Societies can prevent suicide by substituting homicide. In Canada, doctors in the spring of ‘23 will be authorized to encourage patients who are depressed, mentally ill, or just difficult or expensive to treat to commit suicide. To be fair, two doctors must sign off on the final decision, and there will be a 90-day waiting period before the execution can be carried out. If doctors are squeamish about it, the law is going to permit nurse practitioners to do the deed (probably with a hefty bonus for each ‘patient’ so treated).

This new policy is materially different from the assisted suicide that is already legal in Canada. That sees doctors supplying the drugs for ending life and leaves it to the individuals to choose the time and place to self-administer.

Calling this policy immoral or amoral is underrating its evil by a light-year. That’s because the facts on the ground show that it’s an alternative to treating patients for pain or depression. The waiting list for mental health treatment in Canada in some programs can be as long as five years. Gee, I hope it is not that long for cancer treatment!

This extended wait time is quite enough to weaken vulnerably depressed or chronically anxious individuals, who would become more likely to choose to exit life than fight to regain their health. If the government can kill hope, it will be easier to get people to end their own suffering.

Image: Canadian hospital corridor by Cory Mogk. Unsplash license.

The implication is that Canada has decided to advocate for population control through government policy. The rich will not have to rush for the doors. They have always gotten to buy their seats on the lifeboats, while the poor have not even gotten a soggy life preserver.

Let me spell this out clearly: the government has already actively begun to cull its poor and sick population through its policies. Are these lawmakers really being elected by the people whom they are going to eliminate? That would be strange, indeed, making no conventional sense at all.

Who is culpable under such conditions of cloudy causation? Is it the doctor who followed the law? Is it the company that produced the life-ending drugs? Is it the policy maker, an individual who does not really exist because the law’s provisions were cobbled together by a committee? Is society responsible for dissocial policies? No one pulled a trigger here! There is no one to put in jail for the rest of their lives for the crime of murder. How deliciously manipulative!

In truth, the evil of misusing legal institutions in this way protects those who formulated the policy in their brains before committing the bill to writing. Frankly, under these circumstances, there’s a very good case for jailing the mothers of everyone who had a hand in making this death-dealing policy into a reality including every doctor, lawmaker, and drug company executive.  

Evil becomes a reality because of poor mothering. Failure to inculcate life-affirming values into children is sufficient to heap punishment on these women’s heads. Fill the jails with mothers and watch how society turns about in less than a generation.

These women should not be punished for the sins of their children, but for their own crimes of failing to raise empathetic children. Such a policy makes as much sense to me as promulgating laws that encourage the death of people who are already vulnerable and then watching them die as though the policy wonks and profiteers had nothing to do with the process of excess deaths.

We have got to get to the heart of the matter. Let’s have no mercy for mothers who have brought our society to its own destruction! Perhaps when we send someone to jail for any crime at all, we should always make it a policy to send their mothers with them. Perhaps they should even be housed in adjacent cells. After reading about the new Canadian death policy, as a remedy, jailing mothers seems perfectly logical to me. In this way, we can focus on root causes.