Expanding assisted suicide encourages a culture of neglect for suffering, elderly, disabled, and vulnerable people and devalues their lives. Canada needs to promote suicide prevention and life-affirming care for all.
In Canada, euthanasia is often referred to as Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD). Canada is the only country in the world to use the term MAiD to describe euthanasia.
Allowing euthanasia for those with disabilities and chronic illness encourages ableism and marginalizes those who are suffering. It wrongly suggests that the lives of people with disabilities and chronic illness are less worth living than the lives of able-bodied Canadians.
In 2021, Canada expanded euthanasia to those who are not dying.
Canada should not be a place that kills its sick, disabled, or elderly. We should support people so they can live well, not support or encourage their wish to die.
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Tampering with the trust needed in the doctor-patient relationship by inserting the possibility of [MAiD] as an outcome, may undermine psychiatric treatment; ambivalent patients, knowing that [MAiD] could be placed on the table as a treatment option, but not really wanting death, may avoid disclosing their suicidal ideations to their physician for fear of having MAiD foisted upon them
