WBCA Podcasts

Life Matters

This week's guest is Alex Schadenberg, Executive Director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition. He talks about Canada's legalization of medical aid in dying since 2016. Schadenberg raises concerns about the practice, and also discusses the usage and connotations of the terms medical aid in dying, euthanasia, and assisted suicide.

Duration:: 27m
Broadcast on:: 28 Aug 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

[music] Hello, welcome to Life Matters. I'm your host, Brendan O'Connell. Well, the last time we spoke with a guest, he was on the Isle of Man over near England somewhere. And he's closer now. He's in Ontario, Canada. And we want to welcome Alex Schadenberg, the Executive Director of the Youth and Asia Prevention Coalition. We'll welcome Alex. Thank you very much. Yeah, I do a lot of speaking worldwide and throughout the U.S. and certainly throughout Canada, but I'm happy to be on your show today. And whether I like it or not, the topic that I'll be speaking of today, which is the Youth and Asia Assistant Suicide, sadly, there's always new things to talk about. And that's what we're going to be doing. Very good. Well, the theme of today's show is the slippery slope of assisted suicide bills in the USA and Canada, which it's now the fifth leading cause of death in Canada. Can you speak to that a little bit, Alex? Well, in Canada, we legalized Youth and Asia in 2016. So just to put this into some context, California legalized assisted suicide at the same year as we legalized Youth and Asia. So I'll give you a quick information to the difference between the two. Youth and Asia is when the doctor or nurse practitioner actually caused your death. They do the act, they either inject you or they hook up an IV, and they are the ones who actually poison your death. In the case of assisted suicide, the doctor or the nurse practitioner will prescribe the lethal poison and the person has to take it themselves. So in Canada, we allow for Youth and Asia. Now, how did we do that in Canada? We created an exception to homicide in the criminal code. So if you look at Canada's criminal code, it's similar to like Massachusetts, they have a criminal code, you've got a first degree murder, etc. So in Canada, we created an exception in our criminal code to homicide, and it requires either two doctors or two nurse practitioners or one of each to agree that they agree that your life is not worth living and that they can go ahead and kill you, because it's literally killing you, but it's an exception in the law. So this is what we have. So since 2016, the numbers have gone through the roof. Our law started out by requiring the person to have a terminal condition. They didn't have to be terminally ill, but they had to have a terminal condition in the beginning. The law was defined to say that one's natural death had to be reasonably foreseeable, but it wasn't defined. So you would say that tended to be someone with a terminal condition, but they never defined it. And then in 2021, they removed that from the law. So since that time, you don't have to be terminally ill, you could have simply a chronic condition. And if the doctor or nurse practitioner agreed that your suffering is significant, you have to have a grievous and irimediable medical condition. I don't know, Brendan, do you know anybody who has a grievous and irimediable medical condition? Because the fact is, is that once again in our law in Canada, that's undefined. So therefore, it's become fairly common that people are dying this way. So the numbers have gone through the roof. And as of the end of 2023, it's become the fifth leading cause of death. And how many people is that in Canada? Any idea of the totals? Okay, so we don't have the final numbers for 2023, but we believe it's somewhere around 15,300 or so who died by euthanasia. Why I'm saying we don't have the final numbers is the federal government is not released that that final data. We have most of the data from most of the provinces, because each province collects the data. So some of the provinces, the minor provinces have not released that data. So as I said, I can't give you an exact number. What it means though, is that we've had on average about a 30% increase every year. So last year, for instance, in 20, when we had the 2022 data come out, it said that there was 1313,241. Now we're, you know, as I say, approximately 15,300. The other thing about this, what's happened is it's a very differs by region in the country. So Quebec's now become the highest euthanasia rate in the world. And you may say, well, why am I mentioning that? It's significant because the Netherlands, you know, Holland legalized euthanasia. The law came at the place in 2002. So that would be, you know, 22 years ago. So when you look at that, they have about 5.1% of all deaths are euthanasia, but they've been doing this for a very, very long time. Whereas in Canada, we legalized in 2016, Quebec in 2023 had 7.3% of all deaths were euthanasia. Significant, huge. The other thing we've done with it is we've redefined it in our country. So by redefining it, people feel so much better about it. So what's interesting about it is in the Netherlands and Belgium, they're quite honest about these things. And they're willing to call it what it is, which is euthanasia. It's a doctor or nurse. And the Netherlands can only be doctors, but it's fine. They actually are killing you. That's what they're doing. They're killing you. They admit that. That's what it's about. In Canada, we don't like being so honest about it. We like to hide it. We call it medical aid in dying. And so the funny thing is, is that the euthanasia people are often saying, oh, no, this isn't euthanasia. This isn't, no, no, this isn't killing. This is medical aid in dying. Well, what is medical aid in dying? Oh, it's when the doctor injects you with lethal drugs. Yeah, that's called euthanasia. That's homicide. And in the law, we've created an exception to that, to allow you to do it without having to worry about prosecution. So anyway, we've seen massive growth. But just so you know, in the US with assisted suicide, you now have 10 states that have legalized assisted suicide. That's the bad news. The good news is in the last two years, no new state has legalized assisted suicide. So as much as the assisted suicide lobby has been pushing, for instance, in Massachusetts, New York, quite a few states, Delaware, etc., Connecticut, you start naming them, there's quite a few states where they've been pushing very hard to legalize assisted suicide. They have failed to do so. So therefore, in the last few years, the number of states that allow it have not changed in the US. And now what Maryland has something called the end-of-life option act? What was that? Well, you know, you've had the same sort of thing going on in Massachusetts. You've had a bill to legalize assisted suicide. So Maryland had that. The Delaware had a bill like that that was being debated, etc. And there's quite a few states. In fact, 20 states this year had bills to legalize assisted suicide. And as of this moment, none of them, none of them have gone into place. So I have to be quite, quite clear, Delaware actually passed their bill, but the governor's not signed it. So because the governor's not signed it, the bill's not gone into place. But the fact of it is these are bills to allow for assisted suicide. Now, let me tell you a lot about how this actually works, because what assisted suicide is, is to say it's very similar to euthanasia, because what happens is the doctor has to decide that, yes, your life is not worth living and a second doctor has to also sign off. So they're saying, in your medical condition, I agree, your life's not worth living. We're going to give you lethal drugs, but you have to take it yourselves, these lethal poisons. It's not actually, they call it a death with dignity, but it's not actually a nice way to die. Because if you consider how this works, there is a lot of these deaths that take a very long time. Last year in Oregon, one death was 115 hours. The person took 115 hours to die. A lot of these deaths, the drugs are quite caustic and horrific. So they actually, I'm not going to get into exactly all the drugs with the use, but it has a burning sensation of the throat. So people are complaining and they're screaming before they go into coma, because the mixture of the cocktail, the poison cocktail, they give the person does put you into coma. But before you go into coma, a lot of these people are screaming and pain because it's so caustic and painful as it's burning their throat. So it's not exactly a death with dignity. It is a killing. That's exactly what it is. People should call it what it is. A lot of people say, well, I chose it. I really question this whole thing about choice and autonomy when we're talking about somebody else being involved with causing your death. Nonetheless, it is something that a lot of people think is a good idea, and I think it's a crazy idea, Brendan. I think it's a crazy idea to create a law that allows your doctor to be able to be involved with killing you. I think that's actually a very stupid idea, in fact, because how can you actually trust somebody when you're at the most vulnerable time of your life when they now have the right in law to be involved with killing you? That doesn't make a lot of sense. In several years back, we had a referendum here in Massachusetts. We were way behind, but we ended up surprisingly winning by two or three percent, and one of the visuals was showing all of these pills that you need to take to consume, to kill yourself. Nowadays, are there fewer pills you need to take that might kill yourself? They do it differently now. One of the reasons is that the pills that used to use were a drug that used to be a sleeping medication, so they would prescribe you a hundred of these drugs, and you'd have a hundred of these pills, and you'd have to open them up, and they would have to be broken because, of course, you couldn't take a hundred, right? It wouldn't be possible. You got to swallow them all, and you got to do it fast enough that it would actually have an effect to kill you, right? What they would do is they'd open them all up, and they'd put them into a drink, and they'd mix it up, and then they would drink it down. And, of course, it was enough of a drug that it would kill you. There's no question about it, it would kill you. But the cost of that drug, because remember, this was a delisted form or sleeping pill that was used in the 1950s, and the reason it stopped being used as a sleeping pill is because if you accidentally took too many, you would die. So, obviously, doctors stopped prescribing it for that, but it became the assisted suicide drug when Oregon legalized assisted suicide. Now, that drug is pretty delisted now. It doesn't exist, so now they do it with compounds, just so you know, and they mix these three compounds together into a drink, and you drink it down. Nonetheless, this concept of a death with dignity, we start reading articles about how people actually experience these deaths. It's not actually a death with dignity. In fact, recent research on autopsies have shown that somebody who takes this poison, and their death ensues, that when you do an autopsy, they find that the lungs are full of fluid. So, actually, the assisted suicide death comes from, it's like a type of a drowning effect. What happens is the lungs are then paralyzed, and then they fill with body fluids, and the person, of course, the lungs will start moving and the heart will stop beating. And this is how it actually occurs. Now, as far as the slippery slope goes, you have some examples in Canada. One in St. Paul's Catholic Hospital in Vancouver, British Columbia. What's going on there? Well, there's a couple of court cases that have launched. So, here's the interesting thing. So, the government, I'll give you both information. In St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver, you have a situation where, last year, a woman who was in palliative care requested euthanasia. And because it's a Catholic hospital, they refused to do euthanasia, but they did transfer her. They transferred her, and I'm not saying that that's a wonderful thing, but they did transfer. She did, quote, quote, have her death with dignity. She did die by euthanasia. But the family of this woman then put a complaint into the government saying she was denied her right to die at St. Paul's Hospital. And they started a whole campaign. The death with dignity, people started a big campaign to pressure St. Paul's Hospital to do euthanasia. And St. Paul's came back saying, well, well, we don't do euthanasia at St. Paul's Hospital. But if someone wants to have euthanasia, we will transfer them because, you know, hospitals do transfers all the time, right? There's nothing new about doing a transfer. So, now what's happened is that the same family and dying with dignity, dying within our late, our biggest euthanasia lobby group in Canada, they've launched a lawsuit, which is intended to make it to the Supreme Court of Canada. And it's challenging the right of St. Paul's Hospital to deny somebody euthanasia at that location. So, they're challenging the rights of Catholic health care in Canada. So, the goal of that lawsuit is to force all medical institutions, whether they be seconder or religious or whatever they be, to force them all to provide euthanasia. That's the goal of the lawsuit. You know, obviously speaking, if they were to win, it doesn't only affect St. Paul's. It affects all medical institutions across Canada, especially those, of course, that have a religious background to them or are still connected to Catholic health care. Now, there's a second lawsuit that's been recently launched just this week. Now, I'm not sure when this is being played. So, I'll say in mid-August, there was a lawsuit launched in Toronto, and it deals with somebody who has mental illness. So, this is someone who's not chamel. They don't have any chronic physical illnesses. This person has mental illness, and they want to die by euthanasia. So, they're saying the law is unequally applied. This person is being denied their "death with dignity" because they're not actually sick. They have a mental illness, not a physical illness. And so, they're hoping that that case also will end up at the Supreme Court of Canada in the Toronto force, the Canadian government, to allow euthanasia for mental illness alone. So, this is the kind of thing you're seeing. So, it's not only this issue of a slippery slope, which happens by the normalization of killing, it's also a slippery slope because the euthanasia lobby wants to do more killing. Now, in Ohio, there was a man who is charged with suicide of his wife. What was that all about? Well, that's a recent case. So, what you have is a situation where an Ohio man, so Ohio, a similar to Massachusetts, also prohibits assisted suicide. And so, you have a situation where a woman named Arty, no, sorry, artist McCauley, she died by suicide. And her husband, he was with her at the time. His name is Thomas Stewart McCauley, he's 78. And he called the police after she died. He admitted he was there. He claimed to not have participated in the act at all. That's what he claims. But after investigating the situation, police have now charged him with assisting the suicide. So, how the law works in Ohio is, the law says you're not allowed to provide the physical means by which the person commits or attempts to commit suicide. And you're not allowed to participate in the act of a suicide. So, what that means is in this case, obviously, this was a married couple. So, what that means is that if somebody you know is planning to die by suicide, you can't help them out. The law says no, you cannot participate, you cannot help them out. That is illegal to do so. The law says you can't do it. So, in this case, the police have done an investigation that death happened already several months ago, that happened in March, that death. And now, they have now charged the husband. So, I think in their investigation, they have come to some proof that he actually assisted his wife in some way, or he provided the means. We don't know a lot about the case, because there's a bit of a publication ban hour right now. What we do know is this is a woman who died by suicide, her husband was with her at the death, and now he's been charged with assisting the suicide. Wow, that's awesome. Now, there's a research investigator named Sheila Gunn-Reed, and she's been looking into a long document that I think she got from the Freedom of Information Act regarding military veterans, the Veterans Affairs Canada. What's that all about, and why is it a scandal? So, what happened is that a couple of years ago, there was a military veteran who had contacted Veterans Affairs. This was a veteran who had served Canada in Afghanistan, and he was going through PTSD, traumatic stress disorder. And he was seeking help for his PTSD, and instead, the Veterans Affairs employee had told him he should be considering euthanasia. This upset this man greatly, and so what happened is that this person went to the media. Now, since then, there's been quite a few cases of people who have gone to the media saying that Veterans Affairs had pressured them or urged them to die by euthanasia, because euthanasia is legal in Canada, and this has made a lot of Veterans very upset. Sheila Gunn-Reed works for Rebel News. Rebel News is like an alternative media here in Canada, and so what she did is she contacted Veterans Affairs, and she submitted an access to information request, and they had to send her 2,200 pages of documents on their relationships with these people who died by assisted suicide or who were told they should go and die by euthanasia or assisted suicide. What's important here is it actually shows that Canada's Veterans Affairs Department has actually been doing a cover-up. She actually can now prove they were doing a cover-up. They were hiding the reality of what they were involved in doing and convincing these people that euthanasia was their option. But why is this so upsetting? Well, like all countries, Canada's got a lot of Veterans who have gone through a very difficult time. Like a lot of them have experienced PTSD, they've gone through situations where they've been injured while serving the country. There's a woman in Canada who was who's a military veteran who served our country who now was in a wheelchair. She got injured while serving our country. She got shot actually, and she became then a wheelchair athlete. So she was a Paralympian. She was one who had won quite a few medals in the Paralympics, and she went to the media because she said her name is Christine Gautier too, and she went to the media because she was needing a wheelchair lift in her home, which doesn't seem unreasonable. You were injured serving your country. You're in a wheelchair aging. She's quite clear in order to get properly around her house. She needs a wheelchair lift. And if you look at the Veterans Affairs situation, they're supposed to help her with this. Instead, what they told her is, you know, if your life's so bad, you should be seeking euthanasia. This is the kind of thing. People aren't thinking when they're talking about legalizing assisted suicide or euthanasia, they're not thinking about the effect on veterans. They're not thinking about the effect on people with disabilities. What are what people with mental health? So I told you about the case. It's just recently launched about euthanasia for mental illness. That was recently just launched in Toronto. The goal of dying with dignity is to force the Canadian government to allow euthanasia for mental illness alone. Consider the homelessness problem in most major cities in North America. You know, I don't know about, you know, Massachusetts, but I could tell you, in Ontario, Canada, we've had a massive increase in homelessness. And when you start looking at the situation, you realize a lot of those people have mental health problems. They need help. These are people who need help, not death. But if you're going to allow euthanasia for mental illness alone, obviously speaking, some of these people will die by euthanasia. There'll be a proof for death. And this is the kind of thing we're talking about. This isn't about freedom and choice and autonomy. This is about abandoning people in their time of need. Consider just the veterans alone. We all know lots of a lot of people who have served our country and who are veterans and who are going through a hard time. We all know that there's quite a few of them. Is the answer to their lives to kill them, to urge them to die by assisted suicide, to tell them that euthanasia is their answer? Or should we actually be providing the services that they need after they've served our country? This is the reality what we're dealing with. I see. Now, do doctors and nurses push medical assistants in dying on patients in hospitals? In other words, are they selling euthanasia in the hospitals? Okay, so how it works in my country, in Canada, is that all major hospitals have what you call a made team. So I already told you, in Canada, they're not comfortable with the term euthanasia. They're not comfortable with the term assisted suicide. So they've created a new term, which is starting to be used in the US too, which is medical aid and dying made. And so what they've done is then all major hospitals, they have put together these made teams. So the made team is not only involved with causing death, because that's one thing they do. They do the killing, the made team. They're also involved with selling it. So what that means is they have decided that because it's legal, people who might qualify for it should be informed while they're in the hospital that they might qualify for this. So what they do is they go into your room, and they'll say, well, wondering, Brendan, if you realize that made was a legal option for you. Do you realize that? Are you interested in made? So we've been getting calls regularity now regularly from our supporters got a call from a woman in Vancouver. Her elderly husband was in palliative care. So yes, he is dying. There's no question about he's dying. They have no interest in euthanasia or assisted suicide. They have no interest in this whatsoever. And she's calling me up saying, Alex, we've been asked now five times if we're interested in made. When do they get the message? We don't want it. When do they get the message down? You may say, but Alex, you know, this couple didn't want it. So what's the issue? They're upset that they keep getting asked. Well, the point of it is, is as a human being, when you're going through a difficult time of your life, you're, you know, emotionally distraught, you're approaching death, you might be lonely. If you keep getting asked over and over again, what they're actually what the message to me into many are is you're better off dead. Got a call from a guy in Ottawa calls me up and says, you know, I was visiting my dad and the family was all together. We're visiting our dad. He was in palliative care. So he was dying. There's no question about it. The span is dying. He said, so we're all visiting family. And so the main team came in and they said to my dad, we're wondering, do you know that, you know, maids available to you, euthanasia is available to you. And he said, yes, I realize it's available. And they said, well, are you interested? And he said, no, I'm not interested. So then they left. And so then the family is visiting his dad's near and death. This is in palliative care. They decide to go down for coffee, the family. When they come back to the room, the dad says, guess what happened as soon as you guys left the room. The maid team came back in because they thought I was only saying no, because you guys were in the room. So they still they asked him again. And the dad was very upset by this. But this is the kind of thing you're getting. Now, what's the point of it? It's one of the reasons we have such a high euthanasia rate in Canada. If you're constantly being berated with the question of, do you want to die, maybe death is the best thing for you? If you're a veteran and you're calling Veterans Affairs, because you're going through a very difficult time, and you're being told, have you considered euthanasia, you can imagine that some of these people are thinking, well, maybe I should be dead. All right. Yeah, that's really something. Well, we've only got 30 seconds. Alex, could you answer this question? Is it is made being taught to medical students? And are they open to the idea of? So the answer is yes. And even in the US, now there's a curriculum that's been developed in states where assisted suicide has been legal. They're not they're not training medical students and doctors to do it. One of their problems is, and I know you said we only have 30 seconds, so I'll enter this. One of the problems they're having is very few doctors actually want to kill. So they want to train more to do it. That's what's going on. Wow. Well, Alex, thank you so much for coming on the show today is very informative. And I hope to see you again in my travels, either in Canada or you're coming down to America and keep up next time we talk. Maybe we can, I can bring you some more sunshine rather than all this negativity. But anyway, okay. All right, well, thanks so much. And folks, we hope you enjoyed the show and found it to be unique, informative, content rich, truthful and thought provoking. Thanks for watching and listening. My name is Brendan O'Connell, your friend for life. [Music]