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. That is not freedom. It is 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, that is not choice. That is 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 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, not the moral logic.

- We call it inclusion. We call it equality. But if our compassion ends where care becomes inconvenient, then 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. It is not freedom that leads them there, but 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 giving people choice. But we are giving them choice inside a system that has already failed them. That is not empowerment. It is 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 without hope is not freedom. It is surrender.

MAID reveals what we have lost. Not our belief in life after death, but our belief in 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. Because what we are offering is not care. It is death.