A neuroethicist who serves on the board of an assisted suicide advocacy organization wants California to be more like Canada, and expressed disappointment that there aren’t as many people being killed in California.
Adrian Byram wrote an op-ed for the California Health Report, questioning why fewer people are opting for assisted suicide in California compared to Canada, despite having similar populations. “California and Canada have about the same number of people – 39 million in California, 35 million in Canada. Both jurisdictions legalized medical aid in dying in 2016. Both have similar medical systems – many older people are entitled to mostly free medical care, physicians are free to choose their patients and the services they provide,” he said. “Yet in 2022, 13,241 Canadians took advantage of medical aid in dying, while only 853 Californians did so. Why the big difference?”
The ‘problem’, he claimed, is that Californians simply don’t know that they can have a doctor kill them — as if anyone of a certain age or with a certain health condition must want to die. It’s a discriminatory, ableist attitude.
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“First, only 25 percent of Californians aged 60 and over even know that medical aid in dying is their legal right, compared to 67 percent of all older Canadians,” he said. “Second, and possibly contributing to the first, is a major difference in the way Californian and Canadian health care institutions inform the public about medical aid in dying.” Canada, he continued, makes assisted suicide a prominent feature of its health care system:
In Canada, most health care institutions have a list of all their medical services on their websites; medical aid in dying is included in those lists, equally as prominent as all other medical services starting with “M.” Clicking on that link takes the viewer to a page describing the service in detail and providing the phone and email contacts to a care coordination team.
This is not so in California. None of our large health care institutions include medical aid in dying in their readily accessible lists of available services. Clicking on an associated service such as “Hospice” or “Palliative Care” may take the viewer to a page describing a number of end-of-life services such as advanced illness management and home infusion therapy, but medical aid in dying never seems to be included as an option.
Despite Byram’s glowing reviews, Canada has been criticized across the globe for the heavy-handed promotion of its increasingly lax assisted suicide and euthanasia programs. If Medical Aid in Dying (MAiD) were included in the country’s causes of deaths (it isn’t), it would be Canada’s fifth leading cause of death — behind only cancer, heart disease, COVID-19, and accidents. Quebec has the highest euthanasia rate in the world.
Virtually no one is turned down for euthanasia in Canada, and people are regularly given death for things like poverty, housing issues, inability to access health care, and disability, instead of giving them access to the services they truly need. It is an affront to human dignity.
And this is the program Byram wants California to emulate.
