Canada’s mutually assisted aid in dying, or MAID, program continues to produce the grotesque results that its detractors warned about.
The latest MAID horror north of the border was first reported in a Substack post by Kelsi Sheren titled “The Last Ten Days of Brigitte ‘GG’ Stegemann.”
Sheren reported how an 83-year-old Belleville, Ontario resident with cancer who had previously “declined medical assistance in dying” because she said it conflicted with her Christian faith, was killed under Canada’s medical assistance in dying program.
The details are horrific.
According to Sheren, two months after Brigitte Stegemann refused assisted suicide “she died by lethal injection without, her family says, speaking a word of final consent.”
The details of the lead-up and the execution are disturbing.
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The report noted that Stegemann had been placed in a care home due to her physical and mental decline triggered by stomach cancer. Her granddaughter, Brigitte Kranendonk, had the power of attorney.
Stegemann appeared to be in good spirits despite her bad prognosis and occasional mental confusion. She was not suicidal according to the family. But when Stegemann’s granddaughter was away on a 10-day trip, the care facility called her to inform her that a MAID assessment had been planned for Stegemann.
The family said that the home pressured Brigette, who had been disoriented and distressed, to accept MAID with the promise that her death would be peaceful. The family said that the home intentionally kept the family away while the decision to administer the suicide drugs was made.
According to the granddaughter, Brigitte at one point broke down and said she had “made a mistake” days before the procedure. The care home reportedly insisted on going forward anyway. When the lethal injection was completed, the family said that the process seemed unprofessional and that there was an alarming amount of blood that they had not seen with previous uses of IVs.
The granddaughter condemned what had happened in a statement to Fox News Digital: “My grandmother was a vulnerable senior who was let down when the doctors and home bypassed every safeguard put in place to protect her—from assessing her mental capacity, to getting her clear, final consent before acting and the home filling out paperwork and having her sign when we were not there, and giving us copies. I will not stop until there is a full investigation into how this was allowed to happen behind closed doors.”
The care home has not commented on the matter, but the incident is reportedly now under investigation by Belleville Police.
This case has received national and international attention, as it should. Canada’s Conservative Party leader wrote on X that what happened was “disgusting” and called for immediate action to protect those who most vulnerable.
I find it somewhat ironic and morally confused to put it charitably that Canada has long outlawed capital punishment but now fully endorses MAID.
Is “choice” really the only value to be upheld in modern, “liberal” countries?
Even that’s a mirage.
As we’ve seen, even the sacred idea of choice becomes somewhat muddled when state authorities have an incentive to cut costs and bureaucracies take over the decision-making process.
This is hardly the first time MAID seemed to be used to push someone into state-sanctioned suicide.
I wrote in May about how an Ontario man with suicidal thoughts was allegedly pushed into suicide by an overeager doctor whom he met at a Tim Hortons coffee shop. It was pretty much the most modern Canadian story ever. It highlighted how a state-sanctioned suicide system sold as something that would be humane, safe, and rare can quickly become cruel, unsafe, and mortifyingly mundane.
It’s clear that even beyond the horror stories, MAID is becoming increasingly common in Canada as it’s now becoming one of the leading causes of death in the country.
“A total of 16,499 people received MAID in Canada in 2024, according to Health Canada’s Sixth Annual Report on MAID, the latest report available,” the Post Millennial reported Monday. “In the US, 15,364 people were killed by a gun in 2024, per a report from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. The MAID total is 1,135 higher.”
The toxic mix of state-assisted suicide and government-funded healthcare only serves to supercharge the rate of use and abuse. It seems like the Canadian healthcare system is more eager to offer euthanasia than potentially life-saving cancer medicine.
That’s grotesque.
Canada has been at the forefront of state-assisted suicide, but other Western countries appear just as eager to adopt it. It’s hardly a limited phenomenon.
Fortunately, it seems the U.K. has seen the light for now, as Parliament rejected assisted suicide after a year-long debate on the issue. It was a rare, good decision by the current British government
But when are they going to wake up in the Great White North? And are we here in the United States going to watch the MAID experiment, ignore the dangers, and go forward anyway?
Last year, my friend Dovie Eisner wrote a passionate denunciation of what was then New York’s soon-to-be-passed bill to launch a program that would allow doctors to prescribe life-ending drugs to terminally ill patients. Though the law at least stopped short of allowing doctors administer the drug, unlike under MAID in Canada.
Dovie was born with severe disabilities, but pleaded with New York Gov. Kathy Hochul to veto the bill, and prevent the state from giving families a reason to “abandon the frail.”
He wrote that he was one of the “lucky ones” but feared a world where “life is cheap.”
Shortly thereafter, Dovie fell into a coma after his breathing equipment failed. He was cared for by family until he died on Sept. 11. Even though his body was crippled, Dovie made the most of his life-long situation. There is hardly a conservative writer in New York who didn’t know him and wasn’t influenced by him in some way. His life was certainly worth living.
We should consider that as stories like Stegemann’s become the norm and Western people become numb to the idea of mass state-sponsored death.
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