The Canadian Senate has capitulated, passing into law Bill C-14 legalizing ‘Medical Aid in Dying’, or, more properly, murder-assisted suicide. It will now be legal, even binding in some jurisdictions we may presume, for physicians and other health personnel, to kill their patients. The Senate wanted to broaden the scope of the law, permitting murder-suicide even if death were not ‘reasonably forseeable’ (a broad notion in itself), but they will live with it for now, pardon the pun.  The scope of the law will broaden in due course, as these always do.

There is one more hurdle, however:  The Bill requires royal assent, since Canada is still technically a monarchy. But I do not foresee our Governor-General, David Johnson, nor the Queen, stopping this law.

So welcome to one more step towards the full scale culture of death. Of course, our millennial generation will see this as a leap forward, an evolution towards greater enlightenment and rationality.  ‘Remember the days’, they laugh, ‘when it was illegal for physicians to kill?  What a lot of benighted barbarians our fathers were.’

To paraphrase Chesterton’s prediction, the new barbarians won’t be wearing fur skins and carrying axes; they will be wearing lab coats, with lots of letters after their names, and carrying syringes.