MAID To Die

 

On December 30, 2025, 26 year-old Kiano Vafaeian of Canada ended his life through the country's "Medical Aid In Dying" (MAID)law, enacted in 2016. Vafaeian was diagnosed with type one diabetes as a toddler. Years later, he was diagnosed with diabetic retinopathy, losing all of his vision in one eye and 70% of his vision in the other eye. Vafaeian's mother claimed that because of his conditions and a difficult childhood, her son struggled with his mental health for years. By the time he reached his early 20s, she knew he wasn’t doing okay. (See people.com/mom-outraged-son-approved-for-medical-aid-in-dying-mental-illness-11894589). A "doctor" (I use that term loosely in this context) allowed a mentally ill man who was not terminally ill to be murdered. His parents were outraged that their mentally ill son had his life taken, even as they saw nothing wrong with the law for the terminally ill. 

The MAID law allows patients with terminal illnesses to end their lives with lethal medication either taken themselves or administered by a physician or nurse. The current MAID law in Canada does not apply to people with mental illnesses. An expansion to the law, which would include those with mental illness, is currently set to go into effect in March 2027. 

Many years ago (1990 to be precise), I began a public awareness campaign to let people know that the so-called "right-to-die" being advocated by the likes of Jack Kervorkian would eventually become a "duty-to-die." Jack Kervorkian (1928-2011) was a physician who helped 130 people kill themselves. 

After four failed prosecutions, Michigan authorities sent Kevorkian to prison for 10 to 25 years in 1999 on second-degree murder charges after he videotaped himself giving Thomas Youk, who had the debilitating ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), a lethal cocktail of chemicals. The tape was aired on national television. Kevorkian served eight years in prison before being released in 2007.

Fast forward to 2020, and look what has happened since the time of "Dr. Death" (as the media dubbed Kervorkian). The highest court in Germany declared that committing suicide is a fundamental right — for everybody and for any reason — and that being assisted or assisting others in the act are ancillary rights associated with that "liberty." In other words, death on demand. Now, in 2025 the Supreme Court of Estonia followed the same course as Germany. As of last year, euthanasia is the fifth-leading cause of death in Canada, with more than 15,000 patients murdered ("MAIDed") annually.

According to one source, here's how low Canada (and society at large) has fallen:

The details of the assisted-death experience have become a preoccupation of Canadian life. Patients meticulously orchestrate their final moments, planning celebrations around them: weekend house parties before a Sunday-night euthanasia in the garden; a Catholic priest to deliver last rites; extended-family renditions of “Auld Lang Syne” at the bedside.

For $10.99, you can design your MAID experience with the help of the Be Ceremonial app; suggested rituals include a story altar, a forgiveness ceremony, and the collecting of tears from witnesses. On the Disrupting Death podcast, hosted by an educator and a social worker in Ontario, guests share ideas on subjects such as normalizing the MAID process for children facing the death of an adult in their life — a pajama party at a funeral home; painting a coffin in a schoolyard. 

(See theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/09/canada-euthanasia-demand-maid-policy/683562; Emphasis mine).

A Vatican II sect minister giving "last rites" before someone takes their life and children having pajama parties at funeral homes; am I the only one who is seriously disturbed by the very thought of such things?  In the Canadian Journal of Bioethics, philosopher Wayne Sumner wrote the following:

If we regard an increasing number of joint replacements or abortions as success, with supply having risen to meet demand, why should we think that an increasing number of MAiD provisions is a failure, or somehow a problem? If more awareness, more providers, and more support are good things for these other services, why are they a bad thing for MAiD? Why should we think differently about MAiD than we do about other medical procedures? What's so special about MAiD? 

(See erudit.org/en/journals/bioethics/2025-v8-n4-bioethics010388/1121331ar). So MAID is "successful" like abortion and hip replacements? Euthanasia is suicide for the person who consents to be killed, and an act of murder for the one's who carry it out, or enable the victim to carry it out. Abortion is the murder of an innocent unborn baby. These are analogized to a hip replacement? 

The differences should be apparent:

• Euthanasia and abortion are the taking of a human life and are therefore not medical treatments at all, unlike a hip transplant
• Legalizing abortion paved the way for euthanasia. Life is cheap. If you doubt that, a recent poll of Canadians found 28% were in favor of euthanizing the homeless (See/researchco.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Tables_MAiD_CAN_05May2023.pdf). 
• Soon, it will be a matter of saving money. It won't be long before the only thing covered by medical insurance will be the lethal injection and embalming fluid

Let me be clear: euthanasia was never about a "merciful death," a "way to alleviate suffering," or "helping those with terminal illness," anymore than abortion was about "a woman's right to do what she wants with her body." It's about the exaltation of materialism and hedonism in a worldview that excludes God and His One True Church. 

The Teaching of the Church

 N.B. The following text is from Dr. Albert Niedermeyer, M.D., Ph.D. in his book Compendium of Pastoral Medicine. Published in 1961, this text was used by the Church in the Archdiocese of New York to train priests in the seminary. It contains a Nihil Obstat, Imprimi Potest, and carries an Imprimatur from Cardinal Spellman. It's hard to believe it was written 65 years ago, as it predicted with uncanny accuracy the dilemma we are in today. How wise Holy Mother Church!---Introibo

Euthanasia is the extreme consequence of a series of postulates which represent an ideological unity and which are directed against the sacred character of life: birth prevention, abortion, sterilization, suppressive selection. The rational principle common to all of these postulates is an absolutely temporal intention; a materialism not always well disseminated; the idea of an unlimited autonomy of man, with the elimination of a supernatural moral law and of responsibility before God as Creator, Legislator, and Supreme Judge.

Passing over the apparently harmless postulates--such as the licit alleviation of pain in incurables---there is the attempt little by little to attain more ample consequences; the concession of stronger doses of narcotics to "shorten the suffering" of incurables and dying persons, going as far as exterminating the insane and idiots who are designated as "useless human remains," as having "useless existences," etc., and finally eliminating the old and defective. [N.B. The good doctor's use of the word "idiot" is not the pejorative term applied to people who are unintelligent or foolish, as we use it today. It was a medical term for retarded persons who had and IQ below a 25 on the Binet scale.---Introibo].

The initial postulate to "help the dying" is transformed finally into an open destruction of life. The apparent humanity of the motive reveals itself a crass materialism...

The sacred character of life is the basis of medical morality. The doctor is not the lord of life and death. A conscientious doctor will always refuse to assume the role of an executioner, even if there is the attempt to glorify him with rhetorical exaltation and if there is attributed to the "selectionist doctor" the greatest dignity, and if, in his hands, the greatest power is placed.

Finally, even in the mental life of the apparently mentally dead, there are many unsolved enigmas. In many cases surprising facts have become known by discovering before immanent death a richness of mental life--buried under the surface---that was hidden in completely demented persons. We also do not know what takes place in the dying. We merely perceive that the last moments are of decisive importance. These last moments can bring to many dying persons a great amount of grace and can still save an apparently lost soul. 

When a man believes himself authorized to shorten, even by a few seconds, the life of his fellow creature, he deprives him of these decisive moments of grace---and in so doing, possibly still thinks he is benefitting him. From the higher supernatural viewpoint there is no useless life...

There is no defense of the rights of man if, from the beginning to the end, there is no respect for the right to life, and, in consequence, respect for the Creator and Preserver of Life. The right to life is of iuris divini, and hence absolute, universally obliging and inalienable. (pgs. 202-204; Emphasis mine). 

Conclusion

In the days of Pope Pius XII, Canada's program would have been met with swift, vigorous, and unrelenting condemnation; excommunications upon all involved. What encyclicals, excommunications, and denunciations have come out of Prevost's Modernist Vatican? When Portugal enacted euthanasia in 2023, the AP news recorded this response from Bergoglio:

 “Today when we celebrate the memory of the apparitions of the Virgin Mary to the little shepherds of Fatima, I am very sad, because in the country where Our Lady appeared, a law to kill has been enacted,” the pope said Saturday morning at the Vatican.

That's what I call a strong condemnation and taking action! The devaluing of human life continues unabated. We must do all we can to stop it. Vote, petition, pray--everything possible. Euthanasia is legal in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In Europe, the practice is legal in Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Spain, according to Reuters. Medically assisted suicide is also legal in several other countries across the continent.

In the U.S., medical aid in dying (MAID) is authorized in 10 states, including New Jersey and California, as well as Washington D.C., according to [False] Compassion and [Forced]Choices, a nonprofit that “works to improve care and expand choice at the end of life" [read: "murder people"].

We must do all we can to protect ourselves and our loved ones (indeed all humans) from being subjected to a Morally Abominable Inflicted Death.

"I call heaven and earth to witness this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing. Choose therefore life, that both thou and thy seed may live: " (Deuteronomy 30:19).