In 2022, Global News said the quiet part out loud: poverty is driving disabled Canadians to consider MAiD. Those “some” who are driven to assisted death because of poverty or an inability to access adequate care deserve to live with dignity and with the resources they need to live as they wish. They should never, ever feel the pressure to choose to die because our social welfare institutions are starved and our health care system has been vandalized through years of austerity and poor management.
Given the way our institutions and economic and political elite create and perpetuate poverty in Canada, particularly among disabled people, we should be particularly sensitive to the implications of the country’s MaiD regime for those who are often ignored when warning about the dangers of the law.
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While MAiD may be defensible as a means for individuals to exercise personal choice in how they live and how they die when facing illness and pain, it is plainly indefensible when state-induced austerity and mismanagement leads to people choosing to end their lives that have been made unnecessarily miserable. In short, we are killing people for being poor and disabled, which is horrifying.
This is why Canadians need to talk about this stuff. Some MAiD recipients are being driven to suicide by an underfunded and ignored social safety net. That’s horrible. Our society is rich enough that we should be able to provide a decent quality of life to people with disabilities.
We have a national belief that we have strong supports for those who need it. That doesn’t seem to be the case.
It’s mostly the same in America - I have an invisible disability or two and it has been next to impossible to get access to the social safety net. The only viable avenue, if you aren’t visibly disabled, is to hire an attorney to work with the system.
That takes an humongous effort that not everyone can sustain on their own.
Why aren’t these systems activated at the point of diagnosis, for example? How many gaps are there in the safety net, really?