The Ben Shapiro Show - The West Literally Goes Suicidal | Ep. 1590

00:00:00.000 Canada's assisted suicide policy is one of the most horrifying dystopian programs in modern history.

00:00:05.000 A Pfizer executive makes a truly shocking admission, and Democrats double down on their claims that in the midterms it's democracy at stake.

00:00:12.000 This is the Ben Shapiro Show.

00:00:12.000 I'm Ben Shapiro.

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00:01:36.000 Also, I have some very bad news.

00:01:37.000 Also, I have some very bad news. 1.00

00:01:37.000 You are going to die. 1.00

00:01:40.000 You are going to die. 1.00

00:01:42.000 I know. I know it's it. 0.98

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00:02:42.000 See how much you could save. That's policygenius.com slash Shapiro. There's a story that has emerged in Canada over the course of the last several months, really over the course of the last year since 2021 in Canada. And it really speaks to the complete destruction of the Western ethic.

00:02:58.000 It speaks to how a belief system about life and natural law and right and wrong has completely collapsed in the face of radical individualistic autonomy, the idea that you are free to dispose of your own body, your own life in any way that you see fit, or at least you should be, that the thing that makes you truly free is there being no boundaries, no restrictions on your activity whatsoever, not liberty or ordered liberty, but libertinism.

00:03:26.000 You should be able to do whatever it is you want up to and including disposing of your own life.

00:03:31.000 Now, it's always been controversial in the West as to whether there should be a law regarding suicide.

00:03:36.000 Should it be illegal for you to commit suicide?

00:03:37.000 Now, it seems like a silly question because obviously if you make it illegal, it's not like, well, you know, I'm killing myself and I'm really afraid of going to jail.

00:03:43.000 But the idea is that society does have a stake in you preserving your life.

00:03:47.000 Society should not be facilitating your death.

00:03:50.000 And this particularly comes up in the realm of assisted suicide and euthanasia.

00:03:55.000 In 2021, there's a Canadian law on assisted suicide that was passed and it contained a provision that would allow doctors to provide assisted suicide to the psychiatrically ill starting in 2022.

00:04:04.000 This is according to City Journal circa 2022, May 23rd, 2022.

00:04:10.000 In an article by Theodore Dalrymple, he says, Given that severe psychiatric disorder tends to cloud the judgment of those who suffer from it, one wonders who will benefit most from this law if passed.

00:04:17.000 Certainly, it might remove from society people who are often difficult, unproductive, and expensive for others.

00:04:21.000 They might be encouraged to shuffle off this moral coil as a service to their relatives, or even to their country.

00:04:26.000 The distinction between the voluntary and the compulsory might become blurred.

00:04:29.000 The law is a logical extension of the right to a dignified death procured by others, that is, a mode and time of death of the person's choosing with the aid of doctors and nurses.

00:04:36.000 Originally, the right was conceded to those already dying.

00:04:39.000 But why should the dying have all the best deaths?

00:04:40.000 Either a man has a right to dispose of himself, or he doesn't.

00:04:43.000 Whether he happens to be dying, as in a sense we all are anyway, is relevant.

00:04:46.000 If a man has the right to kill himself, it's only humane to give him the opportunity to do so in comfort, surrounded by his loved ones, with soft music playing, free of the messy outcomes so often associated with unassisted suicide.

00:04:55.000 This is sort of the ethos that you see in the old 1970s movie, Soylent Green.

00:05:00.000 There's a famous scene where Edgar G. Robinson is brought into a death room and essentially they play Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony and they show pictures of flowers in the background while they poison him to death.

00:05:11.000 And it's supposed to be a horror scene.

00:05:13.000 It is not supposed to be a beautiful death because we know what's going to happen with his body.

00:05:17.000 We know that the state wants him dead.

00:05:18.000 But again, what this comes down to, and this is a really deep question in sort of Western ethics really since the rise of the Enlightenment, is what are rights?

00:05:25.000 What is liberty?

00:05:26.000 Is liberty good for its own sake?

00:05:28.000 Are rights Unbounded?

00:05:31.000 Or are rights and liberties supposed to exist within the boundaries of certain social standards that are very important to maintain?

00:05:38.000 Now, there are people who insist that liberty has inherent value, right?

00:05:42.000 This is really a question of inherent versus instrumental value.

00:05:45.000 There are certain things in life that have inherent value, and there are certain things in life that have instrumental value.

00:05:49.000 So, for example, friendship, Aristotle would say, is something that has inherent value, right?

00:05:54.000 You don't need friends in order to accomplish X. Having the friend is the thing that is valuable.

00:05:58.000 Having a relationship with your wife.

00:06:00.000 Having a relationship with your kids.

00:06:01.000 These are things of inherent and final value.

00:06:03.000 And then there are things that are instrumentally valuable.

00:06:05.000 Like, for example, having money.

00:06:07.000 Having money is a wonderful thing.

00:06:08.000 But having a big number in the bank doesn't really do anything for you.

00:06:12.000 It's what you can do with the money that makes it valuable.

00:06:14.000 It is instrumentally valuable.

00:06:15.000 So, the question about liberty is whether liberty is itself inherently valuable or instrumentally valuable.

00:06:22.000 In other words, you having the ability to choose.

00:06:24.000 across a wide variety of options.

00:06:27.000 Is that the thing that is good?

00:06:30.000 Or is it good because you now have the ability to choose among a wide variety of good options?

00:06:35.000 Does liberty make bad options good because you have the possibility of choosing them?

00:06:39.000 And this is, as I say, a very broad enlightenment question.

00:06:42.000 John Stuart Mill in On Liberty would probably argue that liberty has inherent value, that the ability to choose is what makes us human, and that is the thing that has actual real value.

00:06:52.000 And then you have philosophers who are sort of more traditionally minded, and some who are actually not of the right, people like Joseph Raz, famous Israeli philosopher, who would suggest liberty does not have inherent value, liberty has instrumental value.

00:07:04.000 In other words, liberty is designed to allow you to choose between mutually morally okay options.

00:07:11.000 And liberty does not make a bad option good.

00:07:13.000 And what Joseph Raz argues in his book about liberty is that if I am, if I'm forced to kill the person next to me, there's a threat to my child.

00:07:21.000 And the idea is someone's going to shoot my child unless I shoot the guy next to me.

00:07:24.000 Is that more or less blameworthy? 0.96

00:07:25.000 Is that more or less moral than me just choosing to shoot the person next to me?

00:07:29.000 So the idea is that me under arrest shooting somebody is significantly less morally blameworthy than me just choosing to shoot someone.

00:07:35.000 In other words, my liberty did not make the decision better.

00:07:38.000 It did not.

00:07:39.000 The liberty itself was not inherently good.

00:07:42.000 The addition of liberty to a bad action did not make the action better.

00:07:45.000 It actually made it significantly worse because I had the liberty to choose otherwise.

00:07:49.000 What this suggests is that liberty is not actually of inherent value.

00:07:52.000 It's instrumentally good.

00:07:54.000 Liberty is good because you can choose between a bunch of various options, all of which are decent or good.

00:07:59.000 But the minute you can choose a really, really bad option, suddenly, liberty loses its value.

00:08:03.000 In fact, liberty becomes morally blameworthy.

00:08:06.000 You using liberty to do a bad thing makes you a worse person than you using liberty to do a good thing or you being under duress to do a bad thing.

00:08:13.000 Okay, this all seems very abstract, but when it comes to assisted suicide, it becomes a lot less abstract.

00:08:17.000 In other words, do you have the right to kill yourself?

00:08:20.000 Do you have the right to have somebody else kill you?

00:08:23.000 And so, in the liberty is of inherent value camp, the idea would be, sure, I mean, that is the core of who you are, the essence of what you are.

00:08:30.000 This would be maybe the Isaiah Berlin ideal of liberty.

00:08:33.000 Sure, why not?

00:08:34.000 That is what makes you you, is your ability to choose whatever it is that you want to do.

00:08:34.000 Absolutely.

00:08:38.000 And then, in the liberty is of instrumental value camp, you'd say, well, yes, but you choosing to die is a bad decision for you, for society, for everyone.

00:08:46.000 And it says something about a society that allows people to choose to die, especially with the assistance of others.

00:08:53.000 That society does not value human life.

00:08:55.000 That is a society that does not see the preservation of human life as a chief value.

00:08:59.000 And you're suddenly in a really ugly area where liberty is valued more highly than life.

00:09:05.000 Now normally, you know, we are guaranteed in the United States life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

00:09:09.000 And normally life and liberty aren't really seen as coming into conflict, because after all, who would choose to die, right?

00:09:14.000 Life and liberty, if you have liberty, you choose to live, right?

00:09:17.000 This is sort of the basic philosophical view of Thomas Hobbes, is that self-preservation is the main Motivation at the root of human behavior, but what happens when you believe that you should be able to dispose of your body should be able to do whatever you want at any time up to and including death and That comes into conflict with the value of life in a society.

00:09:35.000 Well, the answer is what we're about to see in Canada now the truth is That in Canada, some of the assisted suicide restrictions that they have, they like to pretend that it's about individual autonomy.

00:09:46.000 It's not totally about individual autonomy because there's still rules on assisted suicide in Canada.

00:09:51.000 In other words, if you're a person who wants to have an assisted suicide, you're perfectly healthy, you're adjudicated as perfectly healthy, and you just want to kill yourself.

00:09:58.000 You're just in a bad mood that day, or you've just had a marriage end, you've lost your job, you're just mildly depressed or seriously depressed, and you just want to kill yourself. 0.99

00:10:07.000 Will we allow you to commit suicide? 0.99

00:10:09.000 In Canada, presumably the answer would be no.

00:10:11.000 You actually have to have a doctor's note, which means that it's really not about autonomy because the society is still deciding when you can and cannot kill yourself, and there's still restrictions as to what age and under what conditions.

00:10:21.000 So even in Canada, they like to pretend that radical liberty Is the solution.

00:10:26.000 Liberty is of inherent value, not instrumental value.

00:10:28.000 And so you should be able to pick.

00:10:29.000 Even Canada doesn't really believe that.

00:10:31.000 In the same way that the left routinely argues love is love with regard to marriage.

00:10:34.000 But they don't actually believe all forms of love are created equal.

00:10:37.000 Because even the left believes that, for example, a boy shouldn't marry his brother.

00:10:40.000 Even the left believes that a father shouldn't marry his daughter.

00:10:43.000 Even they have limits on love is love.

00:10:45.000 So that slogan is wrong.

00:10:46.000 So the slogan of radical individual autonomy up to and including assisted suicide, that's not correct either.

00:10:52.000 It's just that Canada has decided certain lives are not worth living.

00:10:55.000 Canada has agreed that certain conditions make it okay within the realm of moral decisions to kill yourself.

00:11:02.000 And we're not talking about just restricted to a woman who has terminal cancer, and she's gonna die in two weeks in excruciating pain, or she's going to be euthanized by a doctor.

00:11:12.000 The reality, by the way, is that in most situations in which you have a terminal cancer patient in excruciating pain, they end up being opiated into death, generally speaking anyway.

00:11:22.000 I know this is very harsh language, but it happens to be the reality.

00:11:24.000 If you bring a relative into the hospital, and the relative is in severe excruciating pain, doctors will give that patient incredibly high doses of opiates.

00:11:34.000 And that, you know, in most moral systems, is basically allowed because it's the doctrine of dual effect.

00:11:41.000 You're not trying to kill the patient, you're trying to alleviate the pain.

00:11:42.000 And if that ends up in the process, shortening the life of the patient, that just is what it is.

00:11:48.000 Okay, but put that aside There's certain circumstances where obviously there's a very sympathetic case that can be made for the idea that people Want to want to die because they're gonna die in three days anyway And they're an excruciating pain and people die in very ugly ways death is a very very ugly thing particularly from medical causes As opposed to you know sort of suddenly I mean like gradual medical causes opposed to suddenly but what Canada is doing is something different they're now broadening the scope of how Suicide should apply.

00:12:14.000 And this is really dangerous stuff because this is Western society deciding that life under most circumstances is not worth living.

00:12:20.000 That there are just too many circumstances in which it's okay for people to take their own lives.

00:12:23.000 In fact, it's morally praiseworthy for society to encourage the taking of life.

00:12:27.000 And this results in what is a horrifying dystopian story straight out of Soylent Green by Rupa Subramanya over at Barry Weiss's Substack over at Common Sense.

00:12:40.000 On September 7th, Margaret Marcilla called Joshua Tepper, the doctor who planned to kill her son.

00:12:44.000 Marcilla is 46.

00:12:45.000 She lives outside Toronto with her husband and daughter, a nursing student.

00:12:48.000 She had known that her 23-year-old son, Keanu Vithayan, was depressed.

00:12:52.000 He was diabetic, he had lost vision in one eye, he didn't have a job or girlfriend or much of a future, and Marcilla asked her daughter to log on to Keanu's account.

00:12:58.000 Keanu had given his sister access so she could help him with his email.

00:13:01.000 He never shared anything with his mother, what he was thinking, where he was going, and Marcilla was scared.

00:13:05.000 That was when Marcel learned that Keanu had applied and in late July been approved for Medical Assistance in Dying, aka MADE, aka Assisted Suicide.

00:13:12.000 His death was scheduled for September 22nd.

00:13:14.000 In a September 7th email from Tepper, the doctor, to Keanu and Tecla Hendrickson, the executive director of Maid House, a Toronto facility where Keanu's death would take place, Tepper mapped out the schedule.

00:13:24.000 Hi, he emailed.

00:13:25.000 I'm confirming the following timing.

00:13:26.000 Please arrive at 8.30am.

00:13:28.000 I will ask the nurse at 8.45am and I will start the procedure at around 9am.

00:13:32.000 Procedure will be completed a few minutes after it starts.

00:13:35.000 The procedure entailed administering two drugs.

00:13:37.000 First, a coma-inducing agent.

00:13:39.000 Then, a neuromuscular blocker that would stop Keanu's breathing.

00:13:41.000 He would be dead in five to ten minutes.

00:13:43.000 Apparently, Keanu wanted to bring a dog with him.

00:13:45.000 In an email to him that same day, Hendrickson said, quote, Dogs are welcome in this space as long as there is someone there who will be responsible for them during the time it made house.

00:13:52.000 Marcelo was terrified.

00:13:54.000 She had tried to do everything for her son, but it had been rough for him.

00:13:57.000 She and his dad had gotten divorced when Keanu was still a kid.

00:13:59.000 On his 16th birthday, she'd given him a BMW when he was 17.

00:14:02.000 He'd been in a bad car accident.

00:14:04.000 He wasn't up to college.

00:14:05.000 He smoked a ton of weed, which by the way, again, this is sort of a side note in the piece, but to pretend that weed addiction has nothing to do with depression or suicidal ideation is really silly and contra the data.

00:14:15.000 He'd lived with his dad, then with his mom, and now with her sister, Keanu's aunt.

00:14:20.000 Whoever he went, whatever he did, he was unhappy.

00:14:21.000 Going blind in his left eye this past April was the tipping point.

00:14:25.000 The day after she discovered the email Marcella called Tepper.

00:14:27.000 She pretended to be a maid applicant. 0.98

00:14:29.000 She called herself Joanne and said, quote, she wanted to go through the whole process in general from A to Z before the Christmas holidays, if you know what I mean.

00:14:34.000 Tepper indicated he understood.

00:14:36.000 Tepper, sounding matter of fact, ran through the list of requirements.

00:14:39.000 You have to be over 18. 0.96

00:14:40.000 You have to have an Ontario health insurance plan.

00:14:42.000 You have to have suffering that cannot be remediated or treated in some way that's acceptable to you.

00:14:46.000 And that's the wiggle word, right?

00:14:47.000 Acceptable to you.

00:14:48.000 Because the truth is, most people under a doctor's care, most people go to a psychologist or a psychiatrist, have periods in which they believe that the care they are receiving is not acceptable to them.

00:14:57.000 This happens all the time.

00:14:58.000 Again, I have mentally ill relatives.

00:15:01.000 The notion that you are constantly and consistently feeling success with your psychiatrist or psychologist is just not true.

00:15:08.000 Very often people go through spates where they feel like things are working and they go through areas where they feel like things are not working.

00:15:13.000 So it's very easy to fulfill that standard.

00:15:15.000 Suffering that cannot be remediated or treated in some way that's acceptable to you.

00:15:19.000 In fact, one of the signs of depression, when you see people who are depressed, is they feel stuck.

00:15:23.000 They feel as though they're stuck in time.

00:15:24.000 That that moment is going to last forever.

00:15:26.000 This is not a transient feeling.

00:15:27.000 This is a permanent feeling.

00:15:29.000 So, depression and suicidal ideation being very linked.

00:15:32.000 Again, not very hard to basically walk into any of these clinics in Canada and just say, my suffering can't be remediated or treated in a way that's acceptable to me.

00:15:40.000 I'm stuck right here, right now in my depression.

00:15:42.000 Marcila, who recorded the conversation and shared the five and a half minute recording with Common Sense, told Tepper she was diabetic and blind, more or less her son's condition.

00:15:49.000 Tepper said he'd had a lot of patients similar to you.

00:15:51.000 Then the doctor said, quote, if you wanted, I could do a formal assessment with you.

00:15:55.000 Marcila asked if she should come in.

00:15:56.000 Tepper replied, we do them remotely, often by video of some type, WhatsApp, Zoom, FaceTime, something like that.

00:16:01.000 A few minutes later, Marcila hung up.

00:16:02.000 She had just over two weeks to stop her son from dying.

00:16:06.000 Says this columnist for Barry Weiss's Substack, When we think of assisted suicide or euthanasia, we imagine a limited number of elderly people with late-stage cancer or advanced ALS and severe pain.

00:16:16.000 The argument for helping them die is clear.

00:16:18.000 Why should they be forced to suffer? 0.65

00:16:18.000 Death is imminent. 0.65

00:16:19.000 In 2015, Canada's Supreme Court ruled that assisted suicide was constitutional.

00:16:24.000 Now again, one of the things that happened in the United States is that euthanasia is legal in certain places in the United States.

00:16:32.000 But the question as to whether there is a constitutional right to assisted suicide has never been adjudicated at the Supreme Court level, right?

00:16:39.000 That you should strike down all bans on assisted suicide.

00:16:42.000 In 2015, Canada's Supreme Court ruled assisted suicide was constitutional.

00:16:45.000 In June 2016, Parliament passed Bill C-14, otherwise known as the Medical Assistance in Dying Act, made was now the law of the land.

00:16:51.000 Anyone who could show their death was reasonably foreseeable.

00:16:54.000 By the way, everyone's death is reasonably foreseeable, is it not?

00:16:57.000 That's literally the predicate to every life insurance ad we do on this program.

00:17:00.000 Like, everyone is going to die.

00:17:03.000 Hate to break it to you, that's the reality.

00:17:04.000 In this respect, Canada was hardly alone.

00:17:06.000 The Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, Australia, and New Zealand, among others, allow assisted suicide.

00:17:10.000 So do 10 states in the United States.

00:17:12.000 In 2017, the first full year in which MAID, which is administered by provincial governments, was in operation, 2,838 people opted for assisted suicide, according to a government report.

00:17:21.000 By 2021, within four years, the figure had jumped to 10,064.

00:17:24.000 That accounted for more than 3% of all death in Canada the entire year.

00:17:31.000 These numbers are skyrocketing.

00:17:33.000 There have been a total of almost 32,000 assisted suicide deaths in Canada.

00:17:38.000 A large majority of those people were 65 to 80 when they died.

00:17:41.000 In 2017, only 34 made deaths were in the 18 to 45 year old category.

00:17:43.000 In 2018, that figure rose to at least 49.

00:17:44.000 In 2019, it was 103.

00:17:45.000 Today, thousands of people who have lived for many years are applying successfully to kill themselves.

00:17:45.000 In 2020, 118.

00:17:45.000 And in 2021, 139.

00:17:48.000 103, in 2020 118, and in 2021 139. Today thousands of people who have lived for many years are applying successfully to kill themselves. Indeed, in some Canadian provinces, nearly 5% of all deaths are assisted suicide. In 2021, the province of Quebec reported that 4.7% of deaths in the province were due to maid.

00:18:07.000 In British Columbia, the number was 4.8%.

00:18:08.000 Progressive Vancouver Island is unofficially known as the assisted death capital of the world, according to doctors.

00:18:14.000 Why the dramatic increase?

00:18:15.000 Well, over the past few years, doctors have taken an increasingly liberal view when it comes to defining reasonably foreseeable death.

00:18:21.000 Then last year, the government amended the original legislation stating that one could apply for this program even if one's death were not reasonably foreseeable.

00:18:29.000 The second track of applicants simply had to show they had a condition that was intolerable to them and could not be relieved under conditions they consider acceptable.

00:18:36.000 In 2023, the numbers are almost certain to rise.

00:18:38.000 Next March, the government is scheduled to expand the pool of eligible suicide seekers to include the mentally ill and mature minors.

00:18:47.000 Okay, this is totally insane.

00:18:49.000 And it comes again of a broader worldview, which suggests radical individual autonomy is, in and of itself, an inherent good.

00:18:56.000 It is not an inherent good.

00:18:57.000 And mentally ill people are not capable of making good decisions for themselves, which is generally why they have people around them who care for them, who try to help them.

00:19:05.000 And you're talking about mature minors, you're talking about 16, 17-year-old kids who, by the way, are going to be plagued by mental health issues because a lot of teen suicidal ideation and depression is linked to age, it is linked to that age where you have hormones racing through, you don't know what to do with them, you don't have social structures around you, you have a broken family structure.

00:19:23.000 You have mental issues that are just starting to crop up.

00:19:26.000 And the solution in Canada, apparently, is to make suicide available.

00:19:28.000 According to Canada's Department of Justice, parents are generally entitled to make treatment decisions on their children's behalf.

00:19:33.000 The Mature Minor Doctrine, however, allows children deemed sufficiently mature to make their own treatment decisions.

00:19:39.000 The federal government does not define mature.

00:19:41.000 It does not specify who determines whether one is mature.

00:19:43.000 It's not like you have to go to a court and a court says, oh, you're a mature minor.

00:19:46.000 Basically, it's self-assessed.

00:19:48.000 The doctrine also varies from one province to another.

00:19:51.000 Dr. Dawn Davies, a palliative care physician who supported MADE when it was first conceived, said she had tons of worries about where this might lead.

00:19:56.000 By the way, if you're talking about the worries about profitability, that's a very real worry.

00:20:00.000 If you're a doctor who makes their living doing assisted suicides, well, what are you going to do?

00:20:03.000 You're going to broaden the spectrum of available conditions that allow for assisted suicide. 0.97

00:20:10.000 Pretty clearly, it can make you a living killing kids.

00:20:12.000 Then a 17-year-old comes to you and says, listen, I'm a mature minor.

00:20:15.000 I'm really, really depressed.

00:20:16.000 I'd like to make an appointment.

00:20:18.000 If that's how you make your money, capitalism does not discriminate between good economic behavior, morally speaking, and bad economic behavior, morally speaking.

00:20:25.000 Capitalism will sell you pornography and it will sell you votive candles. 0.61

00:20:28.000 It doesn't matter.

00:20:29.000 And that happens to be the case if you are selling death, which is why assisted suicide is a very different thing even than euthanasia, the sort of right to commit suicide under medical care.

00:20:38.000 Assisted suicide is actually a step beyond that.

00:20:41.000 Dr. Non-Davies could imagine kids with personality disorders or other mental health issues saying they wanted to die.

00:20:46.000 Some of them will mean it, some of them won't.

00:20:47.000 We won't necessarily be able to discern who is who.

00:20:51.000 According to this article in Common Sense, Barry Weiss' Substack, Hugh Sher, an attorney advising Margaret Marcella, told me, quote, while other countries have explored extending assisted suicide of minors, those governments have insisted on substantial safeguards, including parental notification and consent.

00:21:05.000 Which, again, is totally crazy.

00:21:07.000 By the way, like, if you're a parent and you consent to your 17-year-old committing suicide, who's to say that you're a good- Like, no one should be able to consent to anyone else's death, and the reality is, you should not be able to consent in your own death, barring certain extraordinary circumstances and, realistically speaking, From a pure pro-life point of view, you should not be able to consent in your own death other than if you are talking about the kind of palliative care that we see routinely in hospitals that are designed to minimize pain, not to cause death.

00:21:34.000 We'll get to more on this in just one moment.

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00:22:57.000 Also, we should talk about the fact that you need rest.

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00:24:01.000 But, says this attorney, quote, Canada is poised to become the most permissive euthanasia regime in the world, including for minors and people with only psychiatric illness, already having removed the foreseeability of death or terminal illness as an essential condition to access euthanasia or assisted suicide.

00:24:15.000 Dr. Ellen Warner is an oncologist at the prominent Sunnybrook Research Institute in Toronto, a professor at University of Toronto's Medical School, quote, My objection to MAID from day one was that there is no way we would be able to avoid this slippery slope.

00:24:25.000 There aren't black and white cases.

00:24:27.000 I'm 100% against MAID.

00:24:28.000 I'm an old-fashioned Hippocratic Oath kind of doctor, right?

00:24:30.000 Preserve life.

00:24:31.000 But Dr. Derek Smith, psychiatrist at the University of British Columbia, views the rise in MAID death as progress.

00:24:37.000 Smith never took the Hippocratic Oath because he thought it was archaic.

00:24:40.000 Right, the idea, do no harm.

00:24:42.000 His doctor's like, well, what if I want to do harm?

00:24:44.000 MAID is about relieving suffering, respecting human dignity.

00:24:46.000 Again, respecting human dignity does not mean respecting your ability to kill yourself.

00:24:51.000 That is the opposite of human dignity.

00:24:53.000 We have redefined dignity in dying to mean that death should be less ugly for you and for the people around you.

00:24:59.000 But who is to say, honestly, on a moral level, who is to say that it is quote-unquote more dignified to go while being slowly poisoned by a doctor than it is to wait until the very last minute And die in an ugly way in order to demonstrate to friends and family and to everybody around you that life is so valuable that you should not shorten it.

00:25:18.000 Who said that dignity lies in ease?

00:25:20.000 You know, I'm not condemning people who choose to make what has to be, you know, not just a life-altering decision, but a life-ending decision because they're in horrible pain.

00:25:29.000 I'm not blaming people for feeling that way.

00:25:31.000 What I am saying is that society's standard for what constitutes death with dignity is really incorrect.

00:25:37.000 It is not correct.

00:25:38.000 The society's standard of what death with dignity would constitute should be the attempt to preserve life because life is just that valuable and a society that starts to demean life in favor of quote-unquote dignity gets into really ugly territory really quickly because then the question becomes what does a dignified life look like?

00:25:54.000 Right, if you get to declare that, as a society, death with dignity is being slowly poisoned by a doctor a week before you're going to die anyway, or, as Canada is saying, that death with dignity involves, you have a depressed teenager and the teenager decides to, death with dignity, decides to kill himself with the use of a doctor as opposed to taking sleeping pills, or instead of going to a psychiatrist for a prolonged period of time and slowly fading away, if you're a society and you decide to do that, that raises the question, what does dignified life look like?

00:26:19.000 Because what if, a huge number of people, I'm talking people who are mentally disabled. 0.99

00:26:24.000 I'm talking people who are mentally ill. 1.00

00:26:26.000 I'm talking people who are very sick. 0.96

00:26:28.000 Who's to decide whether those lives are worth living?

00:26:31.000 Now, we say that it's the person's own decision, but when you're talking about mentally ill people, it isn't their decision because mental illness robs you of your faculties.

00:26:38.000 It robs you of the ability to make good, informed decisions.

00:26:41.000 That is why we call people mentally ill, because they're incapable of making decisions that are rational for themselves. 1.00

00:26:47.000 But according to this doctor, quote, assisted suicide had been happening for ages.

00:26:50.000 Before May, patients who were going to die were assisted along the way with high doses of narcotics.

00:26:53.000 The rationale was to, quote, unquote, make people comfortable.

00:26:56.000 But again, when we say make people comfortable, we mean to alleviate pain, not to kill them.

00:27:00.000 Many of the people thinking about killing themselves in Canada are relieved the government has made it easier to die.

00:27:05.000 The nightmares have been a problem.

00:27:06.000 Mitchell Trembly, 40, told me, since I was six years old and my cousin molested me.

00:27:10.000 I'd found Trembly on Twitter.

00:27:11.000 He had a small following, but he was active in maid circles.

00:27:13.000 Trembly was made curious.

00:27:15.000 The made curious were lonely and scared.

00:27:16.000 They'd coalesced into a growing online community, mostly on Twitter and Facebook, and through the spread of death cafes.

00:27:22.000 There are more than 1,300 death cafes in Canada and 14,000 worldwide.

00:27:27.000 In the beginning, in 2012 or 2013, people mostly met in other people's homes to talk about the emotional and philosophical complexities of death.

00:27:33.000 They ate cake and had coffee or tea.

00:27:35.000 Since then, the number of virtual cafes had grown considerably.

00:27:38.000 There was also an expanding constellation of end-of-life doctors and death doulas.

00:27:41.000 Kerry Sawatzky, a death doula at Madehouse, where Keanu Vethan was scheduled to die, is described on the Madehouse website as believing that end-of-life planning leads to a meaningful and transformational experience.

00:27:52.000 That's one way of putting it when you're dead.

00:27:54.000 Trembly was from outside Toronto.

00:27:56.000 He'd been homeless on and off for more than two decades.

00:27:58.000 He'd spent years in and out of psychiatric facilities.

00:28:00.000 He'd prostituted himself, done a ton of drugs, shuttled between dingy apartments and halfway houses. 0.98

00:28:04.000 For now, he had a place to live.

00:28:05.000 He expected to be evicted by spring.

00:28:06.000 He planned to apply for MAID as soon as it opened up to the mentally ill in March 2023.

00:28:11.000 MAID is going to give me dignity, Trembly said.

00:28:13.000 I need to go now because I know it's going to get worse.

00:28:16.000 But is death going to give you dignity?

00:28:18.000 Is that true?

00:28:19.000 Is this what society is saying about life?

00:28:22.000 That certain lives are just not worth living?

00:28:24.000 It has not been lost on government officials Maid could save them a good bit of money.

00:28:27.000 In October 2020, the Office of Parliamentary Budget Office issued a report stating Maid would cut healthcare costs by over $66 million.

00:28:35.000 In 2017, Aaron Trachtenberg, research fellow and doctor at the University of Manitoba in Brands and Hymans, a health economist and nephrologist at the University of Calgary, published a paper predicting Maid could slash healthcare costs by as much as $100 million yearly.

00:28:49.000 Dr. Ramona Koelho, a family physician in a suburb of Toronto, said, I do worry MAID is an easy solution to bed shortages and a terrible lack of resources patients are facing.

00:28:57.000 Koelho's comments jived with a 2021 letter from three UN officials to the Canadian government about MAID having a, quote, potentially discriminatory impact on persons with disabilities and older people who are not at the end of their life or nearing death from natural causes.

00:29:09.000 The letter said there is a real risk that those who may be further marginalized by their racialized, indigenous gender identity or other status will be more vulnerable to being induced to access MAID.

00:29:19.000 On September 8th, the day after Margaret Marcilla called Joshua Tepper, she took to Facebook to post about her son.

00:29:23.000 Can you effing believe it?

00:29:24.000 The doctor has literally given him the gun to kill himself, Marcilla wrote.

00:29:27.000 Dr. Kristen Creek in Winnipeg messaged her.

00:29:29.000 As it turned out, Creek was a family physician and she provided maid.

00:29:33.000 She was surprised to hear a young man with diabetes had been approved for it.

00:29:35.000 She urged Marcilla to call Tepper back and be upfront about who she was.

00:29:38.000 Marcilla did just that.

00:29:39.000 Soon after, Marcila Chiano, Chiano's aunt, and Tepper spoke on the phone.

00:29:42.000 That call led nowhere, Marcila said.

00:29:43.000 By now, a right-wing Canadian Catholic news site had picked up on Marcila's post, which mentioned Tepper by name.

00:29:48.000 The doctor was getting pummeled by outraged readers.

00:29:51.000 On September 16th, Tepper texted Marcilla to say he'd postponed Keanu's death until September 18th.

00:29:55.000 Five days later, the doctor texted her again to say, actually, he wasn't going to do it.

00:29:59.000 He didn't want anything more to do with Keanu the Thaian.

00:30:01.000 Last week, after repeatedly trying to connect with Keanu, I managed to FaceTime with him.

00:30:04.000 He had a dark beard and mustache, special goggles to make it easier for him to see.

00:30:07.000 He said he'd applied for MAID a few years back, then dropped it, and then thought about trying again.

00:30:11.000 Then, in May, after learning his eyesight was only going to get worse, he decided he wanted to die.

00:30:14.000 I was so ready, he said.

00:30:16.000 I was actually very looking forward to ending my pain and suffering.

00:30:18.000 He hated not being able to see.

00:30:19.000 The unhappiness was exhausting.

00:30:21.000 He was arrested for assaulting his father and another time for indecent exposure, which he blamed on some hallucinogenic drugs he had been microdosing.

00:30:29.000 My thoughts are I would be closer to God, he said.

00:30:30.000 He was doing this, he declared, for himself and for his family.

00:30:32.000 Keanu told me he was baffled by everything that had happened the past three weeks.

00:30:35.000 His mother's social media campaign, Tepper's decision not to help him die.

00:30:38.000 I didn't know what to say.

00:30:39.000 It's how she knows how to love me.

00:30:42.000 Still, he was furious with her.

00:30:43.000 He didn't know what came next, whether he'd find another doctor.

00:30:45.000 The made people didn't want to touch his case.

00:30:47.000 On Facebook, he posted a screenshot of a series of texts between him and his mom.

00:30:51.000 Marcello wrote, Keanu, I love you.

00:30:52.000 No you don't, he wrote back.

00:30:53.000 You are adding to my pain and suffering and for that I curse you.

00:30:56.000 I love you and I want to talk to you, Marcello wrote.

00:30:58.000 After a moment he texted back, you know what I need.

00:31:00.000 These are people who are not capable of making decisions for themselves and the government approving all of this is a massive Act, suggesting what they believe of human life more generally, and then you wonder why Western cultures seem to be dying?

00:31:15.000 Maybe the answer is that they have decided that life is not actually of top priority, not just on an individual level, but for society at large.

00:31:23.000 That what liberty boils down to is not liberty to make good decisions within the boundaries of institutions, but eviscerating all institutions and all values in pursuit of atomistic individualism.

00:31:33.000 And if the government can facilitate that, that's really what the government is there to do.

00:31:36.000 The government is there just to facilitate your atomistic individual decision making, no matter how counterproductive or how bad.

00:31:43.000 And even if the government is going to engage in the evil of promoting death for people who can't take care of themselves, I guess that that's just the cost of liberty.

00:31:50.000 Really, really horrifying stuff up in Canada and everything that starts in Canada unfortunately ends in the United States and is promulgated worldwide as well.

00:31:59.000 The euthanasia statistics in places like the Netherlands are fascinating.

00:32:03.000 What they show is that euthanasia is obviously highly tied to societal values.

00:32:07.000 They vary widely.

00:32:08.000 According to BMJ, which is a medical journal, there's an unexplained sevenfold variation in euthanasia rates across the Netherlands.

00:32:17.000 And so what you would expect is that if a government had a widespread euthanasia policy or an assisted suicide policy, and all that were happening is that people who really wanted to die were being allowed to die, that that would be the deciding factor, what you would expect is a certain level of consistency across major cities.

00:32:32.000 And that's not what you see.

00:32:33.000 You see a very big difference between certain areas of Netherlands and other areas of the Netherlands.

00:32:37.000 In other words, societal values matter.

00:32:39.000 And pretending that the only value is consent or liberty, That is not the only value.

00:32:44.000 The goal of rights is to preserve the good.

00:32:47.000 The goal of liberty is to preserve the good.

00:32:49.000 Liberty has incredible value to human beings when we are given a bunch of options, all of which are morally acceptable.

00:32:56.000 And then we get to choose how to define our lives in accordance with these morally acceptable options.

00:32:59.000 But you blow away all the boundaries and you say that there's no such thing as morally acceptable option.

00:33:04.000 You fall into complete moral relativism and from there into societal collapse.

00:33:06.000 And that is what you are seeing right now.

00:33:09.000 Mario gets more in just one moment.

00:33:11.000 First, I'm doing a lot of traveling, as you may notice.

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00:34:10.000 That is ring.com forward slash ben to get started.

00:34:14.000 Also, The corporate media agenda means the news is presented in a very biased way.

00:34:18.000 I know it.

00:34:18.000 You know it.

00:34:18.000 We all know it.

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00:34:22.000 And that is by listening to one of the top news podcasts in America, Morning Wire.

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00:34:44.000 Alrighty, we've reached the end of today's show.

00:34:47.000 However, we still have to talk about the midterm elections and the attempt by Democrats to turn this into a referendum on our democracy itself, plus the latest in the Ukraine war.

00:34:58.000 If you're not a member, you need to join over at DailyWirePlus.com.

The Ben Shapiro Show - October 13, 2022

The West Literally Goes Suicidal | Ep. 1590

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