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 Cassy Cooke

After her parents both became seriously ill and her mother wanted to undergo assisted suicide, a Washington woman convinced her father to die also.

Key takeaways

• Corinne Gregory Sharpe spoke to PEOPLE about her experience convincing her parents to undergo assisted suicide together.
• After her mother was diagnosed with aortic stenosis in her 90s, she lived for a few more years before her health began to decline. At that point, she said she wanted to die by assisted suicide.
• Her father did not have a health condition outside of having previously had a stroke; however, he was nervous to live without his wife. Sharpe convinced him of a “solution” – to kill himself alongside her mother.
• Couple assisted suicide has become romanticized by the media.

The details

Corinne Gregory Sharpe spoke with PEOPLE about her efforts to convince her father to undergo assisted suicide alongside her mother. She said her family had always been close, so when her mother became ill, her father was nervous to live without her.

Sharpe’s mother was first diagnosed with aortic stenosis in 2018 at the age of 92 and given less than two years to live if she did not undergo surgery.

“And even if she had the procedure, there was no guarantee that she was gonna live any longer,” Sharpe said. “So her attitude was sort of like, well, let’s just kind of let things go as they go.”

READ: Colorado gave over 500 people assisted suicide drugs solely for eating disorders in 2024

But Sharpe’s mother didn’t die within those two years. In fact, it was three years later that her health began to decline, only after she fell and hit her head. Shortly after that, Sharpe’s father appeared to suffer small strokes. “So now I have two parents in medical care,” Sharpe said.

Her parents were able to be at a rehabilitation facility together, but Sharpe said they were “losing the will to live,” so she brought them back home. Doctors recommended hospice, but her mother decided she wanted to undergo assisted suicide, which left her father distraught. Sharpe came up with an “interesting” solution.

“I had a very interesting, serious heart-to-heart conversation with him one evening after my mom had gone to bed,” she continued. “And he was just panicked like, ‘What happens to me if she goes first?’ That’s always been a concern of his. He couldn’t see a scenario where he would want to continue if mom was gone.”

She added, “He’s always been afraid of dying. But I think he was more afraid of being left alone. He was like, ‘Well, if she’s gonna go and I have the option to go at the same time, then I’m getting on that horse.’ So I was like, look, we’ll figure something out.”

At this point, her father was not dying, and if he suffered another stroke, doctors believed he could end up incapacitated, but not terminally ill. Yet Sharpe was able to get her father approved for assisted suicide, calling it “a race” to do so.

Sharpe spent what would be the last few weeks of her parents’ lives hosting family dinners, making them their favorite meals, and sharing memories as a way to “repay my parents for everything they’d done for me.” It sounds nice, but there’s no need for an adult child to wait until she knows her parents are dying to do such things for them.

When the drug powder arrived, Sharpe took a selfie with the delivery man and then stuck the drug on a shelf, where it feasibly could have been accessed by anyone. She then joked about choosing Friday the 13th to die, which is when her parents ultimately took the drugs – Friday, August 13, 2021.

“The counselors prepared the cocktail, we sat around and shared some private moments together. They got to sit in their own bed and hold hands with each other and talk before they were able to take the meds,” she said. “We put music on and they took the cocktail. Then we poured a glass of wine and we had a final toast. About 10 minutes after they drank it, they went to sleep.”

Zoom out

It has become increasingly common and romanticized for elderly couples to be euthanized together. This includes murder-suicides and those who opt to die together  simply because they are elderly.

But the reality of assisted suicide is that it may not be as peaceful and romantic as many have been led to believe.

As Dr. Joel Zivot, an associate professor of anesthesiology and surgery at the Emory School of Medicine and an expert on “physician participation in lethal injection,” previously explained, assisted suicide can be excruciating, even if it doesn’t appear to be.

“[F]or both euthanasia and executions, paralytic drugs are used,” he wrote in an op-ed for the Spectator. “These drugs, given in high enough doses, mean that a patient cannot move a muscle, cannot express any outward or visible sign of pain. But that doesn’t mean that he or she is free from suffering.”

He added, “People who want to die deserve to know that they may end up drowning, not just falling asleep.”

Furthermore, a study in the medical journal Anaesthesia found that prolonged, painful deaths from assisted suicide and euthanasia were far from rare, with a considerable number of patients taking 30 hours to die, though some took seven days. Experiments with assisted suicide likewise have been painful, with one drug cocktail “burning patients’ mouths and throats, causing some to scream in pain.” The same drugs labeled as too inhumane to be used for lethal injection are used in assisted suicide.

The bottom line

Suicide is not dignified, peaceful, or romantic. Efforts are made to prevent suicide unless the person in question is elderly, ill, or disabled. And then, it’s made to appear noble and romantic to take your own life.

Reprinted with permission from Live Action.