In 2019, an Alberta nurse reportedly told Christian author Heather Hancock that she was “selfish” for not ending her life through the Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) euthanasia program.
In a July 12 interview with the Daily Mail, Heather Hancock, a 56-year-old Christian author who suffers from cerebral palsy, said that she was shamed by a nurse in 2019 for refusing MAiD at Medicine Hat Regional Hospital in Alberta.
According to Hancock, during a lengthy hospital stay in 2019 for a bout of muscle spams, a nurse told her while helping her to the bathroom that Hancock “should do the right thing and consider MAiD,” and that her refusing MAiD was her “being selfish” and she is “not living” but “merely existing.”
Hancock recalled feeling “gobsmacked” and told the nurse that her life had value even if she spent most of it in a wheelchair.
“You have no right to push me to accept MAiD,” she says she told the nurse.
“They just view me as a drain on the medical system and that my healthcare dollars could be spent on an able-bodied person,” Hancock told the Daily Mail.
In addition to the alleged 2019 incidents, Hancock says she has been routinely encouraged to end her life via euthanasia.
Hancock, who has cerebral palsy, says she has been encouraged to take MAiD on three separate occasions since Canada launched its euthanasia program in 2016.
Hancock currently lives in an assisted-living center in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. Despite her disability, she remains an active writer and activist against Canada’s growing euthanasia program.
Unfortunately, Hancock’s experience is not unique as many Canadians have been reportedly offered MAiD.
In May, LifeSiteNews reported on a Canadian man who felt “completely traumatized” and violated that he was offered MAiD “multiple times” instead of getting the proper care he needed while in the hospital.
First introduced in 2016, MAiD was initially only available to those who were terminally ill. However, in 2021, the Trudeau government expanded the deadly practice to be available to those who were not a risk of death, but who suffered from chronic illness.
While MAiD does not yet apply to the mentally ill, this is not due to a lack of trying on behalf of the Trudeau government, who decided to delay the expansion of euthanasia to those suffering solely from such illnesses until 2027 following backlash from Canadians and prominent doctors.
The most recent reports show that MAiD is the sixth highest cause of death in Canada. However, it was not listed as such in Statistics Canada’s top 10 leading causes of death from 2019 to 2022. When asked why MAiD was left off the list, the agency explained that it records the illnesses that led Canadians to choose to end their lives via euthanasia, not the actual cause of death, as the primary cause of death.
According to Health Canada, in 2022, 13,241 Canadians died by MAiD lethal injections. This accounts for 4.1 percent of all deaths in the country for that year, a 31.2 percent increase from 2021.
While the numbers for 2023 have yet to be released, all indications point to a situation even more grim than 2022.