About a year ago, I covered the very sudden rise of euthanasia in Canada. As of 2022, the most recent year we have data available, euthanasia is now the fifth-leading cause of death in Canada, accounting for one out of every 25 fatalities. That’s ahead of common conditions like liver disease, influenza, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s.
The number of so-called “assisted deaths” rose by more than 30% year-over-year, although precise metrics are getting hard to track. That’s because, going forward, Canada says euthanasia deaths won’t be recorded as deaths caused by euthanasia. Instead, whatever reason the patient provides for seeking euthanasia will be recorded as the cause of death. So if you have a doctor kill you because you have arthritis, in Canada, that’s now classified as a death due to arthritis.
This coverup, like everything that has ever been attempted by the Canadian government, has failed miserably. Euthanasia is such an obviously booming industry that funeral homes have started offering so-called “turn-key” bundles, in which people can kill themselves and then have a burial, all for one low price. There’s no need to have a terminal illness, either. Some Canadians are killing themselves because they say it’s easier than getting disability benefits. The Canadian state-owned media loves this, of course. They claim that euthanasia can save “millions” in health care costs.
This isn’t just happening in Canada. All over the western world, euthanasia is now more common than it’s ever been. The number of British citizens who signed up for “Dignitas,” a Swiss nonprofit that performs euthanasia, increased by nearly 25% in 2023. In Switzerland, assisted deaths jumped by 11% last year. Meanwhile in Belgium, assisted suicide increased by more than 15%. Overall in Europe and Canada, euthanasia rates have increased by a quarter in just about 12 months.
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Over in South Australia, “medical assistance in dying” was legalized a year ago, and the numbers of death permits they’re issuing are increasing at a rate of around 20% per quarter. And those numbers are going to continue to rise, in part because the public broadcaster in Australia is running segments like this promoting euthanasia. Watch:
Make a difference in someone’s life today, by killing them. Give them a little something “extra.” That’s the pitch in Australia, and it’s working.
As you’d expect, as euthanasia becomes more and more common all over the world, we’re hearing more disturbing stories.
For example, there was the Canadian woman who was diagnosed with cancer, only to be told by her doctors that she should consider euthanasia. She refused and fled to the United States, where she paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to receive treatment. Those are the kind of stories that make you realize there are a lot of very sick people in countries like Canada who don’t have a lot of money lying around. And they’re probably killing themselves.
It’s hard to imagine this trend getting any more bleak but somehow, it does.
There’s an incredible new story in the Free Press about a 28-year-old woman in The Netherlands named Zoraya ter Beek. She plans to have a medical professional kill her sometime in May. That’s not because she has any kind of terminal illness. Instead, she’s been diagnosed with depression, autism, and borderline personality disorder. And on that basis, even though she lives in a nice house, with her boyfriend and her cats, she wants to die.
This woman appears to mean what she’s saying. She’s been highly visible in the Dutch press for many years, going as far back as 2017. And every time she’s appeared since then, she’s been promoting the idea of euthanasia or dying in some way.
For example, in 2017, a Dutch website profiled Zoraya, writing:
Zoraya is 22 and does not want to be resuscitated if something happens to her. And of course she gets comments about that. More and more people are deciding to wear a do-not-resuscitate badge.
That same year, another Dutch outlet wrote an article about how Zoraya was planning her funeral.
Additionally, Zoraya has provided the Free Press with a photograph of the coffin she plans to use, including a picture of herself in the coffin. She also posted extensively about her plans on social media.
Confronted with all of this, Zoraya’s psychiatrists didn’t suggest any alternative. Instead, they told her she was doomed:
[Zoraya] recalled her psychiatrist telling her that they had tried everything, that ‘there’s nothing more we can do for you. It’s never gonna get any better.’
It’s hard to sum up the agenda of the pharmaceutical companies and the medical industry any better than that one line. “There’s nothing more we can do for you. It’s never gonna get any better.” I’m sure that’s a paraphrase, but it’s horrifying. This is a woman who’s not even 30-years-old and who has no physical issues whatsoever. Every single problem she has is in her head — and very vaguely defined.
A term like “borderline personality disorder” is one we’re accustomed to hearing — and that many people have been diagnosed with — but very rarely does anyone stop to ask any fundamental questions about it. Questions like: How exactly can you diagnose a “personality” as “disordered.” What is a properly ordered personality? What personality is this woman supposed to have? Well, never mind. Whatever these disorders are, her doctors have prescribed suicide to cure them.
Because this is what happens now if the antidepressant drugs don’t work. Now they have another drug to permanently “fix” the problem. And conveniently, the same companies selling the antidepressants are also making the drugs that help kill people who realize the antidepressants don’t work too well. A company called Valeant Pharmaceuticals, now known as Bausch Health, made the most commonly used drug in physician-assisted suicides, called Seconal. As it happens, that same company also makes Wellbutrin, the 18th-most prescribed medicine in the United States, with millions of prescriptions. When it came out, it was billed as a second-line, heavy-hitting antidepressant that’s supposed to work where first-line SSRIs fail. But in the event the second-line antidepressant fails, now we know what the third line is. They’ll just kill you.
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That should disturb most people. But it doesn’t — at least, not everywhere. One of the most revealing aspects of this Free Press article has been the reaction to it. In The Netherlands, there was outrage — not at the medical industry, but at the Free Press for covering the story. Zoraya shut down her social media accounts, claiming the Free Press article misrepresented her, without explaining how. A lot of her supporters in The Netherlands were also furious with the piece, saying it was a distorted view of what they call “medical assistance in dying.”
But in America, the reaction was different. Instead of writing puff pieces about Zoraya’s decision, many mainstream outlets presented it accurately — as a horrifying crime against humanity, and a betrayal of the most basic principle of medicine.
Here’s how the author of The Free Press piece, Rupa Subramanya, put it on X:
I’ve been struck by the reactions so far, some of which I anticipated. North Americans generally tend to be horrified at the Dutch acceptance of the right to die even for someone who is not terminally ill or their acceptance that there should be a more humane to commit suicide even when euthanasia is legal. The Dutch I spoke to find North Americans very conservative and religious when it comes to life and death.
The Netherlands is a post-religious society, and the comments from there are 180 degrees from what I’m getting from people in North America. We’re living in two different epistemic worlds at the same point in time, in cultures that descend from fundamentally the same Western roots coming from the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Protestant Reformation. There is overwhelming support for euthanasia, assisted dying and a more humane way to commit suicide in The Netherlands than anywhere else in the Western world.
What this tells us is that the contagion that has now completely overtaken Europe, and in particular countries like The Netherlands, may be reversible in this country. It may not have completely taken hold here. And there are other signs of that, as well.
For example, late last year, the American Medical Association’s house of delegates considered a resolution that would have officially endorsed the practice of euthanasia. Given the extent of the barbaric medical practices the AMA endorses already, it seemed likely that this resolution would pass. But as the National Catholic Register reports:
The House of Delegates of the American Medical Association … rebuffed an effort to change the organization’s current stance in opposition to physician-assisted suicide, a development that drew praise from members of the Catholic Medical Association, which advocated against the change.
This is a victory, obviously. But the fact this resolution was even proposed, and seriously considered, tells us we’re not very far removed from The Netherlands. It suggests that, unless the underlying causes of this trend are resolved, it will overtake this country as well. And the underlying causes — the reason young people are killing themselves — is that hope and a sense of purpose are becoming rare in modern society. That’s true both here and in Europe.
Now that euthanasia offers a seemingly easy and “painless” way out, more and more people, at younger and younger ages, will take advantage of it. They’ll be put on antidepressants that don’t work, and then suicide drugs after that. Somehow, the drug companies will suggest that, even though they’ve sold SSRIs that accomplish nothing, you should still trust them when they say that their euthanasia drug is the solution.
This is a pitch that only works when people have been lied to for years, and become profoundly confused about this basic fact: Life is not easy. Nobody is happy all the time. But we are alive for a reason. If we feel like life is meaningless, it’s not because life has no meaning, it’s just that we struggle to see it. The solution is to help those people see the meaning in life.
Pharma companies like Bausch Health are not providing that solution. They aren’t trying to help people in their despair. They’re only trying to profit off of it.