Our September 2025 LMCC meeting took place on Wednesday, Sept. 24 at 5:30pm in the HHIVE Lab, also known as Greenlaw 524 or Gaskin Library, with options for members to join via Zoom as well. 
We discussed an article from The Atlantic by Elaina Plott Calabro titled “Canada Is Killing Itself” (Aug. 11, 2025), https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/09/canada-euthanasia-demand-maid-policy/683562/.
We also encouraged members to check out our suggested supplementary readings:
- Segal, David. “He Announced His Intention to Die. The Dinner Invitations Rolled In.” The New York Times, 10 Aug. 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/10/business/last-supper-joseph-awuah-darko.html.
- Effting, Maud. “This Influencer Told an Incredible Story about his Impending Death by Euthanasia. But How Does This Affect his Followers?” de Volksrant, 3 June 2025, https://www.volkskrant.nl/cultuur-media/this-influencer-told-an-incredible-story-about-his-impending-death-by-euthanasia-but-how-does-this-affect-his-followers~b7ad0440/.
If you missed the meeting, you can still access the texts on the Readings page of this site!
You can also access the recording of our meeting here.
A few reminders and announcements:
- Be sure to follow LMCC on Twitter and Instagram to show your support and receive regular updates!
- If you want to get more involved with LMCC, please send us other resources we should post to the site or suggestions for improvements, additions, future readings, etc. We’d love to hear your ideas and input! (See our email addresses on the Home page of this site.)
- Also, please feel free to spread the word about LMCC to other interested graduate or professional students at UNC.
We will be in touch soon with more details about our upcoming October meeting!
Calabro, Elaina Plott. “Canada is Killing Itself.” The Atlantic, 11 Aug. 2025, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/09/canada-euthanasia-demand-maid-policy/683562/.
Meeting Notes (courtesy of LMCC Co-Director Mindy Buchanan-King):
- Calabro’s piece, suggested by Bri: Shocking statistics, not normal area of study, knowledge gained from this well-sourced article; some parallels to eugenics movements of early 20th century
- Paul: Certainly a provocative title; thinking about eugenics as well, and the slippery slope
- Desire: Thinking about Tylenol when reading and latching onto the conversation of ableism; point where legislative language comes into play, and thinking about the difference between expert and authority. This article puts some pressure on those differences; an authority is not always an expert. Defining legal terms has caused issue; we live under these kinds of circumstances. Moments over the past 10 years that have presented similar issues in Canada.
- Bri: How much onus is on the medical providers to clarify the terms; boundaries that were originally set have since eroded, with the splitting of Track 1 and Track 2
- Paul: Related articles, what happens when liberalism goes too far; what happen when you enshrine an ideal without thinking of the implications. The tension in authority and expertise and idea of autonomy, both for the patients and for the assessors. Where do we draw the line? The line keeps moving; in 2027, they’ll get to “mature minors”—leaving this room for interpretation. One assessor saying the legislators didn’t leave it up to the lawyers, they left it up to the providers.
- Desire: You can pay $10.99 and get an app to help plan for handling this; the culture of being able to do these kinds of things and have accessibility. Rhetorically, it’s a well-organized piece that sets up the anticipations. One moment where the author mentions the question of accessibility, and how to quantify dignity, and access to dignity.
- Paul: Creating events surrounding MAID. And how the government quantifies how much healthcare savings will be made.
- Claire: In some ways, disability justice theorists who don’t center the individual, this reads what they have been predicting. It’s easy in the abstract to think these things through; what is striking is the ease of accessing MAID versus a wheelchair. This is about a publicly-funded healthcare service, and undercut by neoliberal divestment from humans. Respected the one interviewee who used the language of access, versus choice. This is a sad story of the deliberate undermining of a public healthcare system. The wheels came off during and after COVID; neither that or disability justice comes up in this article.
- Paul: So many individuals put in the position of feeling like a burden, or feeling like the state is willing to support their death but not their life. Can see the autonomy issue, but at the same time—what about the autonomy to live a long, happy life. It’s easier to say it’s about autonomy, but also we’re going to divest and save money. Rather than dealing with the systemic issues that create (or at least exacerbate) people’s health issues.
- Bri: There are at least two different groups accessing this program: the group who lobbied for it, who are accustomed to the full autonomy of citizenship and right to control your own life. Then the other group who go to a hospital for attempted suicide and then are told the state can do it for them. Who wants it, and who gets it? It’s not all one patient group. There was a small point made early about Canada overcoming Belgium’s numbers very quickly. Maybe this situation didn’t entirely come about through systemic issues, maybe it’s also cultural. Thinking about the absolute right to personal autonomy, and one group has paradoxically devalued the lives of another.
- Camille: The doctor, Ellen Wiebe, who didn’t have any qualms doing either Track 1 or Track 2 (p. 17) as part of her human rights advocacy. The use of human rights within the liberal idea of what it means to be free from suffering, and what it means to have individual autonomy, and in pursuit in the good. Humanitarians encourage to push back against when the “good” or “human rights” is brought up. At the same time, it’s not really a choice to take their own lives because the state is not providing them with what’s necessary to live a good life.
- Claire: I wish we knew more about the pharmaceutical industry in Canada; how much is the pharmaceutical company making? Accepting the mind/body dichotomy, as Western medicine does, but what do we do with chronic pain? There was no kind of engagement with the pharmaceutical industry in this article.
- Camille: Need to think about cultural interpretations and pain; one of the arguments in the 1980s with the opioid crisis was that people should be free from pain. It had a similar seepage, a category creep—it started out with an argument with terminal illnesses. Then there was a category creep of why just cancer? What about chronic pain that may not kill you, but is causing suffering. There’s not an easy answer, but it would be interesting to see different responses to suffering.
- Bri: One of the moments who floored me was the 30-year-old cancer patient who had a shot at making it, but did not want to experience pain. Maybe it gets into the article because it is remarkable; if they open it up to psychiatric conditions, as Canada did in 2017, it seems like cases will increase. They don’t have a challenge mechanism in the law; there’s no limit on the number of times you can apply to MAID. The case where the husband challenged MAID re: his wife’s decision.
- Paul: That’s another question of accessibility, and who has access to the courts to pose such challenges, Also, the article raises the question: how do you differentiate between suicidal ideation and desire for MAID.
- Desire: Two scenes that were striking, was the husband whose wife said he didn’t need to kill himself, the government will do it for you. And the other case of the younger patient who didn’t want to experience any pain for treatment. On one end, there is the theatrics—and the variety of situations that culminate in this piece of legislation.
- Desire: The question of the body fighting back, and rejecting these procedures; like having to inject in the bone marrow
- Camille: Interested to know the background of other major biomedical standards; where MAID is legal in the U.S., the patient has to be the one doing the injection. Striking that most patients in Canada ask the provider to administer the dosage. In the U.S., there are so many instances where medical treatment was forced—how might the person who wanted MAID and refused cancer treatment, may have been forced into treatment in the U.S.
- Desire: Difficult to kind of figure out context in relation to other governments
- Carmen: The article talks about another advance request for MAID, and the patient had severe cognitive decline two days later, and it wasn’t clear if consent was clearly given at that point. Question if consent is ongoing, or if the provider was pushing him on to go with MAID. The culture of consent is questionable; it doesn’t seem like medical staff is prepared to stop.
- Desire: A lot of other pressures, like the easy accessibility of MAID—even that initial consent, is that an act of autonomy? Or because they don’t want to or cannot pay medical bills? The narrative that the doctors are so enthusiastic about MAID; that feminist discourse and questioning of consent should be brought up.
- Carmen: MAID seems to be corrupting liberal ideology; Kovac, who had ALS, wrote her obit before she died, saying she chose to do it, but because she didn’t have access to what she needed. Is that really a choice? The implication of the article is that it isn’t a choice.
- Paul: Thinking about vets who take their own lives because they don’t have the support; going back to the idea of consent and outside pressures. Calabro makes the point that no doctor says anything neutrally; there is a power imbalance. Mentions the law versus expression of consent; that goes back to the question of interpretation. Once we get into seeing things through, there’s not much room to stop.
- Desire: Throughout, the line between what is familiar and what becomes mundane, has been a recurring theme. Microsoft Office becomes the arbiter of death (scheduling to perform a euthanasia procedure via Outlook), and the technological fabric and everyday-ness of it becomes mundane. How do we handle really big ethical questions, with this being so rapid? It’s spidering into so many different areas. The article doesn’t go deeper into history, but there’s only so much space…
- Carmen: It seems like some of the physicians were handwaving ethical issues, like Wiebe saying she hasn’t committed a crime, but we’re asking if she’s done something immoral. It seems like she doesn’t want to tackle the moral.
- Bri: Thinking of this as a program that came out of a progressive culture and mode of ethics, but progressivism is not antithetical to eugenics. It happens at the same time as the raising up of the value of expertise, and the power system of knowing more, which makes you have more rights to tell other people how to live their lives. Sense a lot of that in the providers who would override a gesture of resistance. There is an absolute value of personal autonomy, but it’s also clear not all people have personal autonomy. The power to tell others what they don’t and do need seems to be part of this. The issue of consent becomes eroded, when you feel like you have more say/more power over those who aren’t as educated—the lawyers, the patients, the families. Consent is illusory.
- Camille: In the Netherlands, they publish every year their report if MAID cases were handled properly; there are cases that were not handled appropriately, but legal action wasn’t taken. Litigation would open up a whole set of concerns.
- Paul: And Calabro explains that in Canada, there have been issues that have been critiqued, but no true consequences, punishments, or litigation is brought up.
- Claire: We keep running into the collision between the legal and medical cases, and the systems that support it. The division between law and medical.
- Desire: Did like the storytelling elements, and how to think about on a conceptual level and then present these concepts.
—
Note: The featured image for this post is an image taken from Calabro’s article in The Atlantic, captioned “At a hospital in Quebec, a pharmacist prepares the drugs used in euthanasia.” Photo credit: Johnny C. Y. Lam for The Atlantic.