I need you guys to listen so bad, but I’m at least glad people on Twitter are starting to talk about this. The government of Canada is expanding Medically Assisted Death to cull the poor and disabled, and now suicidal and mentally ill (these are usually interchangeable of course here). It is EUGENICS and every single disabled rights organization is against it.
Disability payments are $1,200 a month. The average one bedroom apartment rent in the Greater Toronto Area (greatest pop. area by far here) is $2,000 a month. People with mental illnesses are on months long waitlists to get even a single publicly funded session. Weeks to get privately funded care which costs at least $200 a session. There is no housing here for disabled people. We are in one of the worst housing crises in the world right now.
Doctors are now offering MAiD unprompted to young suicidal people. This woman is 21, a health practitioner literally suggested she kill herself.
This is one of the worst Disability Rights Violations we’ve ever seen in Canada. The government is killing us because it is cheaper than funding healthcare, cheaper than giving people housing and food and basic human rights.
Would it kill you people to source anything? Or do you prefer making sweeping, inflammatory statements with no basis in fact? Criticize it all you like, because there are criticisms, but do it with some fucking information under your belt.
I mean, I know many people personally who have had MAiD pushed on them, and more than one personally who has taken MAiD as the route out of crushing fucking poverty and medical neglect. This isn't a fucking secret within the disability community.
But please tell me how this isn't happening when people I know are dead now, may their memory be for a blessing.
The exact reason why disability advocates have been sounding the alarm on MAiD since before it passed is happening now.
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CityNews spoke with a 54-year-old St. Catharines man, Amir Farsoud, who has applied for MAID as an alternative if he should become homeless.
Farsoud is currently on Ontario Disability Support Payments and can’t afford to pay anymore in rent. The rooming house he lives in is for sale, instead of becoming homeless, he wants to have the option of MAiD.
Because he suffers from debilitating back pain, Farsoud meets the eligibility criteria for MAiD.
“I don’t want to die but I don’t want to be homeless more than I don’t want to die,” shared Farsoud.
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Despite Canada’s reputation for universal health care, many of its citizens with manageable health conditions have turned to crowdfunding campaigns to afford treatment, medical support, and the cost of living. When that fails, they turn to MAiD. “These are people who do want to live but they can no longer go on,” Naheed Dosani, palliative care physician and lead for health equity at Kensington Health, told The Daily Beast. “Because structurally, the society they live in will not support them with the bare minimum resources that they need.”
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But Denise said she and supporters have called 10 different agencies in Toronto over the past six months to locate housing with reduced chemical and smoke exposure that she can afford on ODSP.
"None of them were able to do anything meaningful in terms of getting me relocated, getting the discretionary emergency, or temporary housing and emergency funds," said Denise.
Applying for medically assisted death has been surprisingly easier. Denise said she began working on applications for MAiD in the summer of 2021.
Maybe it's just because my editor and one of my best friends on this fucking hellsite, @thebibliosphere, has MCAS that I think that the fact that I can find two different people who are either seeking or have gone through with MAiD due not being able to find housing suitable for someone when MCAS is pretty fucking disturbing.
But maybe many many sources where disabled people are telling you about their experiences like the screenshots above, or news stories about people who are accessing or have accessed MAiD just aren't as compelling as two generic pages about it from its proponents.
I wonder why that could be. I wonder why disabled people telling you what they experience is something you feel like you need to respond to with the proof version of unseasoned oatmeal. Why is it, do you fucking think, that you respond to disabled people talking about their experiences that way?
Oh, sorry, I got sidetracked from adding in more sources by that paragraph heavily implying that you're deeply fucking ableist. Anyway, here's part of what the UN had to say about MAiD:
“There is a grave concern that, if assisted dying is made available to all persons with a health condition or impairment, regardless of whether they are close to death, a social assumption might follow (or be subtly reinforced) that it is better to be dead than live with a disability.”
Hunh. Maybe that's not enough sources for you that this is really fucked up. (They're still talking about making this available to minors as of 10/22/22, btw.) That's okay. I have a few more.
But maybe you want sources which directly address the inclusion of mental health as of 2023? Okay!
The inclusion of mental illness was in fact studied in detail by the federally mandated independent expert review by the Council of Canadian Academies which could not reach a definitive conclusion on whether this could be done safely. It should also be noted that the original MAiD bill required a review of this and the issues of inclusion of mature minors and advance directives within five years—it has been well past five years and no review has happened. So we now have one of the most liberal MAiD regimes in the world with only Belgium and the Netherlands coming close. People with mental illness who declare their suffering unbearable will now be eligible for euthanasia in two years with only a 90-day reflection period. Canada appears to have found its solution to the crisis in access to mental health supports.
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Pared down to its simplest expression, lowering the threshold for MAiD for persons who have disabilities or disabling illnesses is discriminatory because it creates a special class of persons whose suffering can be ended by death. People with disabilities are the only group excluded from a fundamental safeguard provided to every other Canadian by the Criminal Code. This safeguard provides that a life can be legally ended by a physician only where death is reasonably foreseeable.
Here's a link to the article for that video above, btw. Here's a link to the Tiktok screenshotted above. Here's another mentally-ill person talking about MAiD. Here's some of the committee hearings. Here's an opinion article with a fuckton of links which calls MAID'S expansion "a war on the mentally ill."
Fucking shocker, disabled people have been talking about this for a long time, and the recent expansion of MAiD and the way that it is absolutely serving the purpose of a eugenics program not very much different from Aktion T4 are very real and very very fucked up.
Doctors absolutely pressure disabled people to take actions against our best interests. People who could live full lives with social supports are absolutely using MAiD to escape crushing poverty, and disabled people said this would happen.
The problem with this post isn't a lack of sources, because those definitely fucking exist if you aren't an incurious ableist ingrown ass hair of a human being. The problem is that temporarily-abled people just don't like listening to us cripples.
Oh, and if this wasn't clear enough already:
Fuck you.
