The Patriot Post® · Canada's Medically Assisted Suicide for 'Mature Minors'

Canada struck down the long-established ban on medically assisted suicide in 2015. It has been only seven short years, and the predictable slip into more and more dubious territory has already started. Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) only included allowing suicide to those terminally ill if they were expected to expire within a short amount of time. That quickly changed to include people too poor to afford to live. As of 2021, MAID now also includes people with mental illness and, more horrifically, “mature minors.”

By mature minors, it means children. To quote Dying with Dignity Canada, these children must be “at least 12 years of age and capable of making decisions with respect to their health.” These “mature minors” must be suffering from a medical condition that is severe and incurable in order for this latest measure to apply to them.

The Problem With Dignifying the Idea of “Mature Minors”

Calling children 12 and older “mature minors” is merely justifying the exploitation of this vulnerable and easily manipulated portion of the population. People under the age of 25 do not have fully developed prefrontal cortexes (the part of the brain capable of making rational decisions). Twelve- to 18-year-olds in particular are going though body-changing puberty; hormones make them more impulsive and less able to process the consequences of their actions. These children don’t even fully understand what death is; all they know is that MAID is a promised end to pain. Scientifically, even presenting the option of MAID is reprehensible and taking advantage of a child.

If 12 is considered “mature” enough to make medical decisions without parental permission, it opens up a major can of worms that could lead to all sorts of abuse against these children.

Sliding Down the Slippery Slope: Eugenics

All these truly evil ideas like abortion, gender theory, critical race theory, and medically assisted suicide stem from the same radical thought of achieving a perfect society here on earth without the moral tethers of religious belief.

Take Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, as a prime example. Her vision for creating these abortion clinics was to “help women” but also to exterminate babies of color. She was a professed eugenicist who, through the purging of black people, would bring about a more perfect human race. She wrote about this in her book The Negro Project, which advocated for “the gradual suppression, elimination and eventual extinction, of defective stocks [black Americans] — those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.”

This idea of weeding out the “defective stock” is not a new one. Plato writes about this very same idea in his philosophical opus The Republic.

Plato’s Republic is largely lauded as the most influential book in Western political philosophy. In Book V, his character Socrates (who is based on the actual philosopher and was a teacher of Plato in real life) describes in coldly rational terms how to bring about a perfect city and society. It is precisely that divorce from emotion into the realm of pure intellect that takes the Republic into some dark territory.

The best men must cohabit with the best women in as many cases as possible and the worst with the worst in the fewest, and that the offspring of the one must be reared and that of the other not, if the flock is to be as perfect as possible.

In other words, only the best people are allowed to procreate. Those in society who are seen as inferior are culled.

This academic treatment of life is an attempt to create the impossible: a perfect worldly city in which pristine elite men and women live. The Republic shows that there is no way to go about creating a utopia without atrocity: murdering people seen as lesser.

The Case for Life

The very concepts of medically assisted suicide and its far uglier cousin, eugenics, are symptoms of a society that no longer respects life. The very idea of MAID attacks incredibly vulnerable populations like children and the poor. The very suggestion of MAID as a viable option to solve their problems is criminal.

Life is a gift. We do not choose to be born, but we do get to choose how we use the gift of life. It is a Judeo-Christian tradition that calls out the utter folly of trying to create perfection according to imperfect human standards. A person who is disabled or ill can still use his or her life to bless others. It is the standards of the godless world that tell us that some deserve to live and others do not. It is God who says throughout the Bible that we are created in His image, that we are fearfully and wonderfully made, that we have purpose and identity in Him. God also clearly commands us not to murder. That includes self-murder.

This is not said to discount the immense struggles of those with suicidal thoughts. It truly is a fight and one that is made even more difficult without faith in God as a foundation. Suicide is not the solution that it promises to be.

Canada Is a Cautionary Tale

Canada is our more radical neighbor to the north. Where its policies go, our leftists try to follow. Even now, 10 U.S. states have physician-assisted suicide as an option. The radical Left has already made chess moves in the transgender debate, erasing parental consent and declaring that children as young as two are medically competent to choose their gender. It is only an intellectual hop, skip, and a jump to make the connection that children are medically competent enough to decide to end their life. It is a grave evil that must not be allowed to get a better foothold here in the States.