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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.
There's a repeating discourse cycle where first a conservative sounds the alarm with raw MAID numbers, and then someone else comes in and provides a more detailed breakdown showing it's overwhelmingly old people near death who use MAID (as aqouta does below). I'm not a big fan of the state killing young healthy people with depression (even at their own request) but I've seen this cycle so many times that I basically tune out any anti-MAID people who just post raw numbers.
If you're conservative and you want to persuade people who don't share your worldview but think there's some potential for state overreach or bad norms, it's counterproductive to sound the alarm with these high headline numbers when many people are okay with use case that makes up the vast majority. Tell me if there is large percentage growth in specifically young healthy people with mental illness. Tell me if MAID is increasing total completed voluntary deaths among physically healthy people rather than displacing suicides. But if you just post "the total number of MAID uses is going up" and then someone else says "that's 95% old people or people near death" you haven't popped my filter bubble, you've reinforced it.
95% oldies today. What about tomorrow?
How many users of artificial contraception today are married couples with a kid or two just using it to space out their family so they will end up with three, four, or five children over a sensible period? But that's how it started, and that was the exact same argument: oh don't try and scare me, the numbers don't bear it out.
I've had an interest in tracking this particular issue through the Anglican Communion and I think it's instructive as to how acceptance changes social attitudes, then social attitudes further soften on acceptance, in a circle. "The Lambeth Conference is a decennial international gathering of bishops from the Anglican Communion, convened by the Archbishop of Canterbury"; basically it's where they gather to thrash out pastoral questions and applications of theology to the practice of the churches.
1920 Lambeth Conference: no-no to contraception, it is wrong and sinful
1930 Lambeth Conference: well okay but only for married couples in cases of necessity
1948 Lambeth Conference - nothing about contraception, they were much more worried about divorce becoming widespread and easily available, and divorced people wanting to remarry in the Church. And warning against marrying Roman Catholics.
1958 Lambeth Conference - God wants you to use contraception! (but only if you're married):
1968 Lambeth Conference - the Catholics are wrong in "Humanae Vitae", technically you should only be contracepting if you're married and planning to have kids eventually but eh, we all know how society is going:
1978 Lambeth Conference - contraception? birth control? Nah, we've moved on to the gays now.
So it took just 48 years to move from "the only permissible form of birth control is abstinence" to "that's wrong, dumb Romans! (let's not mention that used to be our position too)" and then another 10 years to capitulate on social acceptance and increasingly widespread sex outside of marriage and use of contraception.
60 years from "this is wrong and sinful" to "this is your duty, God says".
Things move a lot faster today. Don't presume that "95% oldies" now is going to remain "95% oldies" in future.
OP posted as an attempt to "pop filter bubbles" and I just want to say that for people outside the conservative filter bubble the argumentative form of proposing a slippery slope and then assuming we'll inevitably slide down it to the bottom is not highly persuasive. The pro-life movement (which has had a strong of recent successes in the U.S.) doesn't say "we demand a return to the 1920s status quo on contraception because anything else is an inevitable slippery slope to infanticide" because they know that isn't actually persuasive to the public.
I'm not going to spend my time trying to disabuse religious conservatives of their belief that society slides down every slippery slope they can imagine. I do hope I can get you all to understand it's an eccentric aspect of your worldview and you're not popping filter bubbles by telling everyone else that you can imagine slippery slopes without providing evidence we're actually sliding down them.
What's wrong with slippery slope arguments? Would you also dismiss concerns of global warming ("climate change") as a slippery slope argument? Or the Nazi bar argument? It's just arguing from basic causality. It shouldn't be taken less seriously to argue that if X happens, then Y, and then if Y, then Z. Especially when there doesn't seem to be a consistent limiting principle that would stop the chain of causality from continuing to Z. You are free to disagree on the specifics on X, Y and Z, but just dismissing arguments of this form out of hand doesn't seem conducive to discussion.
Proposing a plausible sounding chain of causation is cheap and easy and only persuasive to people who already share your beliefs about how complex social dynamics will inevitably play out. I will note that when the climate people propose "more CO2 -> higher average global temperature -> economic/environmental/humanitarian catastrophe" they then go on to spend tremendous resources measuring the global average temperature and developing cyclical climate models and attempt to show that the increased number of extreme weather events is related to the rising average global temperature.
In this thread anti-MAID people are proposing "terminal cancer patients and people with degenerative neurological conditions using MAID -> healthy old people using MAID because of new social norms about not being a burden -> depressed 25 year olds killing themselves" (x->y->z). I think that's a plausible chain of events, but I don't think it's the only possible way for a complex social change to play out, so I am asking for evidence that y and z are happening at increased rates relative to the past. No one in this thread has bothered to answer me with numbers. I've gotten "x->y->z is plausible because a->b->c in the past" or "isn't the general form x->y->z valid" or "x is increasing" but no one is digging into the stats to tell me what's going on with y and z.
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Sure looks like a slope. Sure looks like it's trending downhill. Sure looks like heading downhill is accelerating.
But no, don't believe your lying eyes, that's not slippery and it's not a slope!
I'm not even disagreeing with you all that this is a potentially slippery slope I'm just asking for any sort of numerical evidence that we're sliding (young people or healthy old people are using MAID more) and no one has bothered to provide it. I'm just supposed to "believe my eyes" about statistical trends in the Canadian medical system, what?
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There are countries where assisted suicide has been legal for decades.
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So what about that 5%?
5% of 16,000 is a lot more than 5% of 100.
I'm not Canadian so I don't know what Track 2 means and who uses it. I askee Chat GPT and it tells me it's for people who aren't dying but have serious decline in their ability to function and that ~50% are people with degenerative neurological conditions, and that the median age in 2024 was 75. I had a close friend and roommate whose dad died slowly of Alzheimer's, it was awful. I don't think people with degenerative neurological disease ending their lives on their own terms is a problem.
Now okay so there's still a pretty big other category that seems to be a bunch of musculoskeletal issues, chronic pain, etc. Maybe there's a bunch of young healthy people in that bundle and I would find it if I dug through it but I'm not Canadian and I don't have that much time on my hands.
But we've done a second round of you telling me "a large number of people are using MAID, this is concerning" and then I get one piece of additional contextual information and it turns out I'm actually completely fine with the relevant use case. I think I'm now more likely to ignore anti-MAID people in the future because while you may raise issues about the possibility of bad social norms pushing relatively functional elderly folks to suicide (which seems a plausible concern to me) you keep scaremongering using numbers that include cancer, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's patients ending their lives on their own terms. So I don't think you are actually responding to the first signs of a bad equilibrium taking shape. I think you probably have an eccentric moral framework where people with terminal cancer dying on their own terms is bad and you're using our shared concerns about the long term formation of bad social norms to try to get me to oppose what I think are perfectly reasonable MAID cases.
But that is the exact problem: the Track 1 cases are being used as the stalking horse for Track 2. While Track 2 might be confined for now to Alzheimer's etc. there's nothing saying it will remain confined to such cases. March 2027 is the first permissible time to start trying to expand Track 2 to mental health disorders.
And while it's only 4.4% now, what will it be in future? Will it creep up as it becomes more acceptable and more available and people become more aware they can avail of it? Will mental health disorders like chronic depression be included in the name of compassion?
If MAID was only "people terminally ill who are going to die soon and painfully", there would be less concern. But it's not, and has not been from the start, and once the camel gets its nose into the tent, at what point do you tell the camel to stop moving it? It's only the head now. It's only the neck now.
Yes, I agree that could happen (but it also could not). What I am asking is that anti-MAID people present statistical evidence that this is beginning to happen, not just point out that we could in theory slide down a slippery slope, and then state that the total number of MAID cases is increasing without making any attempt to separate out "terminal cancer patient dies painlessly" from "healthy 25 year old with depression".
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Moreover, it seems to me that the more normal and routine it is for people who are old or near death, the more careless and sloppy the institutions get, and the more iffy cases you get proportionally. If Canada keeps running their MAID program indefinitely, I'd expect to see feature creep get worse and worse.
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