Assisted Suicide in Canada: A Sobering Reminder of What Happens When Society Loses Respect for the Value of Human Life

We must create a culture that can stand up against all evils that violate the sanctity of life

The issue of assisted suicide has been growing in prominence in Canada over the last few years following a 2015 decision by the Canadian Supreme Court. In Carter v Canada, the Court ruled that people with a “grievous and irremediable medical condition” have a right to assisted suicide. This was followed by legislation in 2016 which changed the law in accordance with the court’s ruling.

In the years since, Canada has seemed to be sliding with increasing velocity down the proverbial slippery slope, which was so often warned about by those opposed to the Court’s decision. 

In 2021, Parliament passed a bill that expanded access to assisted suicide by eliminating the requirement for “a person’s natural death to be reasonably foreseeable.” Additionally, the 2021 law provides that those “with a mental illness as their sole underlying medical condition” will be eligible for assisted suicide in March of 2023.

In the years following the Court’s decision, the Canadian government has also established several committees to evaluate questions related to assisted suicide, such as the “eligibility of mature minors.” 

One of this committee’s conclusions was that denying mature minors access to assisted suicide “would pose a potential future legal challenge if a case were to be brought forward in which a mature minor argued that their constitutional rights were being denied.” 

Following the rapid expansion of access to what the Canadian government has euphemistically dubbed “Medical Assistance in Dying” or MAID, reports of people seeking or even being encouraged and coerced into suicide due to economic factors and lack of government support have skyrocketed.

 Stories of Canadians ending their lives after failing applications for affordable housing, being crushed underneath growing debt, or simply being unable to afford to live are abundant. The Canadian government, however, insists that rather than providing these citizens with the resources needed to survive, allowing them to kill themselves is the only way to respect their dignity.

 Coincidentally, the Canadian government estimates that the legalization of assisted suicide and its subsequent expansion will save approximately $149 million a year.

Ironically, the idea that assisted suicide is somehow about respect for life is prevalent throughout the government’s rhetoric on the issue. The Canadian Supreme Court refers to the “sanctity of life” throughout its decision and even refers to it as “one of our most fundamental societal values.”

 Despite this, the Court argued that “an individual’s choice about the end of her life is entitled to respect.” Otherwise, it states, one would have “a ‘duty to live,’ rather than a ‘right to life.’” 

One must wonder how sacred life can really be when it is viewed as something to be discarded at will. Additionally, it is unclear how the court can justify the constitutionality of any restrictions whatsoever on eligibility for MAID if one really has a constitutional right to “‘waive’ their right to life.”

Beyond the legal incoherence and the horrific real-world practical consequences of such policies, it must be pointed out how practices like assisted suicide and abortion are inherently incompatible with values like the dignity and equality of all people, which are meant to be the bedrock of societies like Canada and the United States. 

A practice like assisted suicide necessitates placing value on some people’s lives and not others. Advocates argue that allowing people the autonomy to choose how and when to die respects their dignity, but they still support restricting the practice to only certain groups of people, such as those with some kind of illness or disability. 

Within this decision is an implicit judgment that these people’s lives are not valuable enough to protect in the same way that a healthy person’s life is protected. Even as the group of people eligible for MAID continues to expand, society will always have to make judgment calls about who can be eligible for this practice and in what situations. 

Presumably, the government should not help a 19-year-old going through a bad breakup kill himself. Why? Because we deem that his life is still valuable. Because we judge that a bad breakup, while painful, does not make his life less worth living. Because we believe that he has a whole future ahead of him. 

Any time we say that someone should be allowed to receive assisted suicide, we are making the opposite judgment. We determine that her life is not actually valuable. That her life is not worth living. That she has no worthwhile future. We as a society decide that she is not worth as much as the person who we preclude from assisted suicide. 

And as seen in the tragic cases happening in Canada, this attitude that some lives just aren’t worth living encourages people to see suicide as a solution to their problems and lets society off the hook for failing its citizens.

The situation in Canada is a sobering reminder of what happens when a society, even one nominally founded on the equality and dignity of the human person, becomes detached from a respect for the inherent value of human life. 

It is also a reminder to the pro-life movement in America that while we focus on the fight against abortion, we must also work to create an expansive culture that can stand up against all evils that violate the sanctity of life, including the practice of assisted suicide.