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Popping the filter bubble and the sanctity of life.
This Tuesday I was presented with a piece of Trivia that brought me up short.
My initial reaction was to quite literally exclaim "bullshit!" but having looked into it, there does appear to be a case. According to the Sixth Annual Report on Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada (which is currently the most recent report available) Canadian doctors euthanized 16,499 individuals in 2024, an increase of 7.5% over the 15,343 euthanized in 2023. Meanwhile The Trace a website maintained by the Gun Control advocacy organization Everytown USA maintains that there were 14,651 instances of Homicide by Gunshot in 2025. While this number does not include self-inflicted gunshots (IE Suicides) it does include an estimated 1,200 cases where the shooting was likely justified (IE suspects being shot by police or by would-be victims) and at least 2 instances of execution by firing squad.
Upon review of those numbers and their associated trend-lines where instances of euthanasia in Canada have increased with each consecutive year since it was legalized, while homicide in the US has been trending downward for the last 5 years from it's Pandemic-era peak it actually seems likely to me that more people are killed by doctors in Canada than are killed by guns in the US. Not "per capita" but by raw quantity (16 thousand people and change versus 14 thousand and change).
Considering the above in the context of another story that came across my feed a couple weeks ago. A Ghoulish Proposal Gets a Prestige Endorsement, it seems to me that there is a concerted effort on the part of certain factions to commodify and devalue Human life. See this story from the New York Times last year Organ Donors are too Rare we Need a New Definition of Death. I expect the media to assure me that that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy announcing that the Network for Hope (an organ procurement non-profit serving Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio) having had their certification revoked on the basis of credible claims that many donors were not legally dead at the time their organs were harvested is completely unrelated.
On a slightly different track, back when Harris was running for president there was this "ridiculous claim" that the Left wanted to legalize Abortion up to the moment of crowning, but just this Monday, Massachusetts became the 10th state in the union to do just that.
As in my prior "Popping filter bubbles" posts I don't feel like any of these things really warrant a post on their own, but when taken together they illustrate a trend, and I find myself lacking the vocabulary to describe my growing sense of unease with where this one seems to be going.
I'm frankly surprised the numbers are so low globally. Switzerland has had euthanasia for decades, and yet most elderly people there still die by very slow decay, with only 2-3% choosing the less painful, more dignified option.
I think comparing gun deaths in the US to MAID deaths in Canada is pretty facile. The age breakdown for MAID looks like this. Young and middle-aged people are tiny rounding errors compared to the overwhelming majority who are elderly. US gun deaths are the opposite, for both suicides and murders.
My grandfather was euthanised. Not legally mind you, this was in the UK in the 90s. But he had terminal cancer and had been given a year to live. He spent it taking lots of holidays and seeing his grandchildren as much as he could. All of my memories of him are from that year.
One year later, right on time, his health rapidly deteriorated. My dad had to drive him to the hospital and wasn't sure if he'd even make the trip, but he did.
Lying in the hospital bed, the doctor asked him: 'As we discussed Mr Crowstep?'
'As we discussed.'
The family left the room, and he was pronounced dead a few minutes later.
I've heard a lot of anti-euthanasia arguments, from people whose beliefs I generally agree with. I understand the points about normalisation, about old people feeling like a burden, getting pressured into euthanasia by grasping relatives and struggling health services. I even get the religious arguments, even though I don't believe in the supernatural.
But it's impossible for me to think about the overwhelming majority of us, the billions who will face an end where bodies and minds are dismantled bit by bit, by the cruel hand of entropy, and say to them:
'No, you have to suffer'.
I certainly know what my grandfather would say to them.
Oh well, if we're swapping anecdotes...
My father had a sudden, drastic collapse. Rushed to hospital. Kidney failure, the works. Comatose or damn near it. Heart stopped and he had to be resuscitated. Doctors then broached "look he's very bad, do you want us to resuscitate if this happens again or you know you could just let nature take its course hint hint". My mother said more or less "Hell no" and the family demanded he be resuscitated. Happened twice more. When he was eventually discharged, it was pretty obvious the hospital thought they were sending him home to die.
Well, he didn't. Thanks to my mother and me, we nursed him back to health and he had ten more good years of life. He was on dialysis for those years, but he had recovered so well that his consultant used to brag about him to the student doctors as "my miracle man". We the family smiled and muttered under our breaths "yeah you guys wanted to kill him off, we stopped you".
If we had listened to the doctors, we would have let him die and lost those final ten years of life. By the time he came to die, it was natural: he'd been gradually fading for a year and even though it was sudden (a blood clot and resultant stroke) by then he was ready to die and we were ready to let him go.
So if euthanasia gets normalised, I do think there will be more pressure on families to "let nature take its course" and preventable deaths will happen.
Why are doctors as a whole so evil, I wonder? Aside from the fact that they skew liberal and are probably less Catholic than the general population. Do you know many of them?
For every story like OPs there are probably about 100 ones where an old person is kept in excruciating pain and delirium for months because their family forces doctors to keep them alive beyond any hope of recovery?
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I don't think it's evil so much as a combination of 'having seen a lot of dragged-out deaths' and sincerely wanting to be compassionate, plus eventually the stresses over "look, get Grampa out of that bed he's blocking" encourage them towards "let nature take its course".
The really evil ones are the medical ethicists.
Isn't that fairly reasonable, then? It's possible that your doctors have seen a hundred, or a thousand patients similar to your father and they suffered greatly in some large majority of cases. And, while nobody is perfect, the medical system (at least in North America, I can only imagine that it's much worse in the EU) already bends over backwards to the point of massive dysfunction to accommodate consent and the wishes of the patients.
I mean, I'm not wishing you had let your dad die, but it's not clear to me that having most of the public following the advice of doctors around euthanasia is a bad thing.
Again, why do you think this? And do you know many of them? I've probably met somewhere between 5-10 in my life and they're largely focused on arcane minutiae that you will almost certainly never hear or think about.
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I'm not sure the anecdotes quite compare. Families/doctors choosing not to resuscitate is very different from allowing people to choose euthanasia for themselves. A fairer example would be if your father had asked not to be resuscitated but the doctors had ignored his request because not resuscitating him would be illegal.
In cases where it's not clear, e.g. Grampa has not previously expressed a wish for euthanasia, I do think relatives can be influenced into "just be compassionate" by trusting the doctors and medical authority. And sometimes that medical authority is motivated by "we need to strip the parts before the carcass gets too stale" and not so much compassion.
The problems around the Liverpool Care Pathway demonstrate that; some medical staff are a little too eager to play God and assist the shuffling off of the mortal coil before the would-be deceased is ready for it. It was meant to be a protocol for hospices and somehow it got turned into "general hospitals decide off their own bat not to give Granny food or water once she turns up with pneumonia and is a certain age":
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