Canada’s Assisted-Suicide Express

Available for Minors and No Conscience Protections.

It has sped through Canada like a runaway train, set to leave in its path a near-complete dislocation of morality from medicine. Once in place, legalized assisted suicide and euthanasia will destroy life, bring back the ethos of Nazi Germany, in which human dignity is subsumed by one’s usefulness, and strip doctors of their conscience rights and turn them into opinion-less expeditors of death.

The reach of this dark movement has spread so thoroughly that the media and the public refers to this form of murder as “medical aid in dying” and “death with dignity:” two bland expressions meant to put a happy face on evil.

“This is not a matter of ‘medical assistance in dying,’” the Catholic bishops of Alberta said in a March 3 statement. “What is at issue here is state-sponsored killing of the innocent. Killing is not medicine. This has no place in a just and ethical society.”

Assisted suicide and euthanasia are two different ways of killing patients. With assisted suicide, patients are given fatal drugs to take home and ingest when they are ready. Euthanasia takes place when physicians actively kill their patients with a hypodermic needle. In Canada, we have started to use the terms interchangeably, as the end result is the same: killing.

Archbishop Terrence Prendergast of Ottawa said the Church might take the radical step of refusing to anoint those who choose to take their own lives.

“The rite is for people who are gravely ill or labor under the burden of years, and it contains the forgiveness of sins as part of the rite, in either form. But we cannot be forgiven pre-emptively for something we are going to do — like ask for assisted suicide when suicide is a grave sin,” he told Canadian Catholic News.

State-sanctioned killing will be legal in this country by June. Only a miracle can stop it. It has barely been debated. Even in last fall’s national election, won by the pro-euthanasia Liberal Party, the issue was barely mentioned.

An Angus Reid Forum poll in 2015 found 37% of Canadians approved of assisted suicide, while 42% expressed moderate approval; perhaps not that surprising, in a country where secularism and atheism dominate the culture. More disturbingly, the poll found 70% of Canadian Catholics either strongly approved or moderately approved of doctor-assisted suicide.

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