Death as a same-day service

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Mar 02, 2026

Here’s a ghoulish statistic from Ontario’s “Medical Assistance in Dying” program: In 2023, more than 200 people who applied to the program were dead within 36 hours. For 65 people, the state program provided same-day service.

Think about it: If you’re sick and suffering—or if you’re just suffering from a severe bout of depression—you can end it all, more or less immediately. You won’t have time (on his earth, anyway) to regret it.

The chilling efficiency of Ontario’s death service contrasts sharply with nearly any other government program you might care to name—particularly in the field of medicine. If you show up at the hospital in pain, suffering from a condition that will require a surgical procedure, you can expect to wait days, or weeks, or even months before you are taken to the operating room.

Now suppose that condition is painful enough so that you find yourself thinking that death would bring welcome relief. If you express that thought out loud, the medical system will leap to accommodate you. If, on the other hand, you want relief from the pain—even temporary relief—that might have to wait. The Catholic Herald story reports the case of a woman who requested help to end her life, thought better of it, withdrew the request, and asked for palliative care. That care was denied. But when relatives made another request for euthanasia—despite the evidence that she had not clearly chosen that option—the request was granted and her life was ended that very day.

The temptations should be obvious. Palliative care requires medication, nursing, and hospital beds. Assisted suicide is quick, inexpensive, and the decisive. The medical system can consider the case closed, the problem solved. It is—the very phrase should frighten us—a final solution.

For more evidence of how those temptations creep into the medical system, see this horrifying report in First Things:

Between June 1980 and March 1981, a spree of murders struck SickKids hospital. Over the course of several nights, thirty-six babies and infants died, many of them due to an overdose of digoxin, a drug used to control heartbeats and often used for assisted suicide in the United States. A judge confirmed that at least five of those deaths were murders (though the defense believed the number was closer to seventeen), and yet the judge at the preliminary hearings absolved the only suspect, a pediatric nurse. No one else was ever charged, despite statistical evidence from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control that tied another nurse to the deaths.

This appalling crime, which coincidentally took place in Ontario, vividly illustrates the dangers that arise when a medical institution leans toward the option of death. The infants who died in SickKids hospital had been judged to have a “minimal chance of surviving.” That judgment was hotly contested by some parents. But evidently at least one nurse thought she was justified in ending their lives, even without legal authorization. Even when the scandal was uncovered, neither the hospital administration nor the justice system was ready forthrightly to condemn the nurse’s actions.

The argument that “they were going to die anyway” is a classic example of the slippery slope. We are all going to die someday. Pray that when that day draws near, an overanxious intern doesn’t misinterpret something that we mumble as a request for release, and rush off to prepare the heart-stopping dose. Pray, too—and take action—so that your state will not adopt the heartless policy that makes same-day extinction the government’s most effective policy.