Category: Assisted suicide
Euthanasia and the lie of the ‘good death’
The term euthanasia literally means “good death.” The word is constructed from the Greek eu (good) and thanatos (death) — the same root that inspired the name of the Marvel villain Thanos, whose vision of “balance” required mass death.
The language itself tells you everything. Dress death up as “good,” and you can begin to sell it to failed socialist medical systems as a desirable cure-all.
Euthanasia, often called “doctor-assisted suicide,” has been thrust back into public view by developments in countries like Canada and Spain. What we are seeing is not compassionate medicine. It is the quiet normalization of despair.
A culture that cannot tell its weakest members, ‘Your life is worth living,’ will eventually tell them, ‘Your death is preferable.’
Consider the case of Noelia Castillo in Spain.
Castillo, just 25 years old, had endured profound suffering. As a minor, she was in mental health care. As an adult, she was the victim of sexual assault multiple times. After a suicide attempt following the second assault, she was left paralyzed from the waist down. In that condition, she requested euthanasia.
Her father pleaded with the courts to deny the request, arguing that her mental health made such a decision unsound. The courts disagreed. The state approved her death.
A young woman, failed repeatedly by those entrusted to care for her, was ultimately offered death as the solution.
Even more troubling, British pianist James Rhodes publicly appealed to her to reconsider, offering to cover her medical costs. His plea underscores what the system refused to admit: Castillo did not need death; she needed care.
And Castillo herself admitted as much. In an interview, she essentially asked: If I cannot access health care, am I then entitled to access death care?
That question exposes the entire moral collapse. She was denied meaningful treatment in her socialist system but granted state-funded death as the solution to her suffering.
The Canadian example
If Spain reveals the logic of euthanasia, Canada demonstrates its trajectory. In Vancouver, Miriam Lancaster went to the emergency room for back pain. Instead of being treated, she was offered medically assisted suicide.
Death does cure back pain. It cures everything by eliminating the patient. Failed socialist medicine jumped at the chance to raise its cure statistics.
Thankfully, Lancaster refused. She later received proper treatment and went on to continue traveling the world. Had she accepted the offer, a solvable medical issue would have become a state-sanctioned death and she would have been “cared for” right into the grave.
Then there is the case of Jennyfer Hatch, a 37-year-old Canadian woman suffering from Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a painful connective tissue disorder. Hatch became the face of a euthanasia promotional campaign titled “All Is Beauty,” a three-minute film celebrating her final days before medically assisted death.
Let that sink in: a commercial for suicide.
And yet Hatch admitted privately that she chose euthanasia not because her condition was untreatable but because obtaining adequate medical care in Canada’s system was too difficult.
The myth of ‘compassionate’ systems
We have long been told by progressives that socialized medicine would deliver universal care, eliminate wait times, and treat every patient with dignity. Instead, it is increasingly offering a different solution: eliminate the patient.
The logic is brutally simple. If you cannot heal the sick, you can always reduce the number of sick people. These socialists saw the story of Thanos as a “how to.”
People have always been capable of taking their own lives. A system that merely facilitates suicide adds nothing of value. It does not heal; it does not restore; it simply institutionalizes despair. It admits it offers no meaning in life to those who suffer.
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What is a good death?
At the heart of this debate is a deeper question: What do we mean by a good death?
For modern secular societies, the answer is increasingly clear: a good death is a painless one. It is an escape from suffering.
But this definition collapses under scrutiny.
First, it ignores the most basic philosophical question, one raised memorably by Hamlet: “What dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil?” If death is not the end, if judgment awaits, then euthanasia is not an escape but a gamble of the highest stakes. It the solution urged by demons looking forward to claiming another soul.
Second, it misunderstands the nature of a good life.
A life free from all pain is not a noble life. It is not the life we admire, nor the life we aspire to. Our stories, our heroes, and our deepest intuitions all tell us the same thing: Meaning is forged through suffering.
Imagine a hero who, one-third of the way through the story, says, “This is too hard. I think I’ll end my life to avoid the suffering ahead.” That is not a hero. It is a failure.
Suffering, rightly understood, is not meaningless. It teaches perseverance, discipline, and faith. It refines character.
As Scripture teaches, “Add to your faith virtue, to virtue knowledge, to knowledge self-control, to self-control perseverance …” (2 Peter 1:5-6).
A pain-free life is not the highest good. A life shaped by truth, virtue, and endurance aimed at eternal life of knowing God is our chief and highest good.
The real crisis
The rise of euthanasia is not ultimately about medicine. It is about worldview.
Societies that reject God are left with no ultimate purpose, no transcendent hope, and no reason to endure suffering. When affluence fails and suffering remains, the only consistent answer left is escape.
A culture that cannot tell its weakest members, “Your life is worth living,” will eventually tell them, “Your death is preferable.” From hating God, the culture naturally moves to hating neighbors. It is a moral collapse described in Romans 1:31. The people become heartless and ruthless.
A better hope
The answer to suffering is not death. It is redemption.
Only a worldview grounded in the reality of God can make sense of suffering without surrendering to it. Only Christ offers not merely relief from pain, but restoration, meaning, and eternal hope. He can heal our physical pain, but more importantly, he can forgive our sin and restore our communion with God.
The growing acceptance of euthanasia should force us to confront the emptiness of the alternatives.
If death is our only answer, then we have already lost. But if life has meaning, then suffering is not the end of the story.
And that is the difference between despair and hope.
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Pritzker Signs Law Welcoming State-Sanctioned Suicide To Illinois
State-sanctioned euthanasia not only pressures patients to choose suicide, but also inevitably ends in health care systems forcing suicide on patients.
‘Pro-death legislators’ want euthanasia in Illinois — Canada reveals why that’s a terrible idea
Democratic lawmakers in the Illinois legislature have passed a bill that would legalize doctor-assisted suicide across the state.
The bill now awaiting Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker’s signature, SB 1950, originally started out as a measure concerning sanitary food preparation. The bill was, however, hollowed out then repurposed. Instead of keeping consumers healthy, the language was changed to expedite death — authorizing a qualified patient with a terminal disease to demand that their doctor prescribe a lethal dose of medication, thereby ending “the patient’s life in a peaceful manner.”
Catholic leaders in the state are among the bill’s loudest critics.
‘Now, they can prescribe death.’
In May, Cardinal Blase Cupich, the archbishop of Chicago, wrote, “I have to ask why, in a time when growing understanding of the deteriorating mental health of the U.S. population — and particularly among our youth — caused the country to create the 988 mental health crisis line, we would want to take this step to normalize suicide as a solution to life’s challenges.”
Cupich stressed that the Illinois legislature should explore options that instead “honor the dignity of human life and provide compassionate care to those experiencing life-ending illness.”
Bishop Thomas John Paprocki of the Diocese of Springfield stated after legislators ignored Cupich’s counsel and passed the bill in a 30-27 vote on Friday, “It is quite fitting that the forces of the culture of death in the Illinois General Assembly passed physician-assisted suicide on October 31 — a day that, culturally, has become synonymous with glorifying death and evil.”
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“It’s also ironic that these pro-death legislators did it under the cloud of darkness at 2:54 a.m. Make no mistake: killing oneself is not dying with dignity. Doctors take an oath to do no harm. Now, they can prescribe death,” the bishop continued. “Physician assisted suicide undermines the value of each person, especially the vulnerable, the poor, and those with disabilities.”
The Illinois Catholic Conference warned on Wednesday that the legalization of assisted suicide in Illinois will put the “state on a slippery path that jeopardizes the well-being of the poor and marginalized, especially those in the disability community and have foreseeable tragic consequences.”
The dangers and fallout of legalized assisted suicide are hardly hypothetical.
North of the border, Canada is weeks away from publishing its sixth annual report on so-called medical assistance in dying. While the official numbers have yet to be released accounting for all MAID deaths in 2024 nationwide, provincial data appear to indicate another year-over-year increase in state-facilitated slayings.
The federal government under former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau passed the Medical Assistance in Dying Act in 2016, legalizing euthanasia nationwide. Originally, applicants had to be 18 or older and suffering from a “grievous and irremediable medical condition” causing “enduring physical or psychological suffering that is intolerable” to them.
The state-facilitated suicide program has since been grossly liberalized such that the country’s eugenicist-founded health care system can now effectively execute those struggling with anxiety, autism, depression, economic woes, PTSD, and other survivable issues.
In its first year, MAID offed 1,108 Canadians. That number tripled the following year, and by 2021, the number had climbed to over 10,000 assisted-suicide deaths in a single year.
The Canadian think tank Cardus revealed last year that “MAiD in Canada is no longer unusual or rare. Federal predictions about the expected frequency of MAiD have significantly underestimated the numbers of Canadians who are dying by this means.”
As of 2022, MAID was tied with cerebrovascular diseases as the fifth leading cause of death in the country. The following year, state-facilitated suicide claimed the lives of 15,343 individuals, accounting for 4.7% of all deaths in the country.
‘Feeling like a burden can play on a patient’s decision to request and receive a MAiD death.’
Authorities in Nova Scotia, a province of just over 1 million souls, indicated to Blaze News that it saw a drop in completed MAID slayings last year. Whereas there were 380 slayings in 2023, there were allegedly only 169 in 2024, with 286 active cases and 71 recorded natural deaths prior to MAID.
This appears to be the exception, not the rule.
The nation’s more populous provinces have alternatively seen continued increases in MAID slayings.
British Columbia’s 2024 euthanasia data, for instance, indicate that there were 3,000 state-facilitated suicides in the province last year. While most of the victims were over the age of 65, 1.5% of those slain were between the ages of 18 and 45 and individuals who were not dying. In fact, among the conditions cited as reasons and/or contributing reasons for MAID were “frailty,” dementia, mental disorders, and unstated neurological conditions.
The Euthanasia Prevent Coalition noted that MAID deaths in B.C. were up over 8% from the previous year and accounted for 6.7% of all deaths in the province last year.
Alberta, a province of just over 5 million souls, recorded 1,117 deaths in 2024, representing a year-over-year increase of 14.3% and making its total MAID kill count 5,646 victims since 2016.
Data obtained by the MAiD in Canada Substack indicate that in 2024, Ontario had 4,957 deaths, representing an increase of 6.8% and making its grand total 23,333 victims since 2016.
Quebec reportedly had 6,058 MAID deaths last year, representing an increase of 6.4% and making its grand total over 26,000 victims since 2016. In addition to the growing number of deaths, there is apparently a growing cohort of doctors willing to dish out lethal doses in Quebec. A recent government report indicated that over 2,000 physicians were involved in the slayings, representing an 11% increase over the previous year.
Rebecca Vachon, health program director at Cardus, told Blaze News that “based on current reporting from the most populous provinces, we expect to see more than 16,500 ‘medical assistance in dying’ or euthanasia deaths in 2024, which is an increase from the 15,343 deaths reported in 2023. This will likely result in MAiD deaths constituting 5% of total deaths in Canada that year, which, as Cardus discussed in a report released last fall, is a far cry from the expectations set by the courts that MAiD would be for exceptional cases only.”
Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images
The Canadian government released a report in 2020 indicating that the previous year, MAID resulted in a net cost reduction of over $86 million for provincial governments. The report additionally noted that further liberalization of the MAID program under Bill C-7, which was passed in March 2021, would result in an additional $62 million reduction in costs.
When asked whether MAID is being championed in part as a way to cut costs for Canada’s immigration-strained health care system, Vachon told Blaze News, “Regardless of intentions, the pressure that feeling like a burden can play on a patient’s decision to request and receive a MAiD death should not be understated.”
“For instance, Canadian MAiD providers report that almost 50% of the patients they helped die in 2023 reported feeling they were a burden on others — up 10% from the previous year,” Vachon said.
‘Illinois should be a state that offers compassion, care, and hope — not death — as the answer to human suffering.’
Polls conducted by Cardus in partnership with the Angus Reid Institute found that 62% of Canadians fear that those who are financially or socially vulnerable may consider state-facilitated suicide because of difficulties accessing adequate care, Vachon indicated.
The fear is justified given that 42% of all MAID deaths from 2019 to 2023 involved people who required disability supports. Of those victims, over 1,017 never received those supports.
“Canadians deserve care that alleviates their suffering and prevents it from becoming ‘unbearable,'” Vachon said.
Blaze News has reached out for comment to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s office as well as to the leaders of the New Democratic Party and Conservative Party, Don Davies and Pierre Poilievre.
While the slope has been greased in Canada and in states such as California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Vermont, and Washington, there’s still hope that Pritzker may reconsider, especially after he noted on Monday, “It was something that I didn’t expect and didn’t know it was going to be voted on, so we’re examining it even now.”
Rather than sign the bill, the Illinois Catholic Conference has implored Pritzker to “expand and improve on palliative care programs that offer expert assessment and management of pain and other symptoms.”
Bishop Paprocki noted, “Pray for Gov. Pritzker to reject this legislation. Illinois should be a state that offers compassion, care, and hope — not death — as the answer to human suffering.”
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