All Episodes
Previous Next
Oct. 13, 2022 - The Ben Shapiro Show
35:01
The West Literally Goes Suicidal | Ep. 1590
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Canada's assisted suicide policy is one of the most horrifying dystopian programs in modern history.
A Pfizer executive makes a truly shocking admission, and Democrats double down on their claims that in the midterms it's democracy at stake.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show.
The Ben Shapiro Show is sponsored by ExpressVPN.
I talk about them every single show.
Why haven't you gotten a VPN yet?
Get ExpressVPN right now at ExpressVPN.com.
Slash Ben will get to all the news in just one moment.
First, the consumer price index increased yet again.
The stock market is in turmoil.
This is not a solid economy, and we can expect slowing growth and or actual recession in the next couple of years, which means you might want to bet against the market at least a little bit by buying some precious metals the way that I have.
Text BENTON to 989898.
Birchgold will send you a free information kit on protecting your savings with gold in a tax-sheltered account.
The experts over at Birchgold have almost 20 years of experience in converting IRAs and 401ks into precious metals IRAs.
With an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau, countless five-star reviews, thousands of satisfied customers.
Why haven't you checked them out yet?
Gold has always been your best hedge against inflation.
A diversified savings can protect you from downturns in the market.
If you have a 401k or an IRA that's underperforming, text Ben to 989898.
Convert that into an IRA in precious metals right now.
Birchgold Group has an A-plus rating with the Better Business Bureau.
Countless five-star reviews.
Thousands of satisfied customers.
Text Ben again to 989898.
Birchgold will send you that free information kit on diversifying into gold tax-free.
It is historically the way that you hedge against inflation.
It is the reason I own at least a little bit of precious metals, and you should do the same.
Get your free information kit by texting Ben to 989898 right now.
Also, I have some very bad news.
You are going to die.
Also, I have some very bad news.
You are going to die.
I know. I know it's it.
It's not something you want to think about when you're just enjoying your day driving around in the sunshine.
But it is a thing that's going to happen and this is why you should make sure that your family is taken care of in case, God forbid, something should happen to you.
I mean, you're just walking down the street and an Acme anvil drops on your head because of one of Wile E. Coyote's stunts or something.
You need to make sure that your family is taken care of.
Life insurance through your workplace might not offer enough protection for your family's needs.
And it's not going to follow you if you leave your job.
PolicyGenius gives you a smarter way to find and buy the right coverage for you and your family.
PolicyGenius was built to modernize the life insurance industry.
Their technology makes it easy to compare life insurance quotes from top companies in just a few clicks.
Find your lowest price.
With PolicyGenius, you can find life insurance policies that start at just 17 bucks per month for 500 grand in coverage.
And PolicyGenius has licensed agents who can help you find options that offer coverage in as little as a week and avoid those unnecessary medical exams.
Your loved ones deserve a financial safety net. It's just that simple. You deserve a smarter way to find the life insurance you need. Head on over to policygenius.com slash Shapiro. Click the link in the description. Get your free life insurance quotes.
See how much you could save. That's policygenius.com slash Shapiro. There's a story that has emerged in Canada over the course of the last several months, really over the course of the last year since 2021 in Canada. And it really speaks to the complete destruction of the Western ethic.
It speaks to how a belief system about life and natural law and right and wrong has completely collapsed in the face of radical individualistic autonomy, the idea that you are free to dispose of your own body, your own life in any way that you see fit, or at least you should be, that the thing that makes you truly free is there being no boundaries, no restrictions on your activity whatsoever, not liberty or ordered liberty, but libertinism.
You should be able to do whatever it is you want up to and including disposing of your own life.
Now, it's always been controversial in the West as to whether there should be a law regarding suicide.
Should it be illegal for you to commit suicide?
Now, it seems like a silly question because obviously if you make it illegal, it's not like, well, you know, I'm killing myself and I'm really afraid of going to jail.
But the idea is that society does have a stake in you preserving your life.
Society should not be facilitating your death.
And this particularly comes up in the realm of assisted suicide and euthanasia.
In 2021, there's a Canadian law on assisted suicide that was passed and it contained a provision that would allow doctors to provide assisted suicide to the psychiatrically ill starting in 2022.
This is according to City Journal circa 2022, May 23rd, 2022.
In an article by Theodore Dalrymple, he says, Given that severe psychiatric disorder tends to cloud the judgment of those who suffer from it, one wonders who will benefit most from this law if passed.
Certainly, it might remove from society people who are often difficult, unproductive, and expensive for others.
They might be encouraged to shuffle off this moral coil as a service to their relatives, or even to their country.
The distinction between the voluntary and the compulsory might become blurred.
The law is a logical extension of the right to a dignified death procured by others, that is, a mode and time of death of the person's choosing with the aid of doctors and nurses.
Originally, the right was conceded to those already dying.
But why should the dying have all the best deaths?
Either a man has a right to dispose of himself, or he doesn't.
Whether he happens to be dying, as in a sense we all are anyway, is relevant.
If a man has the right to kill himself, it's only humane to give him the opportunity to do so in comfort, surrounded by his loved ones, with soft music playing, free of the messy outcomes so often associated with unassisted suicide.
This is sort of the ethos that you see in the old 1970s movie, Soylent Green.
There's a famous scene where Edgar G. Robinson is brought into a death room and essentially they play Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony and they show pictures of flowers in the background while they poison him to death.
And it's supposed to be a horror scene.
It is not supposed to be a beautiful death because we know what's going to happen with his body.
We know that the state wants him dead.
But again, what this comes down to, and this is a really deep question in sort of Western ethics really since the rise of the Enlightenment, is what are rights?
What is liberty?
Is liberty good for its own sake?
Are rights Unbounded?
Or are rights and liberties supposed to exist within the boundaries of certain social standards that are very important to maintain?
Now, there are people who insist that liberty has inherent value, right?
This is really a question of inherent versus instrumental value.
There are certain things in life that have inherent value, and there are certain things in life that have instrumental value.
So, for example, friendship, Aristotle would say, is something that has inherent value, right?
You don't need friends in order to accomplish X. Having the friend is the thing that is valuable.
Having a relationship with your wife.
Having a relationship with your kids.
These are things of inherent and final value.
And then there are things that are instrumentally valuable.
Like, for example, having money.
Having money is a wonderful thing.
But having a big number in the bank doesn't really do anything for you.
It's what you can do with the money that makes it valuable.
It is instrumentally valuable.
So, the question about liberty is whether liberty is itself inherently valuable or instrumentally valuable.
In other words, you having the ability to choose.
across a wide variety of options.
Is that the thing that is good?
Or is it good because you now have the ability to choose among a wide variety of good options?
Does liberty make bad options good because you have the possibility of choosing them?
And this is, as I say, a very broad enlightenment question.
John Stuart Mill in On Liberty would probably argue that liberty has inherent value, that the ability to choose is what makes us human, and that is the thing that has actual real value.
And then you have philosophers who are sort of more traditionally minded, and some who are actually not of the right, people like Joseph Raz, famous Israeli philosopher, who would suggest liberty does not have inherent value, liberty has instrumental value.
In other words, liberty is designed to allow you to choose between mutually morally okay options.
And liberty does not make a bad option good.
And what Joseph Raz argues in his book about liberty is that if I am, if I'm forced to kill the person next to me, there's a threat to my child.
And the idea is someone's going to shoot my child unless I shoot the guy next to me.
Is that more or less blameworthy?
Is that more or less moral than me just choosing to shoot the person next to me?
So the idea is that me under arrest shooting somebody is significantly less morally blameworthy than me just choosing to shoot someone.
In other words, my liberty did not make the decision better.
It did not.
The liberty itself was not inherently good.
The addition of liberty to a bad action did not make the action better.
It actually made it significantly worse because I had the liberty to choose otherwise.
What this suggests is that liberty is not actually of inherent value.
It's instrumentally good.
Liberty is good because you can choose between a bunch of various options, all of which are decent or good.
But the minute you can choose a really, really bad option, suddenly, liberty loses its value.
In fact, liberty becomes morally blameworthy.
You using liberty to do a bad thing makes you a worse person than you using liberty to do a good thing or you being under duress to do a bad thing.
Okay, this all seems very abstract, but when it comes to assisted suicide, it becomes a lot less abstract.
In other words, do you have the right to kill yourself?
Do you have the right to have somebody else kill you?
And so, in the liberty is of inherent value camp, the idea would be, sure, I mean, that is the core of who you are, the essence of what you are.
This would be maybe the Isaiah Berlin ideal of liberty.
Sure, why not?
Absolutely.
That is what makes you you, is your ability to choose whatever it is that you want to do.
And then, in the liberty is of instrumental value camp, you'd say, well, yes, but you choosing to die is a bad decision for you, for society, for everyone.
And it says something about a society that allows people to choose to die, especially with the assistance of others.
That society does not value human life.
That is a society that does not see the preservation of human life as a chief value.
And you're suddenly in a really ugly area where liberty is valued more highly than life.
Now normally, you know, we are guaranteed in the United States life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
And normally life and liberty aren't really seen as coming into conflict, because after all, who would choose to die, right?
Life and liberty, if you have liberty, you choose to live, right?
This is sort of the basic philosophical view of Thomas Hobbes, is that self-preservation is the main Motivation at the root of human behavior, but what happens when you believe that you should be able to dispose of your body should be able to do whatever you want at any time up to and including death and That comes into conflict with the value of life in a society.
Well, the answer is what we're about to see in Canada now the truth is That in Canada, some of the assisted suicide restrictions that they have, they like to pretend that it's about individual autonomy.
It's not totally about individual autonomy because there's still rules on assisted suicide in Canada.
In other words, if you're a person who wants to have an assisted suicide, you're perfectly healthy, you're adjudicated as perfectly healthy, and you just want to kill yourself.
You're just in a bad mood that day, or you've just had a marriage end, you've lost your job, you're just mildly depressed or seriously depressed, and you just want to kill yourself.
Will we allow you to commit suicide?
In Canada, presumably the answer would be no.
You actually have to have a doctor's note, which means that it's really not about autonomy because the society is still deciding when you can and cannot kill yourself, and there's still restrictions as to what age and under what conditions.
So even in Canada, they like to pretend that radical liberty Is the solution.
Liberty is of inherent value, not instrumental value.
And so you should be able to pick.
Even Canada doesn't really believe that.
In the same way that the left routinely argues love is love with regard to marriage.
But they don't actually believe all forms of love are created equal.
Because even the left believes that, for example, a boy shouldn't marry his brother.
Even the left believes that a father shouldn't marry his daughter.
Even they have limits on love is love.
So that slogan is wrong.
So the slogan of radical individual autonomy up to and including assisted suicide, that's not correct either.
It's just that Canada has decided certain lives are not worth living.
Canada has agreed that certain conditions make it okay within the realm of moral decisions to kill yourself.
And we're not talking about just restricted to a woman who has terminal cancer, and she's gonna die in two weeks in excruciating pain, or she's going to be euthanized by a doctor.
The reality, by the way, is that in most situations in which you have a terminal cancer patient in excruciating pain, they end up being opiated into death, generally speaking anyway.
I know this is very harsh language, but it happens to be the reality.
If you bring a relative into the hospital, and the relative is in severe excruciating pain, doctors will give that patient incredibly high doses of opiates.
And that, you know, in most moral systems, is basically allowed because it's the doctrine of dual effect.
You're not trying to kill the patient, you're trying to alleviate the pain.
And if that ends up in the process, shortening the life of the patient, that just is what it is.
Okay, but put that aside There's certain circumstances where obviously there's a very sympathetic case that can be made for the idea that people Want to want to die because they're gonna die in three days anyway And they're an excruciating pain and people die in very ugly ways death is a very very ugly thing particularly from medical causes As opposed to you know sort of suddenly I mean like gradual medical causes opposed to suddenly but what Canada is doing is something different they're now broadening the scope of how Suicide should apply.
And this is really dangerous stuff because this is Western society deciding that life under most circumstances is not worth living.
That there are just too many circumstances in which it's okay for people to take their own lives.
In fact, it's morally praiseworthy for society to encourage the taking of life.
And this results in what is a horrifying dystopian story straight out of Soylent Green by Rupa Subramanya over at Barry Weiss's Substack over at Common Sense.
On September 7th, Margaret Marcilla called Joshua Tepper, the doctor who planned to kill her son.
Marcilla is 46.
She lives outside Toronto with her husband and daughter, a nursing student.
She had known that her 23-year-old son, Keanu Vithayan, was depressed.
He was diabetic, he had lost vision in one eye, he didn't have a job or girlfriend or much of a future, and Marcilla asked her daughter to log on to Keanu's account.
Keanu had given his sister access so she could help him with his email.
He never shared anything with his mother, what he was thinking, where he was going, and Marcilla was scared.
That was when Marcel learned that Keanu had applied and in late July been approved for Medical Assistance in Dying, aka MADE, aka Assisted Suicide.
His death was scheduled for September 22nd.
In a September 7th email from Tepper, the doctor, to Keanu and Tecla Hendrickson, the executive director of Maid House, a Toronto facility where Keanu's death would take place, Tepper mapped out the schedule.
Hi, he emailed.
I'm confirming the following timing.
Please arrive at 8.30am.
I will ask the nurse at 8.45am and I will start the procedure at around 9am.
Procedure will be completed a few minutes after it starts.
The procedure entailed administering two drugs.
First, a coma-inducing agent.
Then, a neuromuscular blocker that would stop Keanu's breathing.
He would be dead in five to ten minutes.
Apparently, Keanu wanted to bring a dog with him.
In an email to him that same day, Hendrickson said, quote, Dogs are welcome in this space as long as there is someone there who will be responsible for them during the time it made house.
Marcelo was terrified.
She had tried to do everything for her son, but it had been rough for him.
She and his dad had gotten divorced when Keanu was still a kid.
On his 16th birthday, she'd given him a BMW when he was 17.
He'd been in a bad car accident.
He wasn't up to college.
He smoked a ton of weed, which by the way, again, this is sort of a side note in the piece, but to pretend that weed addiction has nothing to do with depression or suicidal ideation is really silly and contra the data.
He'd lived with his dad, then with his mom, and now with her sister, Keanu's aunt.
Whoever he went, whatever he did, he was unhappy.
Going blind in his left eye this past April was the tipping point.
The day after she discovered the email Marcella called Tepper.
She pretended to be a maid applicant.
She called herself Joanne and said, quote, she wanted to go through the whole process in general from A to Z before the Christmas holidays, if you know what I mean.
Tepper indicated he understood.
Tepper, sounding matter of fact, ran through the list of requirements.
You have to be over 18.
You have to have an Ontario health insurance plan.
You have to have suffering that cannot be remediated or treated in some way that's acceptable to you.
And that's the wiggle word, right?
Acceptable to you.
Because the truth is, most people under a doctor's care, most people go to a psychologist or a psychiatrist, have periods in which they believe that the care they are receiving is not acceptable to them.
This happens all the time.
Again, I have mentally ill relatives.
The notion that you are constantly and consistently feeling success with your psychiatrist or psychologist is just not true.
Very often people go through spates where they feel like things are working and they go through areas where they feel like things are not working.
So it's very easy to fulfill that standard.
Suffering that cannot be remediated or treated in some way that's acceptable to you.
In fact, one of the signs of depression, when you see people who are depressed, is they feel stuck.
They feel as though they're stuck in time.
That that moment is going to last forever.
This is not a transient feeling.
This is a permanent feeling.
So, depression and suicidal ideation being very linked.
Again, not very hard to basically walk into any of these clinics in Canada and just say, my suffering can't be remediated or treated in a way that's acceptable to me.
I'm stuck right here, right now in my depression.
Marcila, who recorded the conversation and shared the five and a half minute recording with Common Sense, told Tepper she was diabetic and blind, more or less her son's condition.
Tepper said he'd had a lot of patients similar to you.
Then the doctor said, quote, if you wanted, I could do a formal assessment with you.
Marcila asked if she should come in.
Tepper replied, we do them remotely, often by video of some type, WhatsApp, Zoom, FaceTime, something like that.
A few minutes later, Marcila hung up.
She had just over two weeks to stop her son from dying.
Says this columnist for Barry Weiss's Substack, When we think of assisted suicide or euthanasia, we imagine a limited number of elderly people with late-stage cancer or advanced ALS and severe pain.
The argument for helping them die is clear.
Death is imminent.
Why should they be forced to suffer?
In 2015, Canada's Supreme Court ruled that assisted suicide was constitutional.
Now again, one of the things that happened in the United States is that euthanasia is legal in certain places in the United States.
But the question as to whether there is a constitutional right to assisted suicide has never been adjudicated at the Supreme Court level, right?
That you should strike down all bans on assisted suicide.
In 2015, Canada's Supreme Court ruled assisted suicide was constitutional.
In June 2016, Parliament passed Bill C-14, otherwise known as the Medical Assistance in Dying Act, made was now the law of the land.
Anyone who could show their death was reasonably foreseeable.
By the way, everyone's death is reasonably foreseeable, is it not?
That's literally the predicate to every life insurance ad we do on this program.
Like, everyone is going to die.
Hate to break it to you, that's the reality.
In this respect, Canada was hardly alone.
The Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, Australia, and New Zealand, among others, allow assisted suicide.
So do 10 states in the United States.
In 2017, the first full year in which MAID, which is administered by provincial governments, was in operation, 2,838 people opted for assisted suicide, according to a government report.
By 2021, within four years, the figure had jumped to 10,064.
That accounted for more than 3% of all death in Canada the entire year.
These numbers are skyrocketing.
There have been a total of almost 32,000 assisted suicide deaths in Canada.
A large majority of those people were 65 to 80 when they died.
In 2017, only 34 made deaths were in the 18 to 45 year old category.
In 2018, that figure rose to at least 49.
In 2019, it was 103.
In 2020, 118.
And in 2021, 139.
Today, thousands of people who have lived for many years are applying successfully to kill themselves.
103, in 2020 118, and in 2021 139. Today thousands of people who have lived for many years are applying successfully to kill themselves. Indeed, in some Canadian provinces, nearly 5% of all deaths are assisted suicide. In 2021, the province of Quebec reported that 4.7% of deaths in the province were due to maid.
In British Columbia, the number was 4.8%.
Progressive Vancouver Island is unofficially known as the assisted death capital of the world, according to doctors.
Why the dramatic increase?
Well, over the past few years, doctors have taken an increasingly liberal view when it comes to defining reasonably foreseeable death.
Then last year, the government amended the original legislation stating that one could apply for this program even if one's death were not reasonably foreseeable.
The second track of applicants simply had to show they had a condition that was intolerable to them and could not be relieved under conditions they consider acceptable.
In 2023, the numbers are almost certain to rise.
Next March, the government is scheduled to expand the pool of eligible suicide seekers to include the mentally ill and mature minors.
Okay, this is totally insane.
And it comes again of a broader worldview, which suggests radical individual autonomy is, in and of itself, an inherent good.
It is not an inherent good.
And mentally ill people are not capable of making good decisions for themselves, which is generally why they have people around them who care for them, who try to help them.
And you're talking about mature minors, you're talking about 16, 17-year-old kids who, by the way, are going to be plagued by mental health issues because a lot of teen suicidal ideation and depression is linked to age, it is linked to that age where you have hormones racing through, you don't know what to do with them, you don't have social structures around you, you have a broken family structure.
You have mental issues that are just starting to crop up.
And the solution in Canada, apparently, is to make suicide available.
According to Canada's Department of Justice, parents are generally entitled to make treatment decisions on their children's behalf.
The Mature Minor Doctrine, however, allows children deemed sufficiently mature to make their own treatment decisions.
The federal government does not define mature.
It does not specify who determines whether one is mature.
It's not like you have to go to a court and a court says, oh, you're a mature minor.
Basically, it's self-assessed.
The doctrine also varies from one province to another.
Dr. Dawn Davies, a palliative care physician who supported MADE when it was first conceived, said she had tons of worries about where this might lead.
By the way, if you're talking about the worries about profitability, that's a very real worry.
If you're a doctor who makes their living doing assisted suicides, well, what are you going to do?
You're going to broaden the spectrum of available conditions that allow for assisted suicide.
Pretty clearly, it can make you a living killing kids.
Then a 17-year-old comes to you and says, listen, I'm a mature minor.
I'm really, really depressed.
I'd like to make an appointment.
If that's how you make your money, capitalism does not discriminate between good economic behavior, morally speaking, and bad economic behavior, morally speaking.
Capitalism will sell you pornography and it will sell you votive candles.
It doesn't matter.
And that happens to be the case if you are selling death, which is why assisted suicide is a very different thing even than euthanasia, the sort of right to commit suicide under medical care.
Assisted suicide is actually a step beyond that.
Dr. Non-Davies could imagine kids with personality disorders or other mental health issues saying they wanted to die.
Some of them will mean it, some of them won't.
We won't necessarily be able to discern who is who.
According to this article in Common Sense, Barry Weiss' Substack, Hugh Sher, an attorney advising Margaret Marcella, told me, quote, while other countries have explored extending assisted suicide of minors, those governments have insisted on substantial safeguards, including parental notification and consent.
Which, again, is totally crazy.
By the way, like, if you're a parent and you consent to your 17-year-old committing suicide, who's to say that you're a good- Like, no one should be able to consent to anyone else's death, and the reality is, you should not be able to consent in your own death, barring certain extraordinary circumstances and, realistically speaking, From a pure pro-life point of view, you should not be able to consent in your own death other than if you are talking about the kind of palliative care that we see routinely in hospitals that are designed to minimize pain, not to cause death.
We'll get to more on this in just one moment.
First, let's talk about how you make your business more efficient.
Here is one way.
We've got the holiday season coming up.
This means you're going to be sending out a lot of packages.
And this means you don't need to schlep that stuff over to the post office.
You don't need to wait in line.
The post office is great.
What you really need to do is be able to be efficient about all this, which is why we at DailyWire have been using stamps.com since 2017.
We do not waste our time.
Stamps.com is the 24-7 post office you can access from anywhere.
No lines, no traffic, no hassle.
Stamps.com is your one-stop shop for all your shipping and mailing needs.
For more than 20 years, Stamps.com has been indispensable for over 1 million businesses.
Get access to the USPS and UPS services you need to run your business right from your computer.
With inflation on the rise, every dollar counts.
Protect your margins with major discounts on USPS and UPS rates up to 86% off.
It's a stress-free solution for every small business.
Use stamps.com to print postage wherever you do business.
All you need is a computer and printer, and if you need a package pickup, you can easily schedule it through your stamps.com dashboard.
Rates are constantly changing.
With stamps.com's switch and save feature, you can easily compare carriers and rates, so you know you're getting the best deal every single time.
And if you're running an online store, Stamps.com works seamlessly with all the major shopping carts and marketplaces.
So, get ahead of the holiday cast this year.
Get started with Stamps.com.
Sign up with promo code SHAPIRO for that special offer.
It includes a four-week trial, free postage, digital scale, no long-term commitments or contracts.
Go to Stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the page, and enter code SHAPIRO for the special deal.
Also, we should talk about the fact that you need rest.
Okay, so I have my Helix Sleep Mattress.
It's great.
But here's the thing.
I don't just sleep at night because my kids wake me up all night.
When I actually need some time, I need that power nap.
Or I just want to lie down on the couch and read a book.
And this is why I love Allform.
Helix has left the bedroom.
They've entered the living room with Allform.
Helix has launched a new company.
It is called Allform.
They are already making the best sofas in the game.
Allform sofas are American-made, easy to assemble, scratch and stain resistant, stylish and comfortable.
All-Form sofas are modern yet timeless seating pieces that come in a wide variety of sizes, shapes, and configurations.
They're easily customizable.
They cost a fraction of what you would pay in traditional stores.
They're designed to be flexible and adaptable, and All-Form sofas grow with the way you live.
The All-Form sofa collection, they've got everything from armchairs and loveseats to an eight-seat sectional.
You can find the perfect piece for any space, and they're shipped directly to your door.
They can be assembled in just a few minutes.
No tools needed.
I'm not the most mechanically apt person.
It was easy for me to put together our All-Form sofa to find your perfect sofa.
Head on over to allform.com slash ben.
Allform is offering 20% off all orders for our listeners at allform.com slash ben today.
Step up your sofa game.
But, says this attorney, quote, Canada is poised to become the most permissive euthanasia regime in the world, including for minors and people with only psychiatric illness, already having removed the foreseeability of death or terminal illness as an essential condition to access euthanasia or assisted suicide.
Dr. Ellen Warner is an oncologist at the prominent Sunnybrook Research Institute in Toronto, a professor at University of Toronto's Medical School, quote, My objection to MAID from day one was that there is no way we would be able to avoid this slippery slope.
There aren't black and white cases.
I'm 100% against MAID.
I'm an old-fashioned Hippocratic Oath kind of doctor, right?
Preserve life.
But Dr. Derek Smith, psychiatrist at the University of British Columbia, views the rise in MAID death as progress.
Smith never took the Hippocratic Oath because he thought it was archaic.
Right, the idea, do no harm.
His doctor's like, well, what if I want to do harm?
MAID is about relieving suffering, respecting human dignity.
Again, respecting human dignity does not mean respecting your ability to kill yourself.
That is the opposite of human dignity.
We have redefined dignity in dying to mean that death should be less ugly for you and for the people around you.
But who is to say, honestly, on a moral level, who is to say that it is quote-unquote more dignified to go while being slowly poisoned by a doctor than it is to wait until the very last minute And die in an ugly way in order to demonstrate to friends and family and to everybody around you that life is so valuable that you should not shorten it.
Who said that dignity lies in ease?
You know, I'm not condemning people who choose to make what has to be, you know, not just a life-altering decision, but a life-ending decision because they're in horrible pain.
I'm not blaming people for feeling that way.
What I am saying is that society's standard for what constitutes death with dignity is really incorrect.
It is not correct.
The society's standard of what death with dignity would constitute should be the attempt to preserve life because life is just that valuable and a society that starts to demean life in favor of quote-unquote dignity gets into really ugly territory really quickly because then the question becomes what does a dignified life look like?
Right, if you get to declare that, as a society, death with dignity is being slowly poisoned by a doctor a week before you're going to die anyway, or, as Canada is saying, that death with dignity involves, you have a depressed teenager and the teenager decides to, death with dignity, decides to kill himself with the use of a doctor as opposed to taking sleeping pills, or instead of going to a psychiatrist for a prolonged period of time and slowly fading away, if you're a society and you decide to do that, that raises the question, what does dignified life look like?
Because what if, a huge number of people, I'm talking people who are mentally disabled.
I'm talking people who are mentally ill.
I'm talking people who are very sick.
Who's to decide whether those lives are worth living?
Now, we say that it's the person's own decision, but when you're talking about mentally ill people, it isn't their decision because mental illness robs you of your faculties.
It robs you of the ability to make good, informed decisions.
That is why we call people mentally ill, because they're incapable of making decisions that are rational for themselves.
But according to this doctor, quote, assisted suicide had been happening for ages.
Before May, patients who were going to die were assisted along the way with high doses of narcotics.
The rationale was to, quote, unquote, make people comfortable.
But again, when we say make people comfortable, we mean to alleviate pain, not to kill them.
Many of the people thinking about killing themselves in Canada are relieved the government has made it easier to die.
The nightmares have been a problem.
Mitchell Trembly, 40, told me, since I was six years old and my cousin molested me.
I'd found Trembly on Twitter.
He had a small following, but he was active in maid circles.
Trembly was made curious.
The made curious were lonely and scared.
They'd coalesced into a growing online community, mostly on Twitter and Facebook, and through the spread of death cafes.
There are more than 1,300 death cafes in Canada and 14,000 worldwide.
In the beginning, in 2012 or 2013, people mostly met in other people's homes to talk about the emotional and philosophical complexities of death.
They ate cake and had coffee or tea.
Since then, the number of virtual cafes had grown considerably.
There was also an expanding constellation of end-of-life doctors and death doulas.
Kerry Sawatzky, a death doula at Madehouse, where Keanu Vethan was scheduled to die, is described on the Madehouse website as believing that end-of-life planning leads to a meaningful and transformational experience.
That's one way of putting it when you're dead.
Trembly was from outside Toronto.
He'd been homeless on and off for more than two decades.
He'd spent years in and out of psychiatric facilities.
He'd prostituted himself, done a ton of drugs, shuttled between dingy apartments and halfway houses.
For now, he had a place to live.
He expected to be evicted by spring.
He planned to apply for MAID as soon as it opened up to the mentally ill in March 2023.
MAID is going to give me dignity, Trembly said.
I need to go now because I know it's going to get worse.
But is death going to give you dignity?
Is that true?
Is this what society is saying about life?
That certain lives are just not worth living?
It has not been lost on government officials Maid could save them a good bit of money.
In October 2020, the Office of Parliamentary Budget Office issued a report stating Maid would cut healthcare costs by over $66 million.
In 2017, Aaron Trachtenberg, research fellow and doctor at the University of Manitoba in Brands and Hymans, a health economist and nephrologist at the University of Calgary, published a paper predicting Maid could slash healthcare costs by as much as $100 million yearly.
Dr. Ramona Koelho, a family physician in a suburb of Toronto, said, I do worry MAID is an easy solution to bed shortages and a terrible lack of resources patients are facing.
Koelho's comments jived with a 2021 letter from three UN officials to the Canadian government about MAID having a, quote, potentially discriminatory impact on persons with disabilities and older people who are not at the end of their life or nearing death from natural causes.
The letter said there is a real risk that those who may be further marginalized by their racialized, indigenous gender identity or other status will be more vulnerable to being induced to access MAID.
On September 8th, the day after Margaret Marcilla called Joshua Tepper, she took to Facebook to post about her son.
Can you effing believe it?
The doctor has literally given him the gun to kill himself, Marcilla wrote.
Dr. Kristen Creek in Winnipeg messaged her.
As it turned out, Creek was a family physician and she provided maid.
She was surprised to hear a young man with diabetes had been approved for it.
She urged Marcilla to call Tepper back and be upfront about who she was.
Marcilla did just that.
Soon after, Marcila Chiano, Chiano's aunt, and Tepper spoke on the phone.
That call led nowhere, Marcila said.
By now, a right-wing Canadian Catholic news site had picked up on Marcila's post, which mentioned Tepper by name.
The doctor was getting pummeled by outraged readers.
On September 16th, Tepper texted Marcilla to say he'd postponed Keanu's death until September 18th.
Five days later, the doctor texted her again to say, actually, he wasn't going to do it.
He didn't want anything more to do with Keanu the Thaian.
Last week, after repeatedly trying to connect with Keanu, I managed to FaceTime with him.
He had a dark beard and mustache, special goggles to make it easier for him to see.
He said he'd applied for MAID a few years back, then dropped it, and then thought about trying again.
Then, in May, after learning his eyesight was only going to get worse, he decided he wanted to die.
I was so ready, he said.
I was actually very looking forward to ending my pain and suffering.
He hated not being able to see.
The unhappiness was exhausting.
He was arrested for assaulting his father and another time for indecent exposure, which he blamed on some hallucinogenic drugs he had been microdosing.
My thoughts are I would be closer to God, he said.
He was doing this, he declared, for himself and for his family.
Keanu told me he was baffled by everything that had happened the past three weeks.
His mother's social media campaign, Tepper's decision not to help him die.
I didn't know what to say.
It's how she knows how to love me.
Still, he was furious with her.
He didn't know what came next, whether he'd find another doctor.
The made people didn't want to touch his case.
On Facebook, he posted a screenshot of a series of texts between him and his mom.
Marcello wrote, Keanu, I love you.
No you don't, he wrote back.
You are adding to my pain and suffering and for that I curse you.
I love you and I want to talk to you, Marcello wrote.
After a moment he texted back, you know what I need.
These are people who are not capable of making decisions for themselves and the government approving all of this is a massive Act, suggesting what they believe of human life more generally, and then you wonder why Western cultures seem to be dying?
Maybe the answer is that they have decided that life is not actually of top priority, not just on an individual level, but for society at large.
That what liberty boils down to is not liberty to make good decisions within the boundaries of institutions, but eviscerating all institutions and all values in pursuit of atomistic individualism.
And if the government can facilitate that, that's really what the government is there to do.
The government is there just to facilitate your atomistic individual decision making, no matter how counterproductive or how bad.
And even if the government is going to engage in the evil of promoting death for people who can't take care of themselves, I guess that that's just the cost of liberty.
Really, really horrifying stuff up in Canada and everything that starts in Canada unfortunately ends in the United States and is promulgated worldwide as well.
The euthanasia statistics in places like the Netherlands are fascinating.
What they show is that euthanasia is obviously highly tied to societal values.
They vary widely.
According to BMJ, which is a medical journal, there's an unexplained sevenfold variation in euthanasia rates across the Netherlands.
And so what you would expect is that if a government had a widespread euthanasia policy or an assisted suicide policy, and all that were happening is that people who really wanted to die were being allowed to die, that that would be the deciding factor, what you would expect is a certain level of consistency across major cities.
And that's not what you see.
You see a very big difference between certain areas of Netherlands and other areas of the Netherlands.
In other words, societal values matter.
And pretending that the only value is consent or liberty, That is not the only value.
The goal of rights is to preserve the good.
The goal of liberty is to preserve the good.
Liberty has incredible value to human beings when we are given a bunch of options, all of which are morally acceptable.
And then we get to choose how to define our lives in accordance with these morally acceptable options.
But you blow away all the boundaries and you say that there's no such thing as morally acceptable option.
You fall into complete moral relativism and from there into societal collapse.
And that is what you are seeing right now.
Mario gets more in just one moment.
First, I'm doing a lot of traveling, as you may notice.
It's the Jewish holiday, so I'm over here in Jerusalem.
But I know that my home back in the United States is safe and sound.
Why?
Because I have Ring.
Now, you're thinking, wait, isn't Ring just that video doorbell company?
So I guess you just know who's at your front door?
No, it's more than that.
Ring also makes an alarm system.
Ring Alarm is an award-winning home security system with available professional monitoring when you subscribe, which I do.
Best of all, you can easily install it yourself.
And Ring didn't stop there.
They've changed the home security game with Ring Alarm Pro.
That's why I've decided to team up with Ring.
When it comes to protecting my own home, I rely on Ring Alarm Pro.
With a Ring Protect Pro subscription, which is an amazing deal by the way, I get professional monitoring for the ultimate peace of mind if anything happens.
Professional monitoring calls me.
They can request emergency services as well.
Ring Alarm Pro Combined, a security system with a fast Eero Wi-Fi 6 router for home security plus network security all in one device.
So, whether I'm across the country or across town or out of the country, I know everything at home is protected and connected and that it's going to stay that way.
To protect my home, I've gone pro with Ring Alarm Pro.
So can you.
Learn more at ring.com forward slash ben.
That is ring.com forward slash ben to get started.
Also, The corporate media agenda means the news is presented in a very biased way.
You know it.
I know it.
We all know it.
Thankfully, there is a way to get the most important news of the day without the narrative.
And that is by listening to one of the top news podcasts in America, Morning Wire.
Morning Wire will bring you all the news you need to know in 15 minutes or less every single day.
Stories that are being left out of the narrative by the mainstream media.
presented in a way that is easily digestible and interesting and entertaining.
You'll find Morning Wire and Election Wire on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, DailyWirePlus, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Alrighty, we've reached the end of today's show.
However, we still have to talk about the midterm elections and the attempt by Democrats to turn this into a referendum on our democracy itself, plus the latest in the Ukraine war.
If you're not a member, you need to join over at DailyWirePlus.com.
▲
Export Selection