So then, each of us will give an account of himself to God. (Romans 14:12)
Compassion is unquestionably a Christian virtue. But sometimes, good words like compassion get hijacked by not-so-good ideas.
Medical assistance in dying (MAID) is currently legal in 10 countries and 11 US states, with the United Kingdom currently advancing MAID legislation. Belgium and the Netherlands were the world’s pioneers, legalizing euthanasia in 2002, but Canada has overtaken them.
As of 2023, more than 60,000 Canadians have died with medical assistance.
A court decision led Canada’s Parliament to pass a MAID bill in 2016; as of 2023, more than 60,000 Canadians had died in this way. In the province of Quebec, 7 percent of all deaths are by MAID, the highest percentage in the world.
The September 2025 issue of The Atlantic, not a right-wing or religious publication, contains a lengthy journalistic examination of MAID in Canada. Author Elaina Plott Calabro interviewed MAID practitioners across Canada and even traveled with professionals to a “delivery,” as one provider calls helping people die. Most clinicians, Calabro explains, use the term equally euphemistic term “provision.”
MAID is typically perceived as enabling a merciful end of life for older people with terminal illness and incurable pain. But Calabro relates a different narrative. She tells of a man in his thirties who insisted on dying rather than seeking treatment for cancer, despite a 65 percent chance of survival; another patient around the same age with excruciating but treatable nerve pain about whom the physician said, “I didn’t feel it was my place to tell them no”; and two women whose decisions to pursue death were influenced by medical debt.
One MAID provider related the “horrible” experience of administering death to a woman who gave consent all alone, lying on a mattress in a bare rental apartment. Conversely, another practitioner told of a motorcycle accident victim, blind and relegated to a long-term care facility, who reconsidered his death wish when his family, upon hearing of his intentions, started visiting him again.
A professionalized aid-in-dying system supported by popular demand for personal autonomy, choice, and control...
Calabro depicts a professionalized aid-in-dying system supported by popular demand for personal autonomy, choice, and control, but one that now offers an easy, government-authorized way out of life for all sorts of people for whom death is not imminent.
Here’s the ugliest paragraph of the article for me:
For some disabled citizens, the availability of assisted death has sowed doubt about how the medical establishment itself sees them—about whether their lives are in fact considered worthy of saving. In the fall of 2022, a 49-year-old Nova Scotia woman who is physically disabled and had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer was readying for a lifesaving mastectomy when a member of her surgical team began working through a list of pre-op questions about her medications and the last time she ate—and was she familiar with medical assistance in dying?
The woman told me she felt suddenly and acutely aware of her body, the tissue-thin gown that wouldn’t close. “It left me feeling like maybe I should be second-guessing my decision,” she recalled. “It was the thing I was thinking about as I went under; when I woke up, it was the first thought in my head.”
Fifteen months later, when the woman returned for a second mastectomy, she was again asked if she was aware of MAID. Today she still wonders if, were she not disabled, the question would even have been asked.
There are two sides to every argument, and I dutifully report both of them. The “MAID in Canada” Substack has published a response to the Atlantic article. It accuses Calabro of sensationalism and a hostile tone while disputing obvious statements such as that MAID is “no longer a novel and remarkable event” in Canada.
Several interviewees for the article object to the selection of comments and claim that the Atlantic’s fact-checkers ignored their complaints, such as that Calabro described the extension of MAID eligibility to new groups of people as an “expansion.”
For most readers of this blog, disputes about journalistic fairness are of less interest than the ideology underlying MAID and how to respond to it. In that regard, this comment to Calabro by a western Canada MAID provider is most revealing: “Once you accept that people ought to have autonomy—once you accept that life is not sacred and something that can only be taken by God, a being I don’t believe in—then, if you’re in that work, some of us have to go forward and say, ‘We’ll do it.’ ”
My dignity is rooted in Christ in me, the hope of glory.
In contrast, Joni Eareckson Tada, who has done amazing ministry during 58 years of quadriplegia, asserts that her dignity does not come from “my ability to walk or use my hands, or toilet myself or cut my own food. No; my dignity is rooted in Christ in me, the hope of glory.”
We should certainly argue on a public-policy level against the discriminatory and harmful consequences of legalizing aid in dying. But we should also confront openly, in public discourse and private conversation, the assumption of God’s irrelevance that underlies radical ideologies of individual autonomy.
We have good reason to believe that every human being is a creation of God and will give an account to God. True compassion helps people in pain to find comfort in God, not to run away from him.
A personal confession
My personal attitude toward medicine can skew me toward sympathy with MAID advocates. I faint at blood tests and, like one of the MAID requesters in Calabro’s article, was traumatized by a colonoscopy. Based on what I’ve heard about cancer treatments, I’ve told my wife that if I ever get a cancer diagnosis, I will go directly to palliative care. So if I ever reach that point, I can expect Nancy to tell me to reread my own opinion!
Originally published on Bruce Barron's "Gently Provocative Thoughts" Substack. Republished with permission.
Bruce Barron has had a varied career that included investigating the charismatic movement, dominion theology, political campaigning and public policy in the USA. From 2015 he volunteered for the World Evangelical Alliance as a communications aide and was executive editor of the WEA's theological journal from 2018-2024. He directs editorial services for the Society of Christian Scholars and is assisting Global Trust Partners, which seeks to help Christian leaders around the world develop healthy patterns of governance, financial management, and fundraising. Bruce writes a regular Substack blog, which can be subscribed to here: https://brucebarron.substack.com.
