An old Not the Nine O’Clock News sketch had a woman asking her doctor about an abortion. ‘How advanced is the pregnancy?’ the doctor asks. At which point the mother turns to her son: ‘How old are you?’ ‘Ten, Mum’: 129 months, she duly informs the doctor.
In keeping with the Clown World we’ve found ourselves living in, what was once comedy has become grim reality. The pro-death lobby, not satisfied with promoting suicide, are now widening their remit to unapologetic murder.
Forget abortion, Canada is out here suggesting that we euthanize infants.
Let’s not be bamboozled by the phony euphemisms: this is not ‘VAD’, because there’s nothing ‘voluntary’ about it. Babies cannot ‘volunteer’ to be killed. Even ‘MAiD’ deliberately obscures more than it confesses: ‘Medical Assistance in Dying’, when the dyee can neither consent nor volunteer, is what a more honest society would call ‘murder’.
We do not, though, live in an honest society. Instead we are fed a steady diet of euphemism and lies while the once-unthinkable is turned into as grim a reality as a smoking chimney in 1940s Poland.
A Canadian doctor has suggested that babies with severe deformities could be euthanized under the country’s controversial assisted suicide laws.
Quebec College of Physicians member Louis Roy […] suggested in 2022 that assisted suicide ‘may be appropriate for babies suffering from extreme pain,’ and that parents ‘should have the opportunity to obtain this care for their infant.’
He was quoting a December 2021 Quebec College of Physicians statement which supported considering newborn euthanasia in cases involving ‘unrelievable extreme suffering’.
And there’s the Big Lie of the pro-death lobby. This is the self-righteous bullshit they still baffle so many people with: ‘extreme suffering’. Try to argue against crossing the Rubicon of death and you’re immediately met with a pious chorus of, ‘but the suffering!’ Except that, in practice, we’ve seen that ‘unrelievable extreme suffering’ almost immediately morphs into ‘death on demand’. Whether you want it or not: multiple disabled people in places like Canada have reported public health officials pressuring them to submit to being killed, including by denying them food or other help until they give in. In the Netherlands, one elderly woman at least was literally strapped down, kicking and fighting, so she could be conveniently offed.
This is no slippery slope hypothetical, it’s slippery slope reality.
So is murdering babies.
In 2005, the Netherlands made the historic decision to legalize assisted death for terminally ill infants under the age of one. Dutch law specifies that, should a baby be born with a severe medical condition that is irremediable and causes “unbearable” suffering, parents may have the right to terminate their child’s life. While many other countries in the world have legalized assisted dying for adults, the Netherlands was the first to legalize it for infants since Nazi Germany.
As always, too, the slippery slope goes all the way downhill at alarming speed.
The push for infant euthanasia began in 2022, six years after medical assistance in dying (otherwise known as MAID) was officially legalized in Canada in 2016. That year, Dr Louis Roy spoke on behalf of the Quebec College of Physicians, stating that their board would like to explore legalizing assisted death for “babies from zero to one years of age who are born with severe deformations, very grave and severe syndromes (...) whose life expectancy and level of suffering are such that it would make sense to ensure that they do not suffer given that their possibility of surviving is basically nil.”
This proposal met with immediate backlash.
So was the very concept of medical suicide in the first place: yet, here we are. If there’s one thing we know about the pro-death lobby, it’s that they never take ‘no’ for an answer.
They just keep chipping away and hoping no one notices.
In 2015, when the Supreme Court of Canada declared that laws against medical assistance in dying were invalid and that MAID should be legal under at least certain circumstances, a wide variety of concerns were expressed by adversaries of the practice. The most prominent concern was the “slippery slope” issue […]
The Supreme Court of Canada quickly shut down those concerns, stating assisted death was only for competent, consenting adults who are suffering intolerably from irremediable medical conditions (although what qualifies as “irremediable” was left vague).
And we all know what happens next.
Within five years, Canada removed the ‘terminally ill’ requirement. ‘Suffering’ was changed to “mental suffering from your illness, disease, disability or state of decline”. Just a few years later, even that was removed, and the law was changed yet again, to mental illness as the only necessary qualification.
The Supreme Court still claims that vulnerable people must be protected, but also states, “vulnerability can be assessed on an individual basis.” This means no one is objectively vulnerable, and every safeguard on assisted death can be interpreted subjectively.
And ‘consent’, as Dutch infants, and soon no doubt Canadian, learned, is optional. Especially once, as it so often does, the state decides that it can act in loco parentis.
We’ve seen this movie before. It didn’t end well.
