From the Brownstone Institute

Clayton J. Baker, MD 

Way back in the B.C. era (Before Covid), I taught Medical Humanities and Bioethics at an American medical school. One of my older colleagues – I’ll call him Dr. Quinlan – was a prominent member of the faculty and a nationally recognized proponent of physician-assisted suicide.

Dr. Quinlan was a very nice man. He was soft-spoken, friendly, and intelligent. He had originally become involved in the subject of physician-assisted suicide by accident, while trying to help a patient near the end of her life who was suffering terribly.

That particular clinical case, which Dr. Quinlan wrote up and published in a major medical journal, launched a second career of sorts for him, as he became a leading figure in the physician-assisted suicide movement. In fact, he was lead plaintiff in a challenge of New York’s then-prohibition against physician-assisted suicide.

The case eventually went all the way to the US Supreme Court, which added to his fame. As it happened, SCOTUS ruled 9-0 against him, definitively establishing that there is no “right to die” enshrined in the Constitution, and affirming that the state has a compelling interest to protect the vulnerable.

SCOTUS’s unanimous decision against Dr. Quinlan meant that his side had somehow pulled off the impressive feat of uniting Antonin Scalia, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and all points in between against their cause. (I never quite saw how that added to his luster, but such is the Academy.)

At any rate, I once had a conversation with Dr. Quinlan about physician-assisted suicide. I told him that I opposed it ever becoming legal. I recall he calmly, pleasantly asked me why I felt that way.

First, I acknowledged that his formative case must have been very tough, and allowed that maybe, just maybe, he had done right in that exceptionally difficult situation. But as the legal saying goes, hard cases make bad law.

Second, as a clinical physician, I felt strongly that no patient should ever see their doctor and have to wonder if he was coming to help keep them alive or to kill them.

Finally, perhaps most importantly, there’s this thing called the slippery slope.

As I recall, he replied that he couldn’t imagine the slippery slope becoming a problem in a matter so profound as causing a patient’s death.

Well, maybe not with you personally, Dr. Quinlan, I thought. I said no more.

But having done my residency at a major liver transplant center in Boston, I had had more than enough experience with the rather slapdash ethics of the organ transplantation world. The opaque shuffling of patients up and down the transplant list, the endless and rather macabre scrounging for donors, and the nebulous, vaguely sinister concept of brain death had all unsettled me.

Prior to residency, I had attended medical school in Canada. In those days, the McGill University Faculty of Medicine was still almost Victorian in its ways: an old-school, stiff-upper-lip, Workaholics-Anonymous-chapter-house sort of place. The ethic was hard work, personal accountability for mistakes, and above all primum non nocere – first, do no harm.

Fast forward to today’s soft-core totalitarian state of Canada, the land of debanking and convicting peaceful protesters, persecuting honest physicians for speaking obvious truth, fining people $25,000 for hiking on their own property, and spitefully seeking to slaughter harmless animals precisely because they may hold unique medical and scientific value.

To all those offenses against liberty, morality, and basic decency, we must add Canada’s aggressive policy of legalizing, and, in fact, encouraging industrial-scale physician-assisted suicide. Under Canada’s Medical Assistance In Dying (MAiD) program, which has been in place only since 2016, physician-assisted suicide now accounts for a terrifying 4.7 percent of all deaths in Canada.

MAiD will be permitted for patients suffering from mental illness in Canada in 2027, putting it on par with the Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland.

To its credit, and unlike the Netherlands and Belgium, Canada does not allow minors to access MAiD. Not yet.

However, patients scheduled to be terminated via MAiD in Canada are actively recruited to have their organs harvested. In fact, MAiD accounts for 6 percent of all deceased organ donors in Canada.

In summary, in Canada, in less than 10 years, physician-assisted suicide has gone from illegal to both an epidemic cause of death and a highly successful organ-harvesting source for the organ transplantation industry.

Physician-assisted suicide has not slid down the slippery slope in Canada. It has thrown itself off the face of El Capitan.

And now, at long last, physician-assisted suicide may be coming to New York. It has passed the House and Senate, and just awaits the Governor’s signature. It seems that the 9-0 Supreme Court shellacking back in the day was just a bump in the road. The long march through the institutions, indeed.

For a brief period in Western history, roughly from the introduction of antibiotics until Covid, hospitals ceased to be a place one entered fully expecting to die. It appears that era is coming to an end.

Covid demonstrated that Western allopathic medicine has a dark, sadistic, anti-human side – fueled by 20th-century scientism and 21st-century technocratic globalism – to which it is increasingly turning. Physician-assisted suicide is a growing part of this death cult transformation. It should be fought at every step.

I have not seen Dr. Quinlan in years. I do not know how he might feel about my slippery slope argument today.

I still believe I was correct.

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

A few months ago, the Canadian government hired outside consultants who will be tasked with looking into whether or not officials should proceed with creating a digital ID system for all citizens and residents.

Canadian airport officials asked the federal government to implement a digital ID for domestic travelers as an option in the name of “modernization.”

Currently, domestic travelers are only required to use physical identification for air travel, including a driver’s license, passport, or government-issued ID card.

However, Toronto’s Pearson International Airport recently recommended that Canada’s Secure Air Travel Regulations be amended to allow for “digital ID to be recognized.”

“To modernize and support enhanced passenger experience, we ask that the government endorse system-wide border and screening modernization including immediate regulatory changes,” Pearson representatives told Canada’s House of Commons finance committee in a recent submission.

Airport managers wrote that “Canada should proactively embrace both emerging and proven technologies that have the potential to enhance the passenger experience and improve operational efficiency and promote productivity across the sector.” 

“Key initiatives should include accelerating the adoption of a common digital ID for both domestic and international travel.”

The Canadian Airports Council also told Parliament that a national digital ID program should start with airport travelers, including the introduction of “biometrics.”

The Council asked to “enable digital ID and biometrics in air travel” to allow it to “enable more efficient use of space, reduce pressure on infrastructure and enhance security.”

“At present, Canada is behind our international peers in ensuring travel process security screening, Customs and border procedures and boarding are modern, efficient, simple and biometrically based,” it wrote.

Only non-Canadians are currently mandated to undergo biometric screening as well as fingerprint scans when they enter Canada.

To date, Parliamentary committees have shot down requests for a domestic national identification system.

Some nations, such as the United Kingdom, have recently said they will mandate digital ID using the pretext of illegal immigration as the catalyst.

As reported by LifeSiteNews a few months ago, the Canadian government hired outside consultants who will be tasked with looking into whether or not officials should proceed with creating a digital ID system for all citizens and residents.

Canada’s Privy Council research from 2023 noted that there is strong public resistance to the use of digital IDs to access government services.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has a history of backing central bank digital currencies and supported in 2023 “choking off the money” donated to the Freedom Convoy protests against COVID mandates.

As late as February, the Liberal government under former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s immigration ministry, as reported by LifeSiteNews, was secretly asking Canadians via surveys if they would accept a national identification program that would likely end up requiring each citizen to always have a type of “digital” passport on them.

While the Liberal government under Trudeau insisted the program would be optional, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre nonetheless sounded the alarm by promising to introduce a bill that would “expressly prohibit” digital IDs in Canada.

Digital IDs and similar systems have long been pushed by globalist groups like the World Economic Forum, an organization with which Carney has extensive ties, under the guise of ease of access and security.

Critics, however, have warned that the purpose of such a system is actually to centralize control over citizens. This opinion seems to be mirrored by the general public, with a Bank of Canada survey finding that Canadians are very wary of a government-backed digital currency, concluding that a “significant number” of citizens would resist the implementation of such a system.