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Need a puff of my stuff.

"I always thought legalizing euthanasia was a no-brainer. 

It always seemed to me like an individual choice people ought to have, akin to legalizing abortion or same-sex marriage. 

If someone is in such pain that they decide to end their life, I thought, who are we as a society to tell them they can’t? 

There’s also a harm reduction component. If someone is dead set on ending their lives, shouldn’t we give them a relatively safe, effective option under medical supervision? It would be cruel not to. 

This was the rationale behind the 2015 Supreme Court of Canada decision in Carter v. Canada, which determined prohibition of medical assistance in dying (MAiD) was unconstitutional. 

But the legalization of MAiD has brought to the fore some disturbing moral calculations, particularly with its expansion in 2019 to include individuals whose deaths aren’t “reasonably foreseeable,” which opened the floodgates for people with disabilities to apply to die rather than survive on meagre benefits. 

I’ve come to realize euthanasia in Canada has become the ultimate neoliberal policy — we’ll starve you of the funding you need to live a dignified life, demand you pay back pandemic aid you applied for in good faith, and if you don’t like it, well, why don’t you just kill yourself? 

The problem with my previous perspective was it held individual choices as sacrosanct. But people don’t make individual decisions in a vacuum. They’re the product of social circumstances, ones often out of their control.

Tim Stainton, director of the Canadian Institute for Inclusion and Citizenship at the University of British Columbia, told the Associated Press that Canada’s MAiD policy is “probably the biggest existential threat to disabled people since the Nazis’ program in Germany in the 1930s.”

This sounds hyperbolic, but there are endless examples of people with disabilities who were offered euthanasia rather than live a life of pain and exclusion. And with the impending expansion of MAiD to include people with mental illnesses, the problem is only going to get worse."

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