Any time the government gets involved with mercy killing, there is a justified concern that the mercy will give way to the killing, for the government’s convenience. From Ian Birrell at unherd.com:
‘I was offered assisted dying over cancer treatment’ In Canada, a broken healthcare system is killing patients
Two years ago, over the Thanksgiving holiday, Allison Ducluzeau started to feel pain in her stomach. At first, she assumed she had eaten too much turkey, but the pain persisted. A couple of weeks later, she saw her family doctor who requested CT scans, although none were sorted. Soon after, as the agony worsened, her partner insisted she went to the emergency unit at their local hospital on Vancouver Island. Finally, doctors confirmed the couple’s worst fears: she was almost certainly suffering from advanced abdominal cancer.
Allison, then 56, later learned that she had stage 4 peritoneal carcinomatosis, an aggressive condition. By the time she saw a specialist early last year, he warned that she might only live a few months longer: chemotherapy tended to be ineffective for her cancer, buying a bit more time at best, and she was inoperable. Instead, she was told to go home, sort out her papers, and decide if she wanted medical assistance in dying.
Unsurprisingly, Allison was devastated. “I could barely breathe — I went in there hoping to come out with a treatment plan but was just told to get my will in order.” That night was the worst of her life as she broke the shattering news to her son and daughter at her home in Victoria. “I told them I might only live for another two months,” she recalled. “If I’d not had my children, I might have accepted MAID [medical assistance in dying] — but when I saw the effect on them, having just been through the deaths of my own parents, it made me dig really deep.”
