Liana Graham: Children are being euthanized in Europe. Is Canada next?

A child in the Netherlands, whose sex has not been revealed, was recently euthanized at the behest of their parents and doctors. Normally, such a case would warrant arrests, trials and convictions. But one crucial fact changed what should have been a straightforward matter of law enforcement: the child in question was severely disabled — not brain dead, not dying — disabled. One would think that such a practice would be condemned by democracies worldwide, especially those that employ highfalutin jargon about human rights and dignity in common parlance.

Instead, a ridiculous amount of mental gymnastics is being employed to justify this child’s death. Consider the report from the Committee for Late Termination of Pregnancy and Termination of Life in Newborns and Children Aged 1 to 12 Years. Yes, that is seriously its name. The committee concluded that there was “no reasonable alternative solution to reduce or eliminate the child’s suffering other than to end the child’s life.”

And what was the situation, exactly? After a very premature birth at 26 weeks, the child developed severe complications including cerebral palsy and epilepsy, leading to severe intellectual and motor disabilities. Doctors judged the situation as hopeless and irreversible. One sentence from the report is particularly revealing: the child “the child would be dependent on support with all activities of daily living for the rest of their life.”

Of course, plenty of disabled adults require similar daily assistance. And under Canada’s capacious euthanasia laws, those adults would qualify for assisted death. That is, if they consent. After all, autonomy is a cardinal moral principle of modern healthcare and, apparently, strictly required by Canada’s MAID system… right?

In theory. But recent developments shed doubt on the idea that consent is an inviolable rule in euthanasia deliberations, both presently and in the future.

The death of Bridgitte Stegmann is one such story. Her family alleges that Stegmann’s doctors obscured the reality of MAID by avoiding words like “death” or “dying” while assessing her willingness to die. Further, they claim that the nurse who initiated Stegmann’s death failed to obtain a final confirmation of consent before proceeding.

And in 2022, the Quebec College of physicians suggested expanding MAID eligibility for “severely ill” infants up to the age of one.

Infants cannot consent to being killed. Nor can so-called “mature minors.” Such cases are therefore difficult to reconcile with the claim that euthanasia is simply about personal choice. But there is an alternative explanation that makes better sense of these disturbing developments: the movement to legalize euthanasia was never about freedom.

If MAID were based on bodily autonomy alone, the logical response to all forms of suicide would be assistance, not prevention. And while Canada’s MAID system has applied that principle in some respects — 93 per cent of people assessed for MAID were approved for the procedure in 2024 — public concern over Canada’s lax safeguards is growing, prompting the Liberal government to announce plans to table legislation this fall to halt the expansion of MAID for mental illness as a sole condition, but to expand the program by allowing advance requests.

Advance requests would permit MAID to be administered after a person has lost the capacity to provide contemporaneous consent, so long as that person had previously set out the conditions under which they wished to die. The proposal therefore sharpens, rather than resolves, the tension between euthanasia and the claim that consent is inviolable. The legislation is expected in the coming weeks.

Defenders of MAID seem hard-pressed to take the logic of a right to die to its conclusion: suicide on demand. Rejecting that premise while preserving MAID assumes that only some truly deserve death. Who? Typically, the sick, disabled and elderly — those some may see as alive but not truly living.

Put that way, it becomes easy to see that euthanasia is less about choice than it is a deliberation about what constitutes a good life. The rhetoric of dying with dignity recasts dignity as freedom from hardship and limits on personal choice — and suffering and dying people hardly have that in spades. Neither do the disabled.

While the government’s announced retreat from MAID for mental illness as a sole condition is a step in the right direction, regulating euthanasia by making eligibility dependent on the existence of a disability or physical illness presents the dangerous possibility that society begins to view eligible parties as better off dead. The proposed move toward advance requests only deepens that danger, allowing doctors to administer MAID after contemporaneous consent is no longer possible.

The societal acceptance of mercy killing predictably leads to more involuntary death. There’s a non-zero chance that this societal acceptance may lead to doctors and nurses increasingly encouraging the procedure because they believe they are acting mercifully.

That future might be hard to imagine. But in certain parts of the world, it’s already here.

National Post

Liana Graham is a research assistant in domestic and economic policy at The Heritage Foundation.