« It is possible that the right to die should be an inevitable corollary of the human being’s liberty of subjective choice.
Euthanasia, however (which is to say homicide presented as an objectively indicated medical act), remains an ethical misdeed whose practice undermines the foundation of our egalitarian society »
— Gordon Friesen, 9 juin, 2020
Please consult the most recent addition to this site (published April 21,2023): “Lessons from the Canadian Euthanasia Experience”. This embodies my current thinking on medically justified euthanasia. It takes the form of a 6000 word article in two parts A) A description of medical euthanasia in Canada, B) a discussion of the illegitimacy of introducing medical euthanasia (death-as-care) through an appeal to democratic support for the logically separate (and incompatible) notion of death-by-choice.
Also of interest: a document presented to the Irish Parliament entitled “Fundamental Considerations in the Creation of a Minimally Intrusive Liberty of assisted Death”, November 12, 2023
Articles and opinions earlier published by notable third-party platforms:
“A Provincial Remedy for the Ills of Medical Assistance in Dying”, Frontier Centre for Public Policy, February 21, 2023
Medical Aid in Dying Is not a Hypothetical “Slippery Slope,” but a Clear and Present Danger, Psychiatric Times, Dec 8, 2022
The Harms of Assisted Death Are Not Just a “Disabled Thing”, Psychiatric Times, Dec 19, 2022
Patients Can No Longer Assume that Doctors are Committed to Protecting Life, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, July 30, 2020
Why Euthanasia is Unethical and Why we Should Name it as Such, World Medical Association Journal, vol. 64, no. 4. (December 2018), pg. 33
Other Material
The version presented here has a different development, more rhetorical, and more appropriate for the American political context (published November 19, 2022) : Being a transcription of a web presentation made by the author for the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition (U.S.A), October 15, 2022. “Lessons from the Canadian Euthanasia Debacle: Utilitarian Death-Medicine Piggy-Backing on the power of Choice”
Also available is an earlier version of the above presentation (now obsolete) delivered April 2, 2022.
- Title: The Medical Justification of Euthanasia in Canada : A Cautionary Tale
The following open letter was written Feb 10, 2021. When Canada Bill c-7 was introduced to move the goal posts by opening MAID eligibility to persons not at the end of life.
The following is an ongoing series of articles studying the competing moral justifications of euthanasia as a) a sovereign personal choice b) an objectively indicated medical act. One main conclusion is that these two are mutually exclusive and that their illogical cohabitation causes significant practical harm.
- What is the “Good” of Euthanasia? December 8, 2020
- What is the “Good” of Euthanasia? Part II: Subjective justification implies no objective moral vindication April 28, 2021
- What is the “good” of euthanasia, Part III: A true system of choice September 20, 2021
- What is the Good of Euthanasia ? Part IV : What it means to present euthanasia as “medical care” November 1, 2021
A now completed group of articles in the same series (seven parts)
Who really wants to die ? (A Brief Quantitative Analysis of the Purported “Need” for Euthanasia)
- Part I : Who Really Wants to Die ?
- From the beginning, then … Who really asked for euthanasia ? Who is it for ?
- Part II : The Popular impact of Celebrity Suicide
- The sources of popular perception examined : a great quantitative divergence between the portrayed importance, of celebrity suicide, and the observed facts
- Part III : Life Choices of the Common Man
- The prosaic commonality of perseverance in life
- Part IV : The True Scale of Demand for Euthanasia in Canada
- What is really at stake here ?
- The instructive cases of Belgium and the Netherlands
- Nothing but the facts…
- The growth and stabilization of euthanasia rates in Belgium and the Netherlands
- A return to the Canadian experience
- Canada by the numbers
- A sad portrait of quantitative over-reach
- Part V : The Absence of Suicidal Desire amongst the Survivors of Catastrophic Injury
- A few useful recollections
- Refusal of care, and the original slippery slope
- The required moral consensus on the desirability of (at least) some suicides
- A case in point : Spinal cord injury
- A personal, indignant resentment, evoked at the view of this drama
- The terrible nature of such literary assault
- A more faithful portrait of real life
- A conclusion of infantile simplicity
- Part VI : AIDS in the Eighties and Nineties : An overwhelming refusal of individual victims to personally embrace the collectively nurtured literary fashion of ritual assisted suicide
- A fundamental discrepancy between appearance and reality
- AIDS and the homosexual community : a perfect storm
- The primary epidemic of Aids
- A secondary epidemic of suicide
- Assisted suicide as spectacle and ceremony
- A cinema of ritual suicide : “Its My Party” (1996) and “The Event” (2003)
- An enlightened consensus surrounding voluntary death
- The suicidal fact of a miniscule minority
- cultural enthusiasm becomes misinformation and unselfconscious irony
- Part VII : The Justification of Canadian-style Euthanasia is not to be Found in any Rational Dynamic of Market Economics ; Not even terminal cancer patients statistically support the popular narrative