MAID

[Tyger]

'Assisted Dying' (called MAID in Canada) has long been considered a slippery slope. Stories like the one below have been coming out of Canada for several years - actually since MAID was made legal in Canada in June 2016. It appears to be a slippery slope indeed whereever it is made legal. Wondering what people think of making government-assisted suicide legal.


𝐎𝐍𝐓𝐀𝐑𝐈𝐎 𝐆𝐑𝐀𝐍𝐃𝐌𝐎𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐑, 𝟖𝟑, 𝐖𝐀𝐒 𝐄𝐔𝐓𝐇𝐀𝐍𝐈𝐙𝐄𝐃 𝐀𝐅𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐑𝐄𝐅𝐔𝐒𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐅𝐎𝐑 𝐑𝐄𝐋𝐈𝐆𝐈𝐎𝐔𝐒 𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐒𝐎𝐍𝐒

Brigitte Stegemann, 83, a Christian grandmother living in a long-term care home near Belleville, Ontario, d∗ed on July 10 after receiving medical assistance in dy∗ng, according to IBTimes UK. Her granddaughter says she had repeatedly turned it down on religious grounds.

Brigitte Kranendonk, Stegemann’s granddaughter and power of attorney, says she asked her grandmother two days earlier whether she knew she would d∗e that Friday. Kranendonk says Stegemann cried for about 45 minutes and said, “𝘐’𝘷𝘦 𝘮𝘢𝘥𝘦 𝘢 𝘮𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘬𝘦.”

Kranendonk says English was not Stegemann’s first language and that she was severely hearing-impaired. She says she was asked to leave the room during the same-day assessment, and about four minutes later the doctor announced her grandmother was 𝐝𝐞𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐝 𝐟𝐢𝐭 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐌𝐀𝐢𝐃. Kranendonk says she told the doctor, “𝘚𝘩𝘦 𝘥𝘰𝘦𝘴𝘯’𝘵 𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘺𝘰𝘶’𝘳𝘦 𝘴𝘢𝘺𝘪𝘯𝘨.”

Belleville Police told IBTimes the matter is 𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫 𝐢𝐧𝐯𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐠𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐛𝐲 𝐢𝐭𝐬 𝐂𝐫𝐢𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐈𝐧𝐯𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐠𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐃𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐨𝐧. The family has also gone to the Ontario Chief Coroner and the Patient Ombudsman. The care home and the MAiD practitioners have not publicly commented and are understood to maintain that she legally consented.

These are the family's allegations, and nothing has been proven. But when a granddaughter says an 83-year-old woman begged and a doctor signed off in minutes, 𝐩𝐨𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐞 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐚𝐬𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐪𝐮𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐲 𝐟𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐲 𝐰𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐚𝐬𝐤.

𝐀 𝐰𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐰𝐡𝐨 𝐬𝐚𝐢𝐝 𝐧𝐨 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐟𝐚𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐝𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧 𝐝𝐚𝐲𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐬𝐚𝐲𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐬𝐡𝐞'𝐝 𝐦𝐚𝐝𝐞 𝐚 𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐤𝐞. 𝐒𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐬𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐚𝐧𝐬𝐰𝐞𝐫 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭.

- M.A. Rothman

 

[Tyger]

Another story ....


𝐂𝐀𝐍𝐀𝐃𝐀 𝐄𝐔𝐓𝐇𝐀𝐍𝐈𝐙𝐄𝐃 𝐃𝐎𝐍𝐍𝐀 𝐃𝐔𝐍𝐂𝐀𝐍 𝐅𝐎𝐔𝐑 𝐇𝐎𝐔𝐑𝐒 𝐀𝐅𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐀 𝐏𝐒𝐘𝐂𝐇𝐈𝐀𝐓𝐑𝐈𝐂 𝐔𝐍𝐈𝐓 𝐑𝐄𝐋𝐄𝐀𝐒𝐄𝐃 𝐇𝐄𝐑

Donna Duncan was 61 when a February 2020 car accident left her with a concussion. Anxiety, paranoia, food aversion and severe weight loss followed, according to The Epoch Times.

Her daughter Alicia says: “𝘔𝘺 𝘮𝘰𝘮 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘥𝘺∗𝘯𝘨. 𝘚𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘤𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘴.” Donna attempted suicide and was held involuntarily on a British Columbia psychiatric unit. Then the hold ended.

On Oct. 29, 2021, 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐟𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬 𝐚𝐟𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐫𝐞𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐞, 𝐃𝐨𝐧𝐧𝐚 𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐞𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐝 𝐦𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐚𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐢𝐧 𝐝𝐲∗𝐧𝐠. Two independent assessors had approved her on the basis of weight loss and frailty, finding her death “𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘴𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘺 𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘦𝘦𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦.”

The family was denied access to the underlying assessment records. A police investigation closed without criminal findings. Former MP Ed Fast raised the case in Parliament, and 𝐀𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐚 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐰𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐧 𝐚 𝐛𝐨𝐨𝐤 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐦𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫’𝐬 𝐝𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐡.

This is the system Canada built: a woman in a documented mental health crisis walked out of a psych unit and into a death approved on the strength of her own weight loss. Her family is still asking to see the paperwork that sent her there. Her daughter wants answers, and so should every Canadian.

𝐂𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐝𝐚 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐚 𝐰𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐢𝐧 𝐜𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐢𝐬 𝐢𝐧 𝐢𝐭𝐬 𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐬, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐢𝐭 𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐝 𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐞 𝐟𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬 𝐚𝐟𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐥𝐞𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐠𝐨. 𝐇𝐞𝐫 𝐟𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐲 𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐜𝐚𝐧’𝐭 𝐬𝐞𝐞 𝐰𝐡𝐲.

- M.A. Rothman

 

[dyingsun]

Slippery slope.......I personally can recount a few times were I honestly whished to be euthanzied, yet here I am still and happy I didn't follow through. The Burden on the "assessors" must be heavy as well.

 

[Tyger]

Assisted suicide used to be something that was seen as applied to someone who was already terminally ill and facing extreme suffering before a certain end. Now - apparently, in Canada, and elsewhere - it can be applied to anyone who is experiencing loneliness, or financial trouble.

There are more MAID deaths per year in Canada than there are gun homicides in the US in a year, which has 10X the population.
What is happening in Canada?

I am told there are television ads for MAID that present death as 'going home'. It's like being in a horrific 'Soylent Green' [film reference].
I find this pure evil. Some years ago I saw a documentary about it in which a woman doctor had already 'put down' between 500-600 patients - and even back then they mentioned how they were doing it and how badly it was going.

In all the esoteric study I have done 'Suicidal Panic' [Existential Despair] is viewed as the level just before 'breakthrough' into 'Samadhi'. All this is possible because of a loss of spiritual grounding, a failure to recognize that we are on a spiritual journey - a mission from God - to here.


[Video Run Time 8:40]

 

[Tyger]

The reports keep coming. Appalling. Will no Canadian here on the chat site comment?

Canada Greenlit a Grandmother’s Death Because She Couldn’t Cook Dinner
"Canada’s assisted-dying machine approved a woman in her 70s for euthanasia because she could no longer cook Sunday dinner. That is not a caricature. It is the case two University of Toronto psychiatrists put in the New York Times, and the Daily Mail reported this week.

"She was the family matriarch. Weekly meals were how she measured her worth. When illness took that from her, she told doctors she had lost her value to the people she loved. Assessors signed off. Under Canadian law, that was enough.

"Counseling, not a lethal injection, changed the outcome. She came to see that her family valued her for who she was, not for the food she put on the table. She pulled back, at least for now. That Christmas she sat at the head of the table while others cooked and served. The system that had already cleared her to die gets no credit for the save. The law never required anyone to have that conversation.

"Gary Rodin and Madeline Li are not abolitionists. They work with terminal cancer patients and accept medical assistance in dying as a last resort. Their warning is narrower and worse: Ottawa built one of the most permissive regimes on earth and then stopped asking whether death was the right answer. Since Parliament dropped the 'reasonably foreseeable death' rule in 2021, almost any subjectively intolerable suffering with a medical hook can qualify, including symptoms doctors cannot explain. Loneliness and poverty already show up in the files. Track 2 patients wait 90 days. Nothing in the statute forces a clinician to push treatment, explore meaning, or protect people whose judgment is bent by isolation or disadvantage.

"MAiD now accounts for more than 5 percent of Canadian deaths. Many providers, the psychiatrists write, have redefined themselves as conduits. Eligibility is the job. Whether the patient should die is someone else’s problem, or no one’s. Suffering is '100 percent' whatever the patient says it is.

"A country that clears a grandmother for death because she cannot baste a roast has stopped practicing medicine and started processing exits. The woman lived because someone still bothered to talk to her. The law does not require the next doctor to do the same."

 

[Squirrel]

One aspect of MAID has me worried ... A LOT, since I'm an octogenarian and more "eligible" for MAID with each passing year.

According to the information I've gleaned over the years, the MAID protocol, the goes something like this (I have no medical training and found the following info via the Internet):

1. The patient is put under by an anesthetic drug PROPOFOL.

2. Death is brought on by a paralysis drug ROCURONIUM stopping the heart and breathing..

(Apologies if I'm not accurate on this, but my point in this post doesn't really depend on which drugs are used.)

Google says there have been no cases of MAID patients waking up after attempted euthanasia, but we all know (e.g. Christa Pike) that lethal injection sometimes fails.

As someone who nearly always needs double or triple the dental freezing injection, what all this tells me is there is significant variation on how each person's body reacts to anesthetic.

Here's a 2021 article titled:

Doctors offer duelling views of what it's like to receive an assisted death

So there's at least some concern about just how "under" a MAID patient is when the death blow, the paralysis drug, is injected.

According to Dr. Joel Zivot, in the above article, we need to be concerned that being hit with a paralysis drug, which will stop breathing, may cause an only partially under patient to undergo what drowning victims experience until they fully lose consciousness.

This is an active controversy, even though media doesn't treat it as such, and is why I will not volunteer for MAID myself.

As to what might be at least one step toward reducing this danger, I would urge medical authorities to require A CONTINUOUSLY MONITORED ELECTRO-ENCEPHALOGRAM MACHINE BE CONNECTED TO EVERY MAID PATIENT UNTIL, WITH ALL DUE CAUTION, THE PATIENT IS PRONOUNCED DEAD. This should alert the clinician administering MAID that it's not time for the paralysis drug yet.

And even then, it would probably be good to keep the EEG machine running for a while after that, just in case.

This additional step should make it more certain that the patient is fully under and unaware, before hitting them with the paralysis drug.

It's hard to imagine, in my lay person's opinion, that ANY medical official would not automatically require continuous EEG monitoring during all MAID events, and for good measure, during organ harvesting (where the donor gets NO anesthetic but only paralysis drugs!) and lethal injection executions.

-- Squirrel

 

[Gudnooz]

One aspect of MAID has me worried ... A LOT, since I'm an octogenarian and more "eligible" for MAID with each passing year.

According to the information I've gleaned over the years, the MAID protocol, the goes something like this (I have no medical training and found the following info via the Internet):

1. The patient is put under by an anesthetic drug PROPOFOL.

2. Death is brought on by a paralysis drug ROCURONIUM stopping the heart and breathing..

(Apologies if I'm not accurate on this, but my point in this post doesn't really depend on which drugs are used.)

Google says there have been no cases of MAID patients waking up after attempted euthanasia, but we all know (e.g. Christa Pike) that lethal injection sometimes fails.

As someone who nearly always needs double or triple the dental freezing injection, what all this tells me is there is significant variation on how each person's body reacts to anesthetic.

Here's a 2021 article titled:

Doctors offer duelling views of what it's like to receive an assisted death

So there's at least some concern about just how "under" a MAID patient is when the death blow, the paralysis drug, is injected.

According to Dr. Joel Zivot, in the above article, we need to be concerned that being hit with a paralysis drug, which will stop breathing, may cause an only partially under patient to undergo what drowning victims experience until they fully lose consciousness.

This is an active controversy, even though media doesn't treat it as such, and is why I will not volunteer for MAID myself.

As to what might be at least one step toward reducing this danger, I would urge medical authorities to require A CONTINUOUSLY MONITORED ELECTRO-ENCEPHALOGRAM MACHINE BE CONNECTED TO EVERY MAID PATIENT UNTIL, WITH ALL DUE CAUTION, THE PATIENT IS PRONOUNCED DEAD. This should alert the clinician administering MAID that it's not time for the paralysis drug yet.

And even then, it would probably be good to keep the EEG machine running for a while after that, just in case.

This additional step should make it more certain that the patient is fully under and unaware, before hitting them with the paralysis drug.

It's hard to imagine, in my lay person's opinion, that ANY medical official would not automatically require continuous EEG monitoring during all MAID events, and for good measure, during organ harvesting (where the donor gets NO anesthetic but only paralysis drugs!) and lethal injection executions.

-- Squirrel

 

[Gudnooz]

Organ harvesting takes place the donor dies. After patient flat lines, a physician produces them deceased. The patient is maintained on a mechanical ventilator so as to keep the organs oxygenated. Then harvesting may begin.

 

[Gudnooz]

Organ harvesting takes place the donor dies. After patient flat lines, a physician produces them deceased. The patient is maintained on a mechanical ventilator so as to keep the organs oxygenated. Then harvesting may begin.

AI never spells the word I want. The donor must be deceased and pronounced before harvesting begin. Family members are often present for this.

 

[Squirrel]

Dr. Gordon - Are you sure that major organ donation can be done with the patient dead? I understood that the donor has to have a beating heart throughout the full organ donation procedure.

Are EEG machines connected to donors throughout the procedure?

One conversation surrounding organ donor status is, are they actually stone cold dead, or are the donors just "declared brain dead?"

Personally, without publicly viewable EEG traces for organ donors, I will not volunteer to donate my organs. I cancelled my status for this reason.

-- Squirrel

 

[Tyger]

Are you sure that major organ donation can be done with the patient dead? I understood that the donor has to have a beating heart throughout the full organ donation procedure.

I have understood the same - that a patient cannot be 'medically' dead for organ harvesting. There is a distinction between 'medical' and 'legal' death - and as you can imagine the definitions have begun to slip-and-slide to line up with the needs of the organ recipient.

The 'problem' lies in the fact that actual death is a supposition not a known. An entire body can be shut down and be declared to be 'dead' yet wake up 20 minutes later, consciousness intact. What is death? How do we define it? When does it occur? In the end I think the definition of death and the needs of an organ recipient to achieve a viable transplant are at odds.

Reexamining the Flawed Legal Basis of the “Dead Donor Rule” as a Foundation for Organ Donation Policy

https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/reexamining-flawed-legal-basis-dead-donor-rule-foundation-organ-donation-policy/2020-12

 

[Tyger]

The moment of death has long been a problematic call. There is a reason that most cultures have what is equivalent to a 3-day vigil over the body after being declared dead. Alexander the Great is a famous example of a possible mis-call of death.

Alexander’s Body Didn’t Decompose for 6 Days — He May Have Been Alive
Ancient sources record that Alexander the Great's body did not decompose for six days after his presumed death in 323 BC. A 2019 medical study argues the real explanation isn't divine — it's that he may never have been dead at all.

"In the summer heat of Babylon, in 323 BC, one of history’s most powerful men lay motionless on a palace bed while the generals who had followed him across three continents filed past his body — and not one of them could say with certainty whether he was dead. That uncertainty, preserved in ancient sources for more than two thousand years, has never fully gone away.

"Ptolemy had known Alexander since boyhood. They had trained together, fought together, and together they had pushed the boundaries of the known world east until the soldiers refused to go further. So when Ptolemy stood in Nebuchadnezzar’s palace in June of 323 BC, watching his king lie utterly still after eleven days of fever, he was not watching a stranger. He was watching the most familiar face in his life — and finding it unreadable.

"By the accounts that Ptolemy would later draw on for his own chronicles, Alexander had lost the ability to speak, then to move, and finally seemed to slip beyond reach entirely. The historian Diodorus Siculus recorded that the generals and bodyguards filed past the motionless body in a slow procession, each man searching the king’s face for any flicker of recognition. None came. The physicians — trained in the finest Greek medical tradition of the era — checked for breath, felt for a pulse, and declared the king gone. What none of them could have known, and what would unsettle historians for two millennia, was that the body they were preparing to hand to the embalmers may not yet have been a corpse.

"Ancient sources agree on one arresting fact, so strange that writers at the time reached for the supernatural to explain it: Alexander’s body reportedly did not decompose for six days following his presumed death. No bloating. No discoloration. No odor — in the Babylonian summer heat that routinely and rapidly accelerated decay. For the court and the chroniclers, this was confirmation of divinity. Ancient writers seized on it to declare Alexander a god, arguing that the gods themselves had preserved his flesh as a mark of immortal status.

"Modern readers, however, will recognize something the ancient world lacked the framework to name: a body that fails to decompose under those conditions is not a body touched by the divine. Living tissue resists the bacterial processes that drive putrefaction in ways that dead tissue cannot. When Alexander the Great’s body didn’t decompose for days after his death, writers declared him a god — in reality, he may have been alive the whole time.

The ancient accounts of how Alexander the Great really died are frustratingly vague and sometimes contradictory. They describe a banquet hosted by his admiral Nearchus, a fever that arrived swiftly and climbed steadily, and a progressive loss first of voice, then of all voluntary movement, over the course of nearly two weeks. But no wound, no obvious poison, no single clean cause satisfied investigators then or now.

The symptom progression reads less like typhoid or malaria — both of which typically produce visible physical deterioration, rashes, and gastrointestinal distress well before death — and more like a neurological shutdown moving in one deliberate direction: high fever, ascending paralysis, loss of speech, apparent death. Every proposed cause from assassination by poison to West Nile virus has attracted serious scholarly attention, but that particular sequence of symptoms nagged at one twenty-first century researcher who recognized it from a very different clinical context.

[...]

"The six-day decomposition anomaly, the ascending paralysis, the lost voice, the political urgency of the succession — each thread is consistent with the Guillain-Barré hypothesis, but none constitutes proof, and serious historians describe the theory as compelling rather than confirmed. The ancient sources preserved the six-day detail without ever fully explaining it, which suggests that even those who were present sensed they had witnessed something that did not quite add up — something that sat uncomfortably between miracle and mistake.

"Ptolemy outlived Alexander by roughly four decades, dying peacefully as king of Egypt around 283 BC. He built a dynasty, a library, a legend. He wrote his own history of Alexander’s campaigns — now lost — which later historians mined for details. Whatever he privately believed had happened in that stifling Babylonian room — whatever conclusions a sharp, observant man might have drawn from six days of impossible stillness — he left no surviving line that tells us."

Alexander's Body Didn't Decompose for 6 Days — He May Have Been Alive

Doctors believe Alexander the Great may have been buried alive — his body showed no decomposition for 6 days, a key sign of a rare paralytic condition.

historycollection.com