Reading Alexander Raikin’s latest commentary in The Hub this morning, I felt a grim sense of déjà vu. “A quarter of all Ontario MAID providers may have violated the Criminal Code,” the title of his column says. “Does anyone care?” His opening paragraph reads like a plea:
Each Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) practitioner is meant to follow the criminal law. Yet Dirk Huyer, Ontario’s chief coroner, at first publicly, and then for years privately, warned that there is a ‘pattern of noncompliance’ by physicians and nurses with the criminal law on MAID. More than 428 flagged cases later, as I wrote in a recent investigative report for The New Atlantis, no one is listening.
If you haven’t yet read Raikin’s entire report for The New Atlantis, you should. It is one of the best pieces of investigative journalism on Canada’s euthanasia regime yet published, adding to Raikin’s already stellar track record of exposing what is actually going on in this country. But his frustration is palpable and understandable. “It is difficult to understand how these accusations of non-compliance with MAID legislation have remained so hidden for so long by all the parties responsible,” Raikin noted.
“No provincial report, no coroner statement, not even a leak from a concerned MAID provider or assessor,” Raikin concluded. “On the provincial subreddit for Ontario, my article was banned for spouting “false information with the intent to mislead.” It is as good an answer as any: compliance concerns with the Criminal Code are happening, but it seems no one cares.” As usual, he’s right. The Trudeau government in particular has been steadfastly oblivious to increasingly desperate warnings from disability rights groups, suicide prevention organizations, psychiatrists, and mental health experts.
There has been no shortage of warnings about Canada’s euthanasia regime, and many of the most prominent voices are not the religious pro-lifers the government finds so easy to contemptuously dismiss. And yet, these horror stories are denied and ignored. Why?
I am increasingly convinced that it is because the government—and the suicide lobby, Dying with Dignity—has long decided that if this is the price for an ever-expanding euthanasia regime, it is a price they are willing to pay. Yes, some poor people may apply for a lethal injection because they can’t get the assistance they need. Yes, some zealous providers might rubber-stamp the deaths of Canadians who are not actually eligible. Yes, yes, providers may engage in “noncompliant” deaths—before we legalized lethal injections, we once tended to call that “murder”—but that’s all part of it. Doctors kill now. Sometimes they make mistakes. Margin of error, and all that.
The reason I say that this gives me a sense of déjà vu is that we see the same approach in Canada’s abortion regime. Canada is exceptional in that we are the only Western democracy that permits abortion until birth. In 2012, the national statistics office, Stats Canada, revealed that 491 babies had been born alive and left to die after abortion between 2000 and 2009. Despite the obvious implications of infanticide, Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper remained blasé when questioned about it in Parliament: “All members of this House, whether they agree with it or not, understand that abortion is legal in Canada.” These babies, once born, were protected by law. But does anybody care? No. Not really.
There has been no response to a gut-wrenching new study by medical statisticians at the University of Montreal that found that one in four babies aborted at 23 weeks gestation in Quebec are born alive. One of the “complications” of later-term abortions is known as “live birth,” and “live birth rates” after abortion have increased in Quebec, most noticeably in abortions between 20 and 24 weeks.
The study out of Quebec found that over 11% of babies aborted in the second trimester between 1989 and 2020 were born alive after the abortion attempt, based on a study of 13,777 abortions between 15 and 29 weeks. The study found that 90% of these babies died within three hours, and LSN reported on August 6 that “only 24.5 percent of the babies born alive were admitted to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) while only 5.5% received palliative care.” Notably, the rate of babies born alive after abortions rose to over 20% between 2011 and 2021.
We know that in Canada, babies are born alive and left to die after abortions. Yet not a single major federal party leader mentions it. When studies detailing these infanticidal practices are published by major universities, the response is a collective shrug. For years, pro-lifers have been horrified to see that it is possible to watch all of the slippery slope prophecies get fulfilled—and for nobody to care. We see this with the brutality of abortion. Now, we see it with euthanasia, too. Canada’s medical system kills both vulnerable. They don’t always get it right. As it turns out, we’re fine with that.
