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Canadian euthanasia doctor takes delight in having killed hundreds through assisted suicide

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Ellen Wiebe

From LifeSiteNews

By Jonathon Van Maren

“I know the exact number,” she told Kirkey, but didn’t want to provide it. “It’s become a weird thing, people talking about their numbers, or criticizing people who talk about their numbers.”

The National Post’s July 6 profile of euthanasia doctor and abortionist Ellen Wiebe begins with a barnburner line: “Dr. Ellen Wiebe has never shied away from speaking publicly about the act of ending someone’s life.” That’s a bit of an understatement — Wiebe has positively reveled in it. In the recent BBC documentary Better Off Dead? Wiebe informed disability rights activist Liz Carr that killing patients “is the very best work I’ve ever done.”

Wiebe’s enthusiasm — and chuckling throughout the interview — made viewers very uncomfortable. Clearly, so is National Post writer Sharon Kirkey. The profile of Wiebe is titled “This doctor has helped more than 400 patients die. How many assisted deaths are too many?” Of course, Wiebe hasn’t “helped people die.” She has actively ended their lives by lethal injection. She now realizes that people recoil from that fact. “I know the exact number,” she told Kirkey, but didn’t want to provide it. “It’s become a weird thing, people talking about their numbers, or criticizing people who talk about their numbers.”

“Hundreds is good,” she added. As Kirkey noted, Wiebe had ended at least 430 lives by May 2022, according to her own testimony before a special parliamentary committee on MAiD.

Wiebe has accrued many nicknames — the “pro-choice doctor providing peaceful deaths,” and a “de facto ambassador” of MAiD, for example. Unsurprisingly, she insists that the killing she does be carefully cloaked in Orwellian language. “In Canada, we don’t use the word euthanasia,” she told a podcaster. “That’s what we use for our pets. Here, we call it assisted dying.” Still, Kirkey notes that not everyone is happy about the work she finds so rewarding. She told Scottish euthanasia advocates that “we know that angry family members are our greatest risk” because they are most likely to bring complaints against euthanasia practitioners.

Indeed, as Kirkey notes, Wiebe is willing to bend the rules:

She’s published numerous papers in the assisted dying space, mentoring other doctors and hosting MAID training webinars, but has also been accused of bullying and sneaking her way into faith-based facilities. She’s faced multiple complaints against her to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia. but has always been found in compliance with the rules …

Wiebe has had several complaints lodged against her, including her provision of death in the case of “Ms. S,” a 56-year-old woman with advanced multiple sclerosis who, in 2017, starved herself to meet eligibility criteria that her death was “reasonably foreseeable,” a case with eerie echoes to the 27-year-old autistic Calgary woman who stopped eating and drinking in May over a judge’s order blocking her access to MAiD.

In 2017, Wiebe was accused of “borderline unethical” behaviour for entering Vancouver’s Louis Brier Home & Hospital, an Orthodox Jewish long-term care home, and providing MAID to 83-year-old cancer patient Barry Hyman, despite knowing the facility did not allow assisted deaths on its site. Hyman’s family had invited Wiebe in to honour his wish to die in his room. As Wiebe assembled her prepared syringes, “My heart was racing that someone would open the door,” Hyman’s daughter, Lola, told The Globe and Mail.

The same year, the chief medical officer and coroner with B.C.’s coroner’s service raised questions about Wiebe’s provision of MAID to a woman with dementia.

As she told journalist Peter Stockland in 2018, her practice comes “right up to the edge of the law but never beyond.” Thus far, at least, the authorities have agreed with her.

Although Wiebe is 72 and suffers from a heart condition, she’s determined to continue the work she believes in the most — euthanasia and abortion. Euthanasia, in particular, she says, is “the last thing I’ll give up,” and both euthanasia and abortion are “about honouring people’s wishes, empowering people to have control over their own lives. It’s wonderful that I have the opportunity to do that.” Kirkey notes that, as in the BBC documentary, Wiebe grinned and laughed in her interview with the National Post. “I love life,” she told Kirkey.

Disturbingly, Wiebe isn’t the only euthanasia practitioner who enjoys her work. Kirkey noted that in “one study, MAiD providers with between 12 and 113 assisted deaths each described the delivery of a medical death as ‘heartwarming,’ ‘the most important medicine I do,’ ‘an ultimate act of compassion,’ ‘liberating’ and ‘almost an adrenaline rush. I was surprised at how good I felt.’” As Christopher Lyon, a social scientist at the University of York, observed, this is jarring “because death is usually a deeply painful or difficult moment for the patients and their loved ones.” As Kirkey noted:

Lyon’s 77-year-old father died by MAiD in a Victoria hospital room in 2021, over the family’s objections. (Wiebe was not the provider.) His father had bouts of depression and suicidal thinking but was approved for MAiD nonetheless. Lyon wonders what draws some providers to MAiD “and what happens to a person when killing becomes a daily or weekly event.”

“Some providers have counts in the hundreds — this isn’t normal, for any occupation,” he said. “Even members of the military at war do not typically kill that frequently. I think that’s a question that we’ve not really ever asked.”

Wiebe says she didn’t plan to be a euthanasia practitioner — she grew up in a conservative, Bible-believing Mennonite home in Alberta but abandoned faith by age 17 — but has been long committed to the medicalized killing. In her work as an abortionist, she did “pioneering work on medical abortions and bringing trials of the abortion drug, mifepristone, to Canada.” When the Supreme Court legalized euthanasia, she wanted in. “I called up a friend who was also an abortion provider and said, ‘Palliative care is not going to do the work. We better figure out how to get trained and get in there,’” she told the National Post.

Wiebe believes that Canada’s euthanasia regime will only expand in the years ahead. Kirkey writes:

She fully anticipates that MAiD will be extended to mature minors. “I’ve always been assuming for eight years that a 17-year-old with terminal cancer is going to say, ‘I have the right,’ and of course any judge in the country will say, ‘Yes, you do.’” She also expects some form of advance requests for MAiD in cases of dementia, which would allow a person to make a written request for euthanasia that could be honoured later, even if they lose their capacity to make medical decisions for themselves. Support for advance requests is strong, according to polls. But if someone is unable to express how they’re feeling, who decides if they are suffering unbearably — and what if they changed their minds? MAID doctors may be asked to “provide” for someone they have not met before, and with whom they will not be able to communicate. That’s going to be hard for us as providers,” she said. “This will be a new challenge. And I’m up for challenges.”

Wiebe’s predictions and enthusiasm are a warning for Canada. We have seen tens of thousands of Canadians die by lethal injection and many others speak out about how they feel pressured or pushed into euthanasia. It is imperative that Wiebe’s vision for Canada be opposed at every step. Lives depend on it.

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Jonathon’s writings have been translated into more than six languages and in addition to LifeSiteNews, has been published in the National Post, National Review, First Things, The Federalist, The American Conservative, The Stream, the Jewish Independent, the Hamilton Spectator, Reformed Perspective Magazine, and LifeNews, among others. He is a contributing editor to The European Conservative.

His insights have been featured on CTV, Global News, and the CBC, as well as over twenty radio stations. He regularly speaks on a variety of social issues at universities, high schools, churches, and other functions in Canada, the United States, and Europe.

He is the author of The Culture War, Seeing is Believing: Why Our Culture Must Face the Victims of Abortion, Patriots: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Pro-Life Movement, Prairie Lion: The Life and Times of Ted Byfield, and co-author of A Guide to Discussing Assisted Suicide with Blaise Alleyne.

Jonathon serves as the communications director for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.

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New York Times publishes chilling new justification for assisted suicide

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From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

Even happy, healthy lives without major issues can warrant needless ending if they are ‘complete.’

Notorious secular “ethicist” Peter Singer has co-authored an opinion piece in The New York Times positing a chilling new rationale for assisted suicide: the determination that one’s life is simply “complete.”

Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman died in March 2024 at age 90. His cause of death was not disclosed at the time, but a year later, The Wall Street Journal revealed that Kahneman had emailed friends the day before to tell them he was traveling to Switzerland to avail himself of the country’s legal physician-assisted suicide.

“I think Danny wanted, above all, to avoid a long decline, to go out on his terms, to own his own death,” WSJ journalist and longtime friend of the deceased Jason Zweig wrote. “Maybe the principles of good decision-making that he had so long espoused — rely on data, don’t trust most intuitions, view the evidence in the broadest possible perspective — had little to do with his decision.”

On April 14, The New York Times published a guest essay by the infamous Singer, a pro-infanticide Princeton bioethics professor, and philosophy professor Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek, who shared that they too knew of Kahneman’s plans and that days before he had told them, “I feel I’ve lived my life well, but it’s a feeling. I’m just reasonably happy with what I’ve done. I would say if there is an objective point of view, then I’m totally irrelevant to it. If you look at the universe and the complexity of the universe, what I do with my day cannot be relevant.”

“I have believed since I was a teenager that the miseries and indignities of the last years of life are superfluous, and I am acting on that belief,” Kahneman reportedly said. “I am still active, enjoying many things in life (except the daily news) and will die a happy man. But my kidneys are on their last legs, the frequency of mental lapses is increasing, and I am 90 years old. It is time to go.”

Singer and de Lazari-Radek argued that this was an eminently reasonable conclusion. “(I)f, after careful reflection, you decide that your life is complete and remain firmly of that view for some time, you are the best judge of what is good for you,” they wrote. “This is especially clear in the case of people who are at an age at which they cannot hope for improvement in their quality of life.”

“(I)f we are to live well to the end, we need to be able to freely discuss when a life is complete, without shame or taboo,” the authors added. “Such a discussion may help people to know what they really want. We may regret their decisions, but we should respect their choices and allow them to end their lives with dignity.”

Pro-lifers have long warned that the euthanasia movement devalues life and preys on the ill and distraught by making serious medical issues (even non-terminal ones) into grounds to end one’s life. But Singer and de Lazari-Radek’s essay marks a new extreme beyond that point by asserting that even happy, healthy lives without major issues can warrant needless ending.

“Instead of seeing every human life as having inherent value and dignity, Singer sees life as transactional: something you are allowed to keep by being happy, able-bodied, and productive — and something to be taken away if you are not,” Cassy Cooke wrote at Live Action News.

Support is available to talk those struggling with suicidal thoughts out of ending their lives. The Suicide & Crisis Lifeline can be reached by calling or texting 988.

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‘Great Reset’ champion Klaus Schwab resigns from WEF

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From LifeSiteNews

By Jonathon Van Maren

Schwab’s World Economic Forum became a globalist hub for population control, radical climate agenda, and transhuman ideology under his decades-long leadership.

Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum and the face of the NGO’s elitist annual get-together in Davos, Switzerland, has resigned as chair of WEF. 

Over the decades, but especially over the past several years, the WEF’s Davos annual symposium has become a lightning rod for conservative criticism due to the agendas being pushed there by the elites. As the Associated Press noted: 

Widely regarded as a cheerleader for globalization, the WEF’s Davos gathering has in recent years drawn criticism from opponents on both left and right as an elitist talking shop detached from lives of ordinary people. 

While WEF itself had no formal power, the annual Davos meeting brought together many of the world’s wealthiest and most influential figures, contributing to Schwab’s personal worth and influence.

Schwab’s resignation on April 20 was announced by the Geneva-based WEF on April 21, but did not indicate why the 88-year-old was resigning. “Following my recent announcement, and as I enter my 88th year, I have decided to step down from the position of Chair and as a member of the Board of Trustees, with immediate effect,” Schwab said in a brief statement. He gave no indication of what he plans to do next. 

Schwab founded the World Economic Forum – originally the European Management Forum – in 1971, and its initial mission was to assist European business leaders in competing with American business and to learn from U.S. models and innovation. However, the mission soon expanded to the development of a global economic agenda.  

Schwab detailed his own agenda in several books, including The Fourth Industrial Revolution (2016), in which he described the rise of a new industrial era in which technologies such artificial intelligence, gene editing, and advanced robotics would blur the lines between the digital, physical, and biological worlds. Schwab wrote: 

We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another. In its scale, scope, and complexity, the transformation will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before. We do not yet know just how it will unfold, but one thing is clear: the response to it must be integrated and comprehensive, involving all stakeholders of the global polity, from the public and private sectors to academia and civil society …

The Fourth Industrial Revolution, finally, will change not only what we do but also who we are. It will affect our identity and all the issues associated with it: our sense of privacy, our notions of ownership, our consumption patterns, the time we devote to work and leisure, and how we develop our careers, cultivate our skills, meet people, and nurture relationships. It is already changing our health and leading to a “quantified” self, and sooner than we think it may lead to human augmentation.

How? Microchips implanted into humans, for one. Schwab was a tech optimist who appeared to heartily welcome transhumanism; in a 2016 interview with France 24 discussing his book, he stated:  

And then you have the microchip, which will be implanted, probably within the next ten years, first to open your car, your home, or to do your passport, your payments, and then it will be in your body to monitor your health.

In 2020, mere months into the pandemic, Schwab published COVID-19: The Great Reset, in which he detailed his view of the opportunity presented by the growing global crisis. According to Schwab, the crisis was an opportunity for a global reset that included “stakeholder capitalism,” in which corporations could integrate social and environmental goals into their operations, especially working toward “net-zero emissions” and a massive transition to green energy, and “harnessing” the Fourth Industrial Revolution, including artificial intelligence and automation. 

Much of Schwab’s personal wealth came from running the World Economic Forum; as chairman, he earned an annual salary of 1 million Swiss francs (approximately $1 million USD), and the WEF was supported financially through membership fees from over 1,000 companies worldwide as well as significant contributions from organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Vice Chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe is now serving as interim chairman until his replacement has been selected. 

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Jonathon’s writings have been translated into more than six languages and in addition to LifeSiteNews, has been published in the National PostNational ReviewFirst Things, The Federalist, The American Conservative, The Stream, the Jewish Independent, the Hamilton SpectatorReformed Perspective Magazine, and LifeNews, among others. He is a contributing editor to The European Conservative.

His insights have been featured on CTV, Global News, and the CBC, as well as over twenty radio stations. He regularly speaks on a variety of social issues at universities, high schools, churches, and other functions in Canada, the United States, and Europe.

He is the author of The Culture WarSeeing is Believing: Why Our Culture Must Face the Victims of AbortionPatriots: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Pro-Life MovementPrairie Lion: The Life and Times of Ted Byfield, and co-author of A Guide to Discussing Assisted Suicide with Blaise Alleyne.

Jonathon serves as the communications director for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.

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