Ellen Wiebe
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.
She and her abortionist colleague went to the Netherlands in 2016 to meet with euthanasia practitioners and learn the trade. “Now it’s half my clinical work and very, very important,” she said. Unsurprisingly, she has repeatedly said that she sees much similarity between abortion and euthanasia. Family members, she tells the National Post, are often shocked by how swiftly death comes after she administers the lethal injection. “When everybody is ready, I say, ‘Okay, ready to go to sleep?’” she recounted, apparently unaware of how similar this sounds to putting a pet to sleep. The entire process, she says, usually takes about five minutes.
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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