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A nurse touches the hand of a palliative care patient.
OSV News photo/Manon Cruz, Reuters
April 17, 2025
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Pro-life voices are welcoming a United Nations report citing the need “to ensure the right to life for persons with disabilities” in the face of Canada’s growing MAiD culture.
The United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has delivered what one critic has called “a stunning and comprehensive rebuke” of Canada’s permissive euthanasia law. As part of an exhaustive review of Canada’s human-rights record dealing with the disabled, the committee called for the repeal of the 2021 extension of MAiD’s availability to those whose deaths are not reasonably foreseeable.
Moreover, in proceedings leading up to the release of the report, one committee expert, Australian human-rights advocate Rosemary Kayess, went so far as to ask whether Canada’s euthanasia regime was a de facto eugenics program.
The report also listed “similar concerns” about MAiD’s adverse impact on the disabled, expressed by agencies examining discrimination related to women, poverty and seniors.
The report was immediately embraced by pro-life advocates in Canada.
“I’m shocked that the UN actually came out with something like this, because it is not known for denouncing things that are seen as progressive,” said Fr. Larry Lynn, the Vancouver Archdiocese’s pro-life chaplain.
Lynn said the UN committee’s denunciation of Canada’s MAiD law means that a major international body believes Canada has simply gone too far.
Despite this, no federal political leader has addressed the UN report. Health Canada did, however, issue a statement to CTVNews.ca saying it had no intention of repealing the 2021 expansion of MAiD, explaining that it believes “enhanced safeguards” are in place to protect vulnerable persons.
“It’s no surprise we’ve yet to hear from Prime Minister (Mark) Carney or his cabinet,” said Mike Schouten, executive director of the Association for Reformed Political Action. “Since 2016, Canada’s government has been focused on expanding euthanasia and assisted suicide rather than addressing the root causes of suffering.”
The UN committee further criticized Canada for creating a “false dichotomy” by setting up the idea that, if persons with disabilities are suffering, it is therefore valid for Parliament to enable their death.
Anti-MAiD activist Kelsi Sheren of White Rock, B.C., said she believes “strongly” that Canada’s MAiD program “is flat-out eugenics. And it is being slow-dripped to the population, not as a solution to the problem, but as the only solution to the problem.”
Sheren, a veteran of the Canadian Armed Forces, author and podcaster, says an attitude has developed within the medical and political establishment that if a person does not take advantage of MAiD, “then they are looked at as a burden on society.”
“The way that this program is being run currently indicates very clearly that when you tell someone — when you dangle the carrot of euthanasia — it is almost an expectation of the population, and if you don’t utilize the program you are seen as individuals who are eating up health care for the healthy population. And if you don’t choose euthanasia, you are a bad person.”
The most recent statistics show that, in 2023, the 15,343 MAiD deaths represented a 15.8-per-cent increase over 2022’s figures.
A version of this story appeared in the April 20, 2025, issue of The Catholic Registerwith the headline "Pro-lifers laud UN saying Canada’s MAiD law discriminates".
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