‘Medical Aid in Dying’, or MAID, is legal medical murder.
This “news” item on the insipidly grave “Medical Aid in Dying” hitting Illinois refers to palliative care and hospice as types of “medical aid in dying.”
In Illinois, as in New York, the state house has voted for legalized assisted suicide.
MAID (even worse as an acronym) is a euphemistic term for the campaign to make assisted suicide — doctor-assisted suicide — ubiquitously legal. The aforementioned local-news report refers to it as a “trusted medical practice.” It’s not medical treatment in any way of giving care or comfort to the patient, however.
It is death.
It is killing.
It is legal medical murder.
We don’t use the m-word because it is considered wanted — never mind the pressures on the patient to do it. Has she been made to feel like a burden? Does his life seem to have little or no value to anyone now that he is not particularly “useful”?
Assisted suicide — sorry, MAID — is “trusted” only if you want the vulnerable dead rather than challenging us to love and care and be drawn out of our self-centered selfishness.
These issues involving life and death are not easy. They can be agonizing, more often than not, especially when you do not have loving support guiding you through it, like from Little Sisters of the Poor or the Carmelite Sisters for the Aged and Infirm. Suffering is not easy, to say the very least. Decisions about medical care are difficult, in no small part because of the bureaucracy and lack of transparency or honesty.
In all honesty, this morning I actually woke up thinking — anguishing more than a little, not for the first time — about regrets involving the medical care of a loved one who died almost a year ago: my Godmother, as it happens. In retrospect, I realized she wasn’t getting the best care she needed and deserved. Perhaps what started to clue me out of my denial was the voicemail message a nurse left on my phone about the exact timing of her death while I was away from my phone for three minutes.
“Trusted” can be hard to come by in medicine these days. The more MAID wins, the more that will be what we encounter. Medicine will be what’s convenient, what’s cheapest, what’s the quickest end to “the problem” — when suffering is the problem. And, if MAID in Canada and elsewhere is any indication, increasingly “suffering” will be not only what comes with grave diagnoses, but depression, and eating disorders, and homelessness, and . . .