WHAT’S HAPPENING
The debate over assisted suicide is intensifying after disturbing reports out of Canada, where its Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) program is killing more people every year.
This comes as Pope Leo XIV delivered a forceful condemnation of the practice during his historic four-day visit to France. The pontiff, speaking before nearly one million people, called assisted suicide "false compassion" and affirmed the "inalienable dignity of the human person."
THE FACTS
Pope Leo XIV declared, "No one ever has the right based on laboratory algorithms to decide the life of a given embryo or elderly person."
He told healthcare workers their calling is to "care for a suffering person, not to eliminate that person."
In Canada's Lanaudière region, 13.4 percent of all 2025 deaths came from MAID. In Quebec province, assisted suicide accounts for nearly 8 percent of all deaths.
On July 10, 83-year-old Brigitte Stegemann was killed through MAID after failing a cognitive test, allegedly telling her granddaughter two days earlier, "I've made a mistake."
Her family says she died “with her hands clasped in prayer, covered in her own blood” after a botched IV attempt at a care home's first-ever MAID procedure.
In 2021, 61-year-old Donna Duncan received MAID just hours after an involuntary psychiatric hold following a suicide attempt, despite her daughter's objection that she needed treatment, not euthanasia.
In the Netherlands, doctors euthanized a nearly 2-year-old child with severe brain damage under the country's expanded framework for ending the lives of children aged 1 to 12.
Assisted suicide is now legal in the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Switzerland, Canada, Australia, and France, plus several US states including Illinois, New York, Oregon, and California.
OUR TAKE
The growing use of medically assisted suicide is quickly becoming disturbingly normalized. What was sold as a narrow mercy for the terminally ill has steadily expanded beyond that. Cases of people who signed up to die, then changed their minds, only to be killed anyway, are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
Canada’s numbers show more people choosing state-sanctioned suicide each year, in what looks like an ever-expanding culture of death. The Pope’s call to end the practice cuts right to the moral question at the heart of the matter — whether a society committed to human dignity can simultaneously normalize the deliberate ending of human life on such a large scale.
