Euthanasia has become a way of life in Canada (he wrote ironically). More than 100,000 people have been killed by doctors and nurse practitioners. At least one hospice lost funding for refusing to kill patients. Doctors with religious and moral objections were told by Ontario’s highest court to either kill qualified patients wanting to die, procure a doctor who will (“effective referral”), or get out of medicine. Euthanasia has been described in the media as a splendid source of organs.
And there are horror stories aplenty. Here’s the latest. If the reporting is accurate, an elderly woman with stomach cancer was euthanized after being coaxed by medical personnel and while mentally incapable. From the Daily Mail story:
Two days before her Christian grandmother’s assisted dying procedure in Ontario, Canada, Brigitte Kranendonk sat her down to make sure she knew exactly what was going to happen.
‘I used very frank terms. I said: “Do you know that you’re going to die on Friday?”’
The 83-year-old was in visible disbelief and began crying for 45 minutes. ‘I’ve made a mistake,’ Brigitte Stegemann, known affectionately to her family as ‘GG’ or ‘Oma’, wailed.
‘She was bawling. Inconsolable,’ Kranendonk, a real estate agent who shares the same first name with her late grandmother, tells the Daily Mail.
In a cognitive test, designed to ascertain whether she was sound of mind enough to consent to Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD), Stegemann ‘got every question wrong’, believing her two living siblings to be dead, according to Kranendonk.
Yet 48 hours after she wept uncontrollably at the notion of MAiD, Stegemann is said to have died with her hands clasped in prayer, covered in her own blood due to a botched first attempt at connecting the IV, administered by a nurse allegedly not wearing gloves.
Well, why worry about infection when you are killing someone, right?
The granddaughter believes the medical personnel were ideologically motivated:
‘She was a vulnerable human being, and they saw an opportunity,’ Kranendonk says, her rage and sadness visible.
She suspects the MAiD practitioners were inappropriately ideologically motivated, and believes the chain of events leading up to the procedure should be investigated . . .
Back in Cannifton, Kranendonk anxiously questioned a nurse at the residential home about who had initiated the MAiD conversation. ‘The nurse became very abrasive, very defensive,’ Kranendonk recalls. ‘She was like, “Well, I’m just trying to advocate for her. I’m just trying to do what’s right for her.”‘
Here are the details:
But every time she tried to question whether MAiD was the right pathway for her grandmother, she feels she was made to feel crazy or burdensome by the medical professionals at the home.
‘I truly believe that one nurse really saw us as an obstacle,’ she says. ‘We were getting in the way of her doing MAiD on my grandmother. I think she really, truly believes that MAiD is the best for people, and shame on me for trying to stop that.’
Kranendonk made sure she was in the room for the second MAiD assessment, and it was there where she noticed the doctor speak in ‘really loose terms, never using the words death or dying’.
‘She explains MAiD to my grandmother by saying: “We’re going to give you medicine, you’re going to feel at peace. And I just want you to know that you won’t have a bowel movement.”’
‘She’s saying it in these strange terms, that aren’t literal,’ Kranendonk says, adding: ‘My Oma’s just kind of nodding. Her first language is not English; she is 83 years old and severely hearing-impaired.’
Kranendonk looked at the doctor, and said: ‘She doesn’t understand what you’re saying.’
That’s when the doctor allegedly turned to the grandmother, and offered: ‘We’re going to make sure you won’t have any more pain.’
I believe that it becomes an ideological cause for some who abandon Hippocratic medicine. One doctor in Canada has killed hundreds of patients. MDs raise the issue with eligible patients. Alex Schadenberg of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition says that “MAID teams” may visit patients in hospitals to tell them they can apply for death. I published a photo here (sent from a source) of a MAID advertisement in a hospital waiting room! Children were indoctrinated about the goodness of lethal jabs. Veterans with PTSD were offered euthanasia as a treatment. An elderly woman was euthanized because she couldn’t bear COVID isolation. But the family was allowed to be with her when she was killed. The list goes on and on. It makes one sick!
How’s this for “death with dignity?”
Recalling those nightmarish minutes, a traumatised Kranendonk speaks in the present tense, as if the procedure was still happening in slow motion.
‘There was a phenomenal amount of blood,’ she says, describing the way that the nurse failed to find the correct vein in the right arm to insert the IV, before switching to the left – but only after having ‘poked her about three or four times with the needle’.
‘It is all over my Oma’s arm, it is all over her nightie, soaking through her pillow, all over the sheets, there is so much blood.
Was this done by a nurse? Where was the doctor, anyway?
Euthanasia is bad medicine and even worse public policy. It exposes the most vulnerable among us to abandonment and death. It subverts hospice philosophy. It pretends to be kind. It claims to be compassionate. But in the end, euthanasia consciousness can justify the most callous cruelty.
Medical personnel who participate willingly in euthanasia/assisted suicide believe that they are doing what is best for suffering people. But they may become victims of the culture of death too. Intentional killing or prescribing poison surely weighs heavily on consciences.
I wonder how death doctors sleep.