Canadians with serious illnesses have opted for death only after years of failing to obtain proper medical care.
MAID is routinely practiced within the Canadian prison system.
Canadians with serious illnesses have opted for death only after years of failing to obtain proper medical care.
MAID is routinely practiced within the Canadian prison system.
It's social murder, they won't offer sufficient care for mental health or disability because that costs money and they, in this long era of neoliberalism, are cutting the states capacity to provision goods and care in favor of lifting declining profits.
But they WILL let you "choose" to end your life.
Sure, it isn't as egregious as the eugenics movement was. But it also, somehow, leads to the same outcomes and arguably for the same reasons. There are those who the upper class has determined are acceptable losses and are not profitable and so they must be eliminated to preserve the logic of the status quo.
MAID as it is offered cannot be viewed context-less. I've had adult patients who went through enormous suffering while at end stage cancer because their family decided they wanted them to hold on a while longer - it's obvious sometimes that a peaceful death on their own terms would have been better than their prolonged suffering and ultimate demise (that the family didn't even fucking show up for in this case).
But MAID is being offered as a legitimate alternative to dealing with a social system that chooses not to provision adequate care. It is offered to veterans in Canada. It's offered people as an alternative than fighting for adequate housing. And so on. All of that is social murder.
Especially when it comes to mental health.
Like I'm sure no one had actually sat down at a spreadsheet and said "ah yes, we'll simply allow people with schizophrenia to choose MAID rather than setting them up with social workers, social assistance, and healthy housing." Because all of that could go a long way to alleviating the suffering they're feeling that is leading them to consider premature death.
But it's also very affordable to healthcare system and the governments budgets overall if all these pesky social assistance seeks and recievers could just... die... and no longer be a line item on the budget or agitate for assistance.
It's also worth pointing out that several countries in Europe, like the Netherlands, Belgium or Switzerland, have very similar regulations without producing the same kind of "woman with disabilities opts for MAID because she can't afford an accessibly built appartment " bleakness.
Yes, I agree that it shouldn't be used as an alternative to having a social system. I just think Canada's issue with this is not with MAID itself, rather that it's not an issue inherent to MAID as a concept, but rather an issue with an insufficient social system that's being actively dismantled. Kind of like how the issues with marijuana dispensaries aren't an issue of marijuana legalization as a concept.