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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.
The equilibrium that ruled until just recently was pretty good. There’s no practical way for the state to stop you from offing yourself, reliable methods abound. So if you want to, you pretty much can, and you hope that God will forgive you on the other side.
There are those who are so infirm that they can’t go out by their own hand, but it turns out you can’t accommodate them without also letting doctors kill healthy but depressed twenty six year old women.
The trade off of not allowing a very small population to contract someone to kill them seems worth it to keep all the negatives of legal euthanasia at bay.
As others mentioned, the vast majority of those partaking in euthanasia are the elderly and (I presume) infirm, rather than depressed young women. The negatives are far smaller and more narrow than the positives.
We will most of us be old and infirm one day, barring miracle medical advances. Yet only a small fraction of us will be the exact fraction of depressed that having euthanasia makes a difference between pushing through it or getting MAID.
Granted, true, but that's after only of couple of years of current practices in Canada. Add bureaucratic and generational inertia, and I see that these things tend to swing more extreme in span of decades. The historical trend of news from the Netherlands used to be that every few years or so there was a court decision about a new group of people who can get killed by the doctors: In the 1980s it was cases of "90-year old ladies with incurable cancer" which slowly ticked from there to "yes, depressed young people can get killed by the doctors".
Another example. It is observable in many Western secular countries that marriage used to be viewed as a serious matter after the divorce became easier, but marriage rates fall when the kids who grew up in the divorce regime are adults. In France among women born in 1980s and later, "marriage" is a minority practice .
I am today convinced that in ethical matters, the human society has no tolerance for uncomfortable complexities of grey areas or context-dependent decisions or tradeoffs (such as, assisted suicide can be a reasonable choice for an infirm 90-year old to make, when he or she is of sound mind and has only death by painful sickness to look forward to), but public policy converges to naive deontological equilibria (either everyone who qualifies through some bureaucratic checklist will get killed by their doctors because the checklist absolves everyone of moral responsibility, or even people who are slowly dying in unmitigable pain can't be offered assistance contrary to their wishes because next of kin are delusional of death).
I am yet to see anyone* being "killed by their doctors" whose lives weren't already contingent on continued medical care, unless very esoteric definitions of killing are applied (such as "offered euthanasia and had it accepted"). I call that "abandoned by their doctors", and in the end someone is always getting abandoned as long as we have scarcity and conditions that can't be cured.
*Organ harvester Georg who commits murder and covers it up obviously does not count.
I assume you are proposing "patient surely takes the deadly poison by themselves if he/she is able to do so"? Sure, that is reasonable and happens, but it is one of those reasonable-sounding things that get abandoned. For example, I think in the Netherlands the usual practice is that after the paperwork is done, "the patient" can just lie down comfortable and the doctor administers sedative and deadly stuff through the IV. Link Which is, in my view, killing the person. You can kill people who request to be killed, but it is still act of killing, if the words are to have any meaning.
No, I don't draw any meaningful difference between the patient throwing the switch and the doctor doing so. Whoever's will is being done is the one doing the killing.
"Doctors killing people" is as far as I can tell a rhetorical trick by pro-lifers to paint a picture of uncaring monsters who strap you into a chair and jab you with the death syringe as soon as you admit any shred of bad quality of life. Plus maybe the useful autists carrying water for them.
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