health advocates, with people navigating the increasingly challenging health care [...]
Josie Luetke: Interim writer, Josie Luetke, Talk Turkey Imagine that you’re mentally ill, convinced that you’re worthless, and waging an internal war with yourself over whether you ought to keep on living or not. You weigh the pros and cons. You consider who might be sad over your death, and so you attempt to keep lists of things to look [...]
Joanna Alphonso: Lucy Letby, Elizabeth Wettlaufer, and Charles Edmund Cullen all had something in common: they were all registered nurses who killed their patients. Lucy Letby, Registered Nurse, Chester, U.K. Lucy Letby, a 33-year-old registered nurse in the United Kingdom, was convicted in August for her murder spree of seven babies over the span of two years at the Countess of Chester [...]
Rory Leishman: Time and again, the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has pledged that as of March 17, 2024, physicians and nurse practitioners in Canada will be authorized to kill suicidal patients who are suffering solely from a mental illness. What can account for this appalling prospect? The Criminal Code of Canada clearly and unambiguously states in sections 14 and [...]
Alex Schadenberg: Kelsi Sheren, a Canadian military veteran, witnessed the horrific death of a comrade in Afghanistan. Sheren who lives with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) told the Daily Mail in July 2023, “It's disgusting and it's unacceptable,” that authorities would rather euthanize a soldier than foot the bill for their recovery. The story of Veterans Affairs employees who advocated euthanasia for veterans [...]
Warren McArthur: British Columbia Catholic hospitals have and continue to stand in opposition to the tides of euthanasia in Canada as bastions of palliative care and reverence for the sanctity of life. As euthanasia becomes more accepted legally and in practice, it is in conscientiously objecting institutions that many patients trust. The government gives a great deal of funding to Catholic hospitals [...]
Joanna Alphonso: Euthanasia is legally defined as the deliberate killing of someone by action or omission for the intention of relieving that person of their suffering. Belgium, Canada, Colombia, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Spain, and most recently Portugal as of 2023, permit active euthanasia (administration of lethal drugs) for irreversible terminal illnesses for adults and in some of these countries, for [...]
Hungary fights for the family The European Union, presently comprised of 27 nations, operates through a hybrid system of supranational and intergovernmental decision-making. The larger countries such as Germany and France, are run by governments that are at the vanguard of social liberalism’s many experiments, and they control many decisions in the EU. Currently, they are fighting to strip Hungarian parents of [...]
Josie Luetke: Interim writer, Josie Luetke, Talk Turkey It’s perversely fitting that an act that renders so many speechless (literally and figuratively) lacks any appropriate descriptors in speech. “MAiD” or “medical assistance/aid in dying,” as it’s most commonly referred to now, is the latest inception of a long evolution of palatability-tested phrases. “Medically-assisted death” was discarded, presumably because the unfortunately [...]
Critics say government’s directives will promote Medical Assistance in Dying Paul Tuns: On March 27, Health Canada released its new “Model Practice Standard for Medical Assistance in Dying,” direction for physicians that critics say will continue the federal government’s promotion of euthanasia, which has killed more than 31,000 Canadians since it became legal in 2016 under the euphemism Medical Assistance in Dying [...]
Presbyterians rarity among mainline Protestant churches to oppose euthanasia James Schadenberg, Special to The Interim: Euthanasia Prevention Coalition has written about situations where Canadian churches are promoting euthanasia (MAiD) such as when Churchill Park United Church in Winnipeg Man., hosted the euthanasia death of an 86-year-old woman in March 2022. Recently, EPC sponsored a petition against a pro-euthanasia prayer promoted by the United [...]
The last canticle of Dante’s Divine Comedy begins with the poet taking stock of his unprecedented enterprise. Thus far, his imaginative journey has taken him, like the epic heroes of old, to the depths of the underworld. But, unlike them, he does not return to the world. Instead, he passes through the realm of forsaken souls to ascend the purgatorial terraces of [...]
How do contraception, abortion, transgenderism and euthanasia fit in? Paul Tuns Editor’s Note: Part I appeared in the March edition of The Interim. Technology, as the writer Sean Haylock points out in a 2017 essay in Crisis “is mechanistic (reductively focused on efficient causation), utilitarian (reasoning by a calculus and willing to treat persons as means to an end), and voluntaristic (taking [...]