A handful of doctors and nurse practitioners are taking on skyrocketing medical assistance in dying requests in Newfoundland and Labrador.

But in the province’s eastern region, which includes the capital of St. John’s and is home to roughly three-fifths of the provincial population, the number of people seeking medically assisted death climbed from 16 in 2019 to 107 in 2022, McKim said in his briefing note. There were 37 requests in the first quarter of 2023.

Each application for MAID must be evaluated by at least two assessors, who can be doctors or nurse practitioners. Seven medical professionals did 75 per cent of the primary assessments for all requests in the region between 2016 and Aug. 31, 2021, McKim’s note said. Eight people did 76 per cent of the primary assessments in 2022.

  • @[email protected]English
    11•1 year ago

    This is not about mentally ill people, this is about people with stage 4 cancer, ALS, and other diseases which cannot be treated, who have a choice between dying in moderate pain now and dying in excruciating pain less than a year down the road, but are physically unable to go find a bridge and throw themselves off. I agree that any other uses of MAID need extremely careful scrutiny, but the person who accused you of throwing the baby out with the bathwater was right on the mark. Making terminally ill people suffer out of a misguided notion of morality benefits no one.

    By bringing up eugenics, you’re making the claim that specific groups of people are being pressured to request MAID. Where’s your evidence? Extraordinary assertions need extraordinary proof.

    • @[email protected]
      3•1 year ago

      Anyone that wants to end their life should be able to do so, regardless of their condition, as long as they are considered sound of mind by the current standards.

      There should be a rigorous process, but at the end of that process, if the person still want to end their life, then they should have the opportunity to do so with dignity and no pain.

      • @[email protected]English
        8•1 year ago

        Actually, no it hasn’t. Not one single study have I seen in the science or the mainstream news, just people foaming at the mouth who were really short on facts. Speculation and alarmism are not truth.

        Let’s look at some, y’know, actual statistics. Nearly everyone who received MAID in 2022 was at least 46, which means that they’re not relevant to any eugenics claim—eugenics means removing undesirable traits from the gene pool, and if you’ve already had kids, killing you doesn’t get rid of your genes. People who are more than 20 years past the age of majority have had plenty of time to reproduce if they want to do so.

        In order to justify a claim of eugenics, you’re therefore going to have to prove that the 1.3% of MAID recipients under the age of 46 were disproportionately slanted toward a specific group, and that this happened because their genes were considered undesirable, and that they weren’t terminally ill to begin with. There were 463 people in 2022 who received MAID even though it wasn’t projected that they would die soon. 16 of those were under the age of 46, and some may not have been fertile. I think you’re going to have a hard time proving a eugenecist agenda based on a sample of less than twenty people.

        Most of the MAID recipients under 46 appear to have been terminal cancer patients.

        From that, I would say that there is currently no eugenicist agenda that’s actually having any effect, and that the system to prevent improper MAID requests from going through is working, at least for the most part.