Category: Euthanasia
A New Low: England Debates Letting Pregnant Women Kill Themselves
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The country that mocks America’s ‘culture of death’ has embraced one of its own
Canada loves to lecture America about compassion. Every time a shooting makes the headlines, Canadian commentators cannot wait to discuss how the United States has a “culture of death” because we refuse to regulate guns the way enlightened nations supposedly do.
But north of our border, a very different crisis is unfolding — one that is harder to moralize because it exposes a deeper cultural failure.
A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order.
The Canadian government is not only permitting death, but it’s also administering, expanding, and redefining it as “medical care.” Medical assistance in dying is no longer a rare, tragic exception. It has become one of the country’s leading causes of death, offered to people whose problems are treatable, whose conditions are survivable, and whose value should never have been in question.
In Canada, MAID is now responsible for nearly 5% of all deaths — 1 out of every 20 citizens. And this is happening in a country that claims the moral high ground over American gun violence. Canada now records more deaths per capita from doctors administering lethal drugs than America records from firearms. Their number is 37.9 deaths per 100,000 people. Ours is 13.7. Yet we are the country supposedly drowning in a “culture of death.”
No lecture from abroad can paper over this fact: Canada has built a system where eliminating suffering increasingly means eliminating the sufferer.
Choosing death over care
One example of what Canada now calls “compassion” is the case of Jolene Bond, a woman suffering from a painful but treatable thyroid condition that causes dangerously high calcium levels, bone deterioration, soft-tissue damage, nausea, and unrelenting pain. Her condition is severe, but it is not terminal. Surgery could help her. And in a functioning medical system, she would have it.
But Jolene lives under socialized medicine. The specialists she needs are either unavailable, overrun with patients, or blocked behind bureaucratic requirements she cannot meet. She cannot get a referral. She cannot get an appointment. She cannot reach the doctor in another province who is qualified to perform the operation. Every pathway to treatment is jammed by paperwork, shortages, and waitlists that stretch into the horizon and beyond.
Yet the Canadian government had something else ready for her — something immediate.
They offered her MAID.
Not help, not relief, not a doctor willing to drive across a provincial line and simply examine her. Instead, Canada offered Jolene a state-approved death. A lethal injection is easier to obtain than a medical referral. Killing her would be easier than treating her. And the system calls that compassion.
Bureaucracy replaces medicine
Jolene’s story is not an outlier. It is the logical outcome of a system that cannot keep its promises. When the machinery of socialized medicine breaks down, the state simply replaces care with a final, irreversible “solution.” A bureaucratic checkbox becomes the last decision of a person’s life.
Canada insists its process is rigorous, humane, and safeguarded. Yet the bureaucracy now reviewing Jolene’s case is not asking how she can receive treatment; it is asking whether she has enough signatures to qualify for a lethal injection. And the debate among Canadian officials is not how to preserve life, but whether she has met the paperwork threshold to end it.
This is the dark inversion that always emerges when the state claims the power to decide when life is no longer worth living. Bureaucracy replaces conscience. Eligibility criteria replace compassion. A panel of physicians replaces the family gathered at a bedside. And eventually, the “right” to die becomes an expectation — especially for those who are poor, elderly, or alone.
Photo by Graham Hughes/NurPhoto via Getty Images
The logical end of a broken system
We ignore this lesson at our own peril. Canada’s health care system is collapsing under demographic pressure, uncontrolled migration, and the unavoidable math of government-run medicine.
When the system breaks, someone must bear the cost. MAID has become the release valve.
The ideology behind this system is already drifting south. In American medical journals and bioethics conferences, you will hear this same rhetoric. The argument is always dressed in compassion. But underneath, it reduces the value of human life to a calculation: Are you useful? Are you affordable? Are you too much of a burden?
The West was built on a conviction that every human life has inherent value. That truth gave us hospitals before it gave us universities. It gave us charity before it gave us science. It is written into the Declaration of Independence.
Canada’s MAID program reveals what happens when a country lets that foundation erode. Life becomes negotiable, and suffering becomes a justification for elimination.
A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order. If compassion becomes indistinguishable from convenience, and if medicine becomes indistinguishable from euthanasia, the West will have abandoned the very principles that built it. That is the lesson from our northern neighbor — a warning, not a blueprint.
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.
Glenn Beck works to save pain-racked Canadian woman left at euthanasia dead end by broken socialist health care system
Blaze Media co-founder Glenn Beck and his team are desperately trying to save a woman in the Canadian prairie province of Saskatchewan who has been failed by her country’s socialist health care system.
Jolene Van Alstine of Regina has for eight years suffered from a rare parathyroid disease called normocalcemic primary hyperparathyroidism, which causes nausea and vomiting and draws calcium from the bones into the blood, resulting in extreme bone pain, weakened bone density, and fractures.
‘I’ve been alone lying on the couch for eight years, sick and curled up in a ball, pushing for the day to end.’
Van Alstine has undergone three surgeries but still requires a specialized procedure to remove her overactive parathyroid gland.
The problem, according to Canadian state media, is that there is presently no surgeon in the province able to perform the operation. While there are apparently capable and available surgeons elsewhere in Canada, Van Alstine has indicated that she must first obtain a referral — and cannot secure one, as none of the endocrinologists in her region are accepting new patients.
Until this week, Van Alstine was running short on hope.
“My friends have stopped visiting me. I’m isolated. I’ve been alone lying on the couch for eight years, sick and curled up in a ball, pushing for the day to end,” she told state media.
Glenn Beck noted Wednesday on his show, “She’s riddled with pain. Yesterday, we found out that she was in the ER because she’s having all kinds of complications because of this. And she can’t take it any more.”
“This one is so grotesque,” continued Beck, “because the state would rather have her die.”
‘We expect to see more than 16,500 “medical assistance in dying” or euthanasia deaths.’
The prospect that her treatable disease might go untreated prompted Van Alstine to contemplate state-facilitated suicide, which is euphemistically referred to in Canada as Medial Assistance in Dying.
RELATED: ‘Pro-death legislators’ want euthanasia in Illinois — Canada reveals why that’s a terrible idea
Photo by ROMAIN PERROCHEAU/AFP via Getty Images
“I understand how long and how much she’s suffered, and it’s horrific, the physical suffering, but it’s also the mental anguish,” Miles Sundeen, Van Alstine’s partner, said late last month. “No hope — no hope for the future, no hope for any relief. I don’t want her to do it, but I understand where she’s at.”
George Carson, a MAID approval doctor, indicated this week that he assessed Van Alstine and provided her with his approval. Since she has apparently also received approval from a nurse practitioner, she now requires only one more approval in order to secure a spot among the tens of thousands of Canadians who will be snuffed out in the new year by their socialist health care system, which was originally founded by the eugenicist Tommy Douglas.
MAID is among the top five leading causes of death in Canada and accounted for 4.7% of all deaths in the country in 2023.
Rebecca Vachon, health program director at the Canadian think tank Cardus, recently 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.”
MAID — which Canada’s Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer boasted in October 2020 would, with expanded access, “result in a net reduction in health care costs for the provincial governments” — appears to be fast becoming a relief valve for a health care system that has come under great strain in part because of an aging population but largely because of the immigration-driven population gains overseen by the Trudeau Liberals.
‘Imagine saving a woman’s life for Christmas.’
Average annual immigration from 2000 to 2015 was 617,800. Under the Trudeau Liberals, average annual immigration was 1.4 million from 2016 to 2024.
As of April 1, 2025, Canada had an estimated population of just over 41.5 million people. According to the 2021 census, over 8.3 million people — 23% of the total population — “were, or had ever been, a landed immigrant or permanent resident in Canada.” This, however, appears to be a gross undercount.
A new government report revealed that 38% of non-permanent residents — roughly another 576,000 — were potentially “missed” by the 2021 census.
According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, there were 2.41 physicians per 1,000 people. The United States, by comparison, reportedly has at least 3.6 doctors per 1,000. An estimated 5.9 million Canadians — around 14% — don’t have regular access to a primary care provider.
“This is your socialized health care, gang,” Beck said on Wednesday of Van Alstine’s case.
“This is the reality of compassionate, progressive health care. Canada has to end this insanity. And Americans must never let it spread here.”
After Van Alstine’s last-ditch plea for help to Canadian lawmakers and officials failed to immediately produce the desired results, an American got involved.
“If there is any surgeon in America who can do this, I’ll pay for this patient to come down here for treatment,” Beck wrote Tuesday on X.
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Photo by Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Beck revealed in a series of announcements first, that multiple surgeons reached out with an interest in helping; second, that his team made contact with Van Alstine and Sundeen; and third, that his team had connected with the U.S. State Department after discovering that Van Alstine lacked a passport to gain legal entry into the United States.
“I’ll fly her down. I’ll put her up. I’ll get her the doctors,” Beck said on his show. “We need to get her the surgery.”
“Imagine saving a woman’s life for Christmas,” added Beck.
“Is there anything better that we could do?”
Sundeen told Canadian state media after Beck’s team spoke with him, “For us to have it done in the States would be financially impossible otherwise.”
An Ipsos poll conducted last year for Global News found that 42% of Canadians would travel to the U.S. and personally pay for more routine health care if needed — up 10 percentage points over the previous year — and 38% would travel to the U.S. and pay out of pocket for emergency care — up 9 points over the previous year.
Sean Simpson, vice president of Ipsos Public Affairs, noted, “I think the increase is happening because of the increasing level of frustration that Canadians have in the health care system.”
“It’s not the quality of care that people are upset about; it is the timely access to care, meaning wait times in emergency rooms, wait times to see specialists, to get appointments, for screening,” continued Simpson. “As a result, we have a significant chunk of the population say if they can get that service elsewhere, such as the United States, they may consider doing so.”
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‘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.”
RELATED: The total state will kill you for being old
Blaze Media Illustration
“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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