Canadian woman offered euthanasia moments before life-saving mastectomy

Image credit: RDNE Stock project via Pexels / Diana Polekhina via Unsplash

An elderly woman in Canada has revealed how she was offered euthanasia on several occasions, including moments before she was due to undergo a mastectomy for her breast cancer.

 According the Right to Life UK, the 51-year-old woman from Nova Scotia, who has shared her story anonymously, revealed that whilst she was “shivering” in the hallway in her hospital gown waiting for her mastectomy, her doctor offered her euthanasia.

 “I was sitting in two surgical gowns, one frontways and one backwards, with a cap on my hair and booties on my feet. I was shivering and in a hard plastic chair and all alone in a hallway”, she said. “The [doctor] sat down and went through all the scary things with me. Then he asked ‘Did you know about medical assistance in dying?’”

“All I could say was, ‘I don’t want to talk about that’. I was scared and I was alone and I was cold and I didn’t know what was coming,” she continued. “Why was I being asked about assisted dying, when I was on my way into what I truly believe was life-saving surgery?”

“It floored me… [it was] the most vulnerable I’ve ever felt in my life”, she added 

Despite this refusal, she was offered euthanasia again 9 months later before the second mastectomy and then a third time whilst she was in the recovery room post-surgery. 

Describing the experience, she said that the repeated offers for assisted suicide made her feel like “a problem that needed to be [gotten] rid of instead of a patient in need of treatment”. 

“I don’t want to be asked if I want to die”, she added. 

She also revealed that she had to wait a year before seeing a specialist pain clinic, but “if I were to call the MAID hotline this morning, I’d be talking to a doctor tomorrow afternoon.” 

University professor, Trudo Lemmens, who originally supported Canada’s euthanasia law, explained that the law does not prohibit the offering of assisted suicide, with campaigners arguing that it needs to be offered to those who are “eligible”, and likened this law to “opening Pandora’s box”.

“They basically turned medical assistance in dying into euthanasia on-demand”, he said. 

Canada’s Medical Aid in Dying law that was passed on 2016 originally required that natural death of person be “reasonably foreseeable” in order for them to be eligibly for assisted suicide. This was however repealed in 2021, with 2022 then seeing an increase in assisted suicide of 31.2%.

This comes as Ireland and the UK are looking towards voting in assisted suicide legislations, with Irish TDs set to vote this week after a debate last Thursday on the Joint Oireachtas Committee that recommends legalising assisted suicide with “certain restrictions”. 

According to Gript, TDs raised a series of concerns in the Dail last week, including Deputy Éamon Ó Cuív of Fianna Fáil saying that he has “serious reservations about the road that we are going on.” And that there is no such thing as limiting access.

“And often what happens in a situation like this is that the proponents in the very beginning propose something very, very limited and it then gets widened and widened,” he said.

Fine Gael TD for Kildare North, Bernard Durkan, also strongly opposed the law saying: “I have a deep concern about the legalisation of termination of anybody’s life.” 

“Any hopes such people might have of new medicines, procedures or help coming on the scene and goes along a line of finality,” he added.

Independent TD Carol Nolan also voiced concern saying that legalising assisted suicide would lead to “untimely, unfair and cruel” premature deaths in cases where “care and compassion could have been offered.”

“We know what the outcome of permissive law in this [area] will achieve,” she said.

Sandra Parda of the Life Institute commented saying: “This shocking story is a classic case of what happens when we allow for assisted suicide or euthanasia. The idea of Euthanasia creates a society that no longer values life, to the point where, like Canada, offering death over treatment becomes acceptable. We must never allow this. When considering assisted suicide laws, our TDs must heed to cases like this, as a warning of what will happen once we open the door to assisted suicide.”