MAID proponents write paper to justify social euthanasia

I've just received my third ATIP from Health Canada regarding Dying with Dignity. At first it didn't look like I received much. Until I read the one email, and a copy of a paper from the University of Toronto that was published in the Journal of Medical Ethics. 

This is what I had asked for:

"All records related to meetings, emails, documents, etc. between Canadian not for-profit "Dying with Dignity Canada" and Health Canada officials between January 19, 2023 and the present day.""

That was the entire corpus for the six month period; not much correspondence at all. But what I read was deeply disturbing.

First of all, remember there is already a cozy relationship between DWDC and government departments. In my previous posts we learned that these people have already met with two different government ministers. Now we have an email, I'm guessing, from the president of DWDC, Helen Long. DWDC seems to be pushing further MAID eligabality qualifications to the government:

"Here is the paper that was recently published which I mentioned today. Take care, Helen"

Clearly DWDC has the ear of government officials. Remember too, that they receive government funding. And that the highest earner in DWDC earned between $200 and $250k in 2022 (looks like they got a raise over 2021 salary). There is money to be made in promoting death.

Secondly, along with this one email, I received the paper discussed, entitled Choosing death in unjust conditions: hope, autonomy and harm reduction from Kayla Wiebe and Amy Mullin. The title itself is not only creepy, but deceiving. No matter how you slice it, there is neither hope, nor autonomy, nor harm reduction in killing people. The authors twist themselves into contortions, trying to make the case that people who are in:

"unjust social circumstances as circumstances in which people do not have meaningful access to a range of options to which they are entitled."

... should be eligible for MAID.

The paper was published in the Journal of Medical Ethics. You will have to pay to get a copy from their site. But I received a copy in my ATIP and here it is.

There are over 500+ Twitter comments regarding this paper. Many of these comments are from other countries. I used Google Translate to get the English version of some of these comments. One example:

"Here is the "justification" for euthanasia of the poorest...Is it curious ethics to invoke autonomy so that society discards some people as "worthless lives", shoving them into desperate situations and "respecting" their choice? free?"

Here is a Twitter thread on why the arguments in this paper are problematic. It begins with this:

"I read the eugenics MAiD paper with my partner last night. He’s an academic and agency is a topic he’s an expert on. We had to stop reading multiple times in horror at the wrongheadedness or audacity of the arguments."

Then there's this article in IMPACT ETHICS: MAKING A DIFFERENCE IN BIOETHICS. It says it all:

MORAL AND INTELLECTUAL GYMNASTICS IN DEFENSE OF CANADA’S OUT-OF-CONTROL MAID REGIME by Daryl Pullman

"Cases are now emerging of individuals opting for MAiD when they are unable to find adequate social supports to relieve the burden of their day-to-day existence. When a society devolves to the point where it redefines every kind of social injustice as a “medical problem” such that MAiD is a legitimate or even preferred option, society in general and bioethicists in particular must consider the moral options. Either we challenge the legal and moral processes that now sanction such desperate actions, or we perform the moral and intellectual gymnastics necessary to justify those tragic “choices”. These authors chose the latter."

...Bill C-7 drove a wedge between the end of life and suffering, thus co-opting the medical profession into providing a solution for individuals facing all manner of social injustice. These authors are complicit in this process by driving another wedge between persons and the tragic choices they feel compelled to make. By then describing these forced decisions as “meaningfully autonomous” they make it more important to respect the putative “choice” than to respect the persons driven to make them. Elsewhere I’ve described such sophistical reasoning as “moral nonsense”.

Toward the end of their paper Wiebe and Mullin change gears and offer a consequentialist consideration, ostensibly in support of their rationale for honoring such tragically “autonomous” choices. Honoring them, they contend, will result in harm reduction. That is, rather than forcing people to suffer through their circumstances by refusing them MAiD, thus furthering the harms their unjust social circumstances have already inflicted upon them, we should end their suffering by killing them (MAiD). All things considered, they argue, this would be a lesser harm. We cannot discuss all the potential chilling sequelae of such creeping consequentialism in the context of an expansive and ever expanding MAiD regime such as we have in Canada. A closer reading might conclude that such consequentialist reasoning is really the core argument here: the attempt to salvage some notion of “autonomy” is intended to make it more palatable. It is just such reasoning that keeps the disability community awake at night."

Canada's MAID regime just keeps rolling forward. There doesn't seem to be any way to stop this deadly runaway train.