Alan Nichols was “virtually pronounced dead” at a Toronto hospital, his brother Gary told The Associated Press. Nichols was 61 years old, with a history of depression. When he was hospitalized and placed under suicide watch, he asked his brother to “kick him out” as soon as possible.
According to the AP story, “his euthanasia petition listed only one medical condition as the reason for his request to die: hearing loss.”
In the report, the director of the Canadian Institute for Inclusion and Citizenship at the University of British Columbia — not a right-wing think tank — was quoted as saying that Canada’s current euthanasia law is “probably the biggest existential threat to people with disabilities since the Nazis” program in Germany in the 1930s.
If you have a disability under Canadian law, you can choose death. In recent months, there has been news of Canadians not receiving adequate health care or housing assistance instead of seeking assisted suicide.
In a 2019 New Atlantis article titled “First, Don’t Take a Stand,” Aaron Keriati, a psychiatrist and fellow at the Center for Ethics and Public Policy, argued that medicine paved the way for the current legalization of assisted suicide, as it often would made medical associations take “disingenuous” neutral positions when faced with state or national legislation. California and Canada are examples. “The story is a growing scandal for the medical profession,” Keriati wrote. “But it’s not too late to undo it.”
“A neutral position,” he argued, “is not really possible on the legal question of whether assisted suicide should be allowed. To say that some doctors can perform it if they wish, while others can choose not to, is to take a position in favor of allowing the practice.
Nichols’ story offers us an opportunity to rethink how we treat our most vulnerable. The debate about culture and law, however, cannot be separated from the broader loneliness plaguing our culture. A study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association in 2017 found that 56% of physician-assisted suicide deaths in the Netherlands were related to loneliness.
Harold Braswell, in his book The Crisis of Hospice Care in the US: Family and Freedom at the End of Life, writes about the importance of doing more for people with terminal conditions. He argues that whatever one’s position on assisted suicide and euthanasia, there is room for common ground, especially in the care of dying patients who lack family support.
It highlights the Home of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Atlanta, which provides long-term hospice care for people who are dying. It is run by the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, a Catholic religious group, and how it works with a secular hospice to care for patients who become too expensive for standard care. The two employees “worked together because they had a common goal: to provide dying people with the best possible care,” Braswell wrote. Such on-the-ground partnerships show how to truly increase freedom when caring for those who are dying, Braswell argues.
Assisted suicide is a divisive topic. But we must not let politics and economics drive these debates. Increasing donations to the Dominican Sisters and institutions like them is one way to do this. The future of how we care for each other requires renewing how we care for the dying and prioritizing this work within the family and within our systems of care. It’s a noble job.
Nichols’ family was appalled that Allen’s death appeared to have been approved in part based on his hearing loss. But the hospital, police and provincial government say nothing has gone wrong under the law. Rethinking and limiting these laws should be a human, not a partisan, priority.
(Catherine Jean Lopez is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, editor-in-chief of National Review magazine, and author of the new book, A Year With the Mystics: Visionary Wisdom for Daily Living.)