Canadian doctors committed thousands of homicides in 2018. According to an interim report published by the government, in the first ten months of last year, doctors lethally injected 2, 613 patients (with one assisted suicide) — and that doesn’t include the homicides committed by doctors in Quebec, Northwest Territories, Yukon, and Nunavut.
This means well over 3,000 people are killed by their doctors each year in Canada, which — if my math is correct — is more than 250 a month, more than 58 a week, and more than eight per day. Heck, that’s about one every three hours.
The report says that about 1.12 percent of all Canadian deaths were caused by euthanasia, a number that is increasing every year. No wonder. Efforts are increasing to normalize lethal injection as a way of death — and soon we are likely to see the killable caste expanded in Canada to include children, people whose deaths are not “foreseeable,” those with dementia who asked to be killed in an advance directive, and perhaps, the mentally ill (as happens regularly in the Netherlands and Belgium).
If 1.12 percent of our deaths in the U.S. were doctor-homicides, it would amount to nearly 30,000.
These statistics are stark, but they don’t tell the whole story. Because these radical policies have only been in effect for a relatively short time, we don’t yet know the moral costs of allowing doctors to kill sick patients or assist their suicides. I suspect decades from now, our posterity will shake their heads in disbelief that so many people once believed it was “progress” to pass laws which, by definition, deny the equal intrinsic dignity and sanctity of all human life.
Photo credit: Cris DiNoto via Unsplash.
Cross-posted at The Corner.