When the State Decides Who Is Better Off Dead
I want to be clear and honest about my position on MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying). I consider every MAID death a crime against humanity.
That statement is not based on a single tragic news story or a failure of safeguards. It is based on principle. When the state authorizes, funds, and administers the intentional killing of its own citizens—especially the elderly, disabled, sick, or socially isolated—it crosses a moral line that no amount of regulatory language can sanitize.
Consent does not resolve this problem. History shows that people can “choose” death under pressure: fear of suffering, fear of being a burden, lack of care, loneliness, or despair. When death is offered as a solution where care, presence, and dignity should be provided, consent is already morally compromised.
Recent reporting from Ontario only underscores this concern. In one case reviewed by the provincial coroner, an elderly woman reportedly expressed a desire for palliative care and to continue living, yet MAID proceeded after her husband requested further assessment. Whether or not the system ultimately labels that case compliant, it reveals how fragile and unreliable “consent” becomes once death is institutionalized as a medical option.
MAID is not private suicide. It is a state-run system in which doctors are licensed to end lives and governments track the results as a policy success. That makes it systemic. It is precisely this normalization of killing—clothed in medical and compassionate language—that places MAID in the category of crimes against humanity rather than individual tragedy.
What troubles me most is the direction of error. Safeguard failures never result in someone living who “should have died.” They only ever result in someone dying who should have lived. That asymmetry should give any humane society pause.
Words like “dignity,” “choice,” and “compassion” do not change the reality of what is happening. They function as euphemisms, insulating us from the moral weight of intentional death.
A just society does not solve suffering by eliminating the sufferer. It does not offer death where care has failed. And it does not call killing “medicine” to quiet the conscience.
I am not persuaded that this can be reformed. I believe it must be rejected.
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