The following text is excerpted from Anna Farrow’s 4000-word essay published by C2C Journal.

Sometimes it takes an outsider to see what’s really going on inside your own home. That was certainly the case with the September 2025 issue of The Atlantic. The American magazine’s take on Canada’s experience with Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) caused deep consternation among MAID advocates across the country and horrified a great many other Canadians with its clear-eyed and entirely factual discussion of the policy’s many contentious aspects. 

Advertisement

Despite its provocative title – Canada is Killing Itself – the story doesn’t read as a hit job. Atlantic staffer Elaina Plott Calabro didn’t even interview or cite any MAID-critical doctors, legal scholars or journalists. Instead, her reporting focused on several high-profile, active MAID practitioners including doctors Ellen Wiebe, who has facilitated the deaths of more than 430 patients, and Stephanie Green, co-founder and president of the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers (CAMAP), who has overseen another 300 or so deaths. Plott Calabro simply presented the facts and let the policy’s biggest boosters speak for themselves. 

In one sentence towards the end of her 11,000-word essay, Plott Calabro accurately pointed out that the Quebec College of Physicians (CMQ) has raised the idea of extending current MAiD practices to cover infants under one year old in cases of “severe deformities.” Legalizing euthanasia for babies, she further noted, would put Canada in the same category as Nazi Germany, which “did so in 1939.” At which point everybody lost their minds – and with good reason. 

The CMQ’s trial balloon cited by The Atlantic came during the October 2022 appearance of Quebec doctor Louis Roy before the Parliament of Canada’s Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying, which was tasked with examining proposals to expand access to MAID beyond adults with terminal illnesses. Potential changes included offering MAID to those suffering a purely mental illness, making it available to so-called “mature” minors, and allowing individuals to file advance requests for MAID ahead of any certifiable physical or mental disease. 

Roy’s report went even farther. He testified that his Quebec colleagues had also considered applying MAID to “babies from birth to one year of age who come into the world with severe deformities and very serious syndromes for which the chances of survival are virtually nil, and which will cause so much pain that a decision must be made to not allow the child to suffer.” Reading the transcript back, it seems striking that no one on the committee questioned Roy about his organization’s willingness to sanction the medical killing of infants. 

But if baby MAiD proved uninteresting to committee members, the media felt differently. In the days after Roy’s appearance in Ottawa, it seemed as if all of Canada had become momentarily galvanized in revulsion at the idea of state-approved baby-killing. Not just outlets such as the National Post and The Catholic Register but also the CBC, whose headline screamed “Federal minister says she's ‘shocked’ by suggestion of assisted deaths for some babies.”

The federal minister in question, Carla Qualtrough, was the Justin Trudeau government’s minister of diversity, inclusion and persons with disabilities. She is legally blind. 

“There is no world where I would accept that,” Qualtrough told CBC Radio of the proposal to allow parents to have their disabled baby killed by doctors. 

By late 2022, Canada had over six years’ experience with MAiD for patients whose death was “reasonably foreseeable,” as well as 18 months of newly approved “Track 2” cases, which do not require the apprehension of an imminent death. Stories of the collateral damage wreaked by this policy change were legion. Only months before Roy’s committee appearance, for example, Canadians were shocked by the story of a 51-year-old Ontario woman who had requested – and received – MAID because her housing benefits prevented her from moving to an apartment that could accommodate her crippling allergies. A Spectator article entitled “Why is Canada euthanizing the poor?” brought such allegations to an international audience, and proved to be the prestigious British magazine’s most-read story of the year. 

The evidence keeps piling up. The 2024 data on Canada’s MAiD program, released late last month, reveals it now accounts for over five percent of all deaths in the country. Last year, 16,499 Canadians died through medical assistance, up by seven percent over 2023 figures. Since it was made legal in 2016, MAID has been responsible for over 76,000 deaths in Canada. Quebec accounts for a disproportionately large share of the national total. (Curiously, the program is also striking for its lack of diversity. Among applicants who provided their racial identity, 96 percent were white.)

From this perspective, a Quebec doctor’s musings about expanding MAID to cover infants – who have no ability to consent to their own death as equired for everyone else currently “eligible” for MAID – was yet more evidence of a country sliding down the slippery slope that critics had warned about when MAID was first proposed. 

A month after Roy’s polarizing appearance, CMQ President Mauril Gaudreault attempted to tamp down the controversy or, as he put it, “reset the clock.” Testifying before the special committee, he made note of the hubbub that followed Roy’s presentation. 

Advertisement

“Even the federal minister of disability inclusion, Carla Qualtrough, was upset when we explained the Collège’s position on 0 to 1 year-old babies to her,” he admitted. Still, it’s nothing to get worked up about, he argued. 

“The Collège never mentioned euthanasia for babies, nor the idea of administering medical aid in dying, without the consent of parents,” Gaudreault said reassuringly. “What it did say was that it was an avenue to be explored and that the suffering of parents also had to be taken into account.” 

Gaudreault then added, quite chillingly: “Medical assistance in dying is a form of care. It’s a medical procedure that may be appropriate in certain circumstances. It is not a matter of politics, morality or religion, but rather a medical matter.” 

To paraphrase: Quebec doctors are not currently killing babies. But they might in the future – though, they promise, not in secret. And if they do, the decision will be merely a medical issue with no moral quandaries to worry about.

When the special parliamentary committee issued its final report in February 2023, MAID for infants wasn’t among the listed recommendations. Attention instead shifted to a proposal that the Criminal Code of Canadabe amended to allow for advance directives and that eligibility be extended to mature minors, or what are termed “12-plus”. Talk of killing babies legally in Canada largely disappeared until The Atlantic article appeared this fall and got people talking again.

So how close is Canada really to a euthanasia protocol for babies?

Among pro-life activists, infant MAID is not a pressing issue, mainly because Roy’s trial balloon received such a negative response in 2022. 

“Given the backlash, I haven’t really heard people talking about MAID for babies,” said Amanda Achtman, an ethics educator and advocate with Canadian Physicians for Life, in an interview. 

From Achtman’s perspective, the real action lies in dealing with the special committee’s concrete proposals, namely the expansion of MAID to mature minors and allowing advance requests in provinces other than Quebec, where such things are already possible.

Journalist Terry O’Neill has spent the past five years submitting Access to Information requests to BC Health regarding MAiD statistics and protocols and reporting on what he finds. He agrees with Achtman about the most newsworthy developments in the area. But considering the source of the infant proposal, he warns, nothing is off the table. 

“Quebec is always the first one”, O’Neill observes. “They were the first ones out of the gate [with MAiD], and then they were the first ones with advance directives. So, we ignore this at our peril.” 

Quebec’’s habit of overlooking national laws or standards, O’Neill warns, means mere federal reluctance won’t prevent baby MAiD. 

“With advance directives, Quebec simply decided they were going to ignore the Criminal Code of Canada,” he points out. “‘We’re going to tell our prosecutors not to prosecute,’ is their approach.” 

Advertisement

Given the province’s sangfroid about Canadian law, O’Neill worries, “They could very easily say, ‘We’re going to tell our prosecutors not to prosecute infanticide if it seems to be reasonable,’ given whatever criteria they want to come up with, that this is a life not worth living.”

MAiD for Canadian babies clearly remains a possibility, though courtesy of an American publication, Canadian are least aware of and talking about it.