The Dark Water

I was grateful to be included in our Banff Mineral Springs Ethics Board Committee meeting on Medical Assistance in Dying, which began with a shared reading of a recent article from The Atlantic about Canada’s MAID program. What follows are not formal conclusions, just some of the thoughts that came out of that discussion. I wanted to put them to paper while they were still fresh, both to clarify what I was hearing in that room and to continue reflecting on what this moment says about us.

Since that meeting I have been thinking about MAID, and what it says about the kind of people we are becoming.

It is easy to treat it as a policy debate, a matter of choice, compassion, or medical ethics. But the more I listen, the more I sense something deeper. Something spiritual. Because the way we face suffering reveals what we believe about life itself.

There is an old story my professor used to tell. Two friends go hunting. One steps away into the trees. The other sees the bush move and raises his rifle. He does not know if it is his friend or a deer. The moral was simple: if you do not know, you do not shoot.

That story has stayed with me. Because as a society, we do not know. We do not know how to walk with people in pain. We do not know how to make the elderly feel wanted, or how to help the lonely and the depressed find meaning again. And yet we have given ourselves permission to kill. Many call that freedom, but it really seems like confusion dressed up as compassion.

All right, so here are some ideas. They may not all connect, but they are what has been on my mind since that meeting.

 - When someone chooses MAID because they cannot afford to live, or because they feel like a burden, MAID isn't an honest choice, it's despair wearing the mask of autonomy. And if we cannot help people to live, then we have no business offering death as if it were a legitimate form of care. To call that compassion is to, much too conveniently, let ourselves off the hook. It spares us from the harder work of building a world where people are not abandoned, where they are held, supported, and loved through their pain.

- I keep wondering what would have happened if we had offered MAID one hundred and fifty years ago. Back when women were told they were hysterical. Back when people who were gay or mentally ill were shamed and hidden away. What if, in those days, we had offered them death as a dignified escape from suffering. We would now call that barbaric. But what makes today different. We have changed the faces of the vulnerable. We have not changed the moral logic.

- Our highest cultural value is inclusivity. And we call it inclusion. We call it equality. I'm not are how or why. But if inclusion ends up being coded language for disposing of those who struggle in pain, then our compassion ends where care becomes inconvenient, and our inclusion is only indifference with better marketing.

- One of the main ideas that came up in our group was autonomy, and the belief that as long as someone chooses MAID freely, the act is justified. That sounds compassionate, but it hides something important. Real autonomy is not simply the power to choose. Real autonomy requires the conditions that make choice meaningful. It requires freedom from despair, freedom from poverty, freedom from fear of being a burden. Without those things, the language of autonomy becomes a moral illusion.

- When someone chooses death because the supports of life have failed, the choice itself has been shaped by abandonment. Is it freedom that lead them there? I think that really sounds more like isolation. True freedom cannot exist in a culture that does not know how to love the weak, the tired, the dependent, and the broken.

- So yes, we are technically giving people choice. But not an honest one. Because we are giving them choice inside a system that has already failed them. For some MAID sounds like empowerment. But the more you look at it, it comes off more like surrender dressed up as freedom.

- If more and more people are choosing death, maybe the problem is not in the people, it is in the pond. It is in the culture we have created, where loneliness is normal, and where self worth depends on productivity, independence, and control.

We say we are the most advanced generation, the freest, the most compassionate. But we are also the most medicated, the most anxious, the most hopeless. We no longer know how to say that life is good. So we say that choice is good instead. But choice must have hope in order to be free, or else it can only be surrender.

MAID reveals a true loss. Not that there is a life after death but a hope that there is life before death. 

A society that cannot care for the vulnerable has no moral authority to kill them.

We are all someone’s child. Every person who suffers carries a name, a story, a face. The question before us is not whether people should have the right to die. The question is whether we as a society are still capable of the kind of love that makes life worth living.

Until we can promise that, until we can promise belonging, care, and hope, we should not call what we are offering compassion or care. It's only hopeless death.