For over 2,000 years, the Hippocratic Oath guiding doctors has mandated "First do no harm."  What happens, though, when doctors decide that it harms their patients to let them live?  Under Canada's Medical Assistance In Dying (MAID) program, which encourages and facilitates patient deaths, it turns out that, the song goes, "It's murder by numbers, one, two, three, it's as easy to learn as your ABCs."

The New Atlantis has a deep-dive article entitled "No Other Options: Newly revealed documents depict a Canadian euthanasia regime that efficiently ushers the vulnerable to a 'beautiful' death." The first sentence sets the tone when it comes to medical care in Canada:

"I find that the act of offering the option of an assisted death is one of the most therapeutic things we do," Stefanie Green tells me.

Ironically, Green is a former OB/GYN who once specialized in delivering babies.

Green and others like her believe they are "compassionate."  That might be true if their job was to deliver a painless death a few days or hours earlier to someone in extreme agony — the kind of suffering that outpaces modern pain relief.

However, in Canada, it's becoming increasingly common for people to be offered a lethal injection when they have a chronic complaint that could be managed or are depressed:

A number of recent news articles have reported on Canadians who, driven by poverty and a lack of access to adequate health care, housing, and social services, have turned to the country's euthanasia system. In multiple cases, veterans requesting help from Veterans Affairs Canada — at least one asked for PTSD treatment, another for a ramp for her wheelchair — were asked by case workers if they would like to apply for euthanasia.

Image: Ellen Wiebe talking about "the most rewarding" work of her career.  Video screen grab.

The New Atlantis article details how, despite ostensible safeguards to limit euthanasia to imminently terminal patients in tremendous pain, euthanasia is becoming an alternative to the care that the socialized Canadian medical system isn't supplying.

The safeguards promised by Trudeau and others to prevent vulnerable people from heading down the road to euthanasia turn out to be vague, pro forma, and easy to get around by doctor-shopping. And interviews with patients and their loved ones show that some of them, perhaps many, are making it to the end of that road.

To appreciate the ease of access to euthanasia in Canada, consider this: California and Canada have roughly the same population — just under 40 million — but California, which also legalized doctor-administered death, killed 486 people in 2021, while Canada killed 10,064.

Green, the obstetrician turned death doctor, has already killed more than 300 Canadians in the name of compassion and claims that the negative reports are clickbait.  However, Madeline Li, a former proponent, testified before a parliamentary committee that the safeguards are "impotent."

To understand just how impotent they are, consider Ellen Wiebe, M.D., who went all out to ensure that a healthy but mentally incapacitated man could die at her hands:

In another CAMAP [Canadian Association of MAID Assessors and Providers] seminar recording, we learn of a man who was rejected for MAID because, as assessors found, he did not have a serious illness or the "capacity to make informed decisions about his own personal health." One assessor concluded "it is very clear that he does not qualify." But Dying with Dignity Canada connected him with Ellen Wiebe (pronounced "weeb"), a prominent euthanasia provider and advocate in Vancouver. She assessed him virtually, found him eligible, and found a second assessor to agree. "And he flew all by himself to Vancouver," she said. "I picked him up at the airport, um, brought him to my clinic and provided for him," meaning she euthanized him.

Wiebe, incidentally, has executed...er, euthanized over 400 people, and considers it "the most rewarding work" she's ever done.

The CAMAP videos in the article aren't embeddable, so you must go to the article to watch them, something I highly recommend (along with reading the whole article).  As California's euthanasia law reveals, death panels (for that's what they are) are a leftist goal in America.

"Death by government" is the inevitable end point of socialized medicine, a government monopoly that leaves little room for innovation that will increase quality while decreasing costs — and the government will always look to cut costs.  The most expedient way to do so is to kill expensive patients.

Remember: unlike your family, the government does not love you.  To the government, you're a widget with a spreadsheet value.  Once you've stopped contributing to the system, your value craters.  (Just read the heartbreaking story of Les Landry.)

At that moment, a social worker will suggest strongly but firmly that you should opt for a painless, terminal shot.  She might even add that, by taking your now useless life, you are saving Mother Earth from the burden of sustaining another parasitical human.