November 24, 2023: Joseph P. Farrell

As if you needed any more proof that the regime of Justin Turdeau in Canada is completely anti-human and anti-God, and that as a sign of the decline of the West and its institutions in general Canada cannot be bested, then there is this story shared by one of our Canadian readers, R.P., and a cautionary note: it is not for the light-hearted:

Canada expands assisted suicide laws to allow for killing of INFANTS for profit

We are where the pro-life movement said we'd be, decades ago when the United States' Supreme Court decision on Roe vs. Wade was handed down: that full-term abortion on demand for any reason whatsoever would eventually lead to infanticide, and that, in turn, would lead us to other kinds of state-sanctioned killings having nothing to do with capital punishments of crimes. It is the end result of that vile change within so many business of their departments of personnel to departments of human "resources", the reduction of the human being, at all stages of life, to a mere bundle of chemicals and resources to be harvested and sold when "convenient":

Canadian Dr. Louis Roy is leading the charge to allow toddlers and infants in Canada to be killed through euthanasia.

Boasting the world's laxest assisted suicide laws, Canada is now a safe haven for young children to be euthanized for profit under the expansive Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) program.

From now on, infants deemed too sickly to live can be signed up for assisted suicide in Canada, even though critics argue that a young child is not old enough to make this kind of decision without coaxing.

Fulfilling what many worried would eventually become the case, MAiD appears to be a program for expanding infanticide rather than assisted suicide, also known as "death with dignity."

But there's a "catch" in this article, a "hang-up" as it were, and it's at the center of all such debates. The article hems and haws, tacks and comes about again, but in the end, still sails into a head wind. Consider the following passages:

As you will see and hear, Dr. Roy believes that in cases where a child is born with "severe malformations," it is not out of the question for that child to want to die rather than have to live an entire life with such problems. (Emphasis added)

Wait a minute. Who said? The Quebec College of Physicians? How do they know what such a child does or does not want?

At the same time, a child under one year of age cannot possibly consent to die, no matter how much he is spoon-fed the words by parents or a doctor. At what point does society draw a line on consent for "assistance in dying?"

"Instead of 'assistance in dying,' infants will be euthanized for the convenience of the parents and doctors who no longer want to deal with problematic babies," one report explains. (Bodlface emphasis added)

Bingo: this is all about "convenience" again, just as the limitless abortion-on-demand was always, and only, about convenience.

The Quebec College of Physicians defends its support for the practice by claiming that some babies are suffering from "unbearable pain" that only assisted suicide can quell.

Unbearable pain... put them down, like a sick kitten or bird. And note carefully that we are never told exactly what constitutes "unbearable pain", because with such people, that goalpost constantly changes. What about the child who wants to bear the pain of that cancer, in order to live? Or is it really about the unbearable pain to the adult not undergoing it?

What is unclear from all the support, though, is how custodial situations work in which a child is handled by two different parents who may not both be in agreement that a child's "pain" warrants assisted suicide.

Adults, the college says, can decide for these babes, this acting as a "safeguard" between the child and attending "physicians" who are ready and waiting to kill babies for profit.

Really? I suspect we already know that will happen if father is opposed to the euthanasia of his offspring, and the mother supports it: she will prevail, because of course the infant was "once a part of her body", a bit of gynecological nonsense that once underwrote all those pleas for abortion on demand: My body my choice, with the fact that the infant body in question had different genetics than, say, the mother's arms or big toes. My body my choice went right out the window once that, too, became inconvenient to the planscamdemic narrative and the "mandates".

Of course, the real goal is simply as has already been stated: the total reduction of a human being at any stage of life to a mere "resource" to be harvested for his or her life, and when that is no longer "profitable" their life can be ended and their organs "harvested" and sold. And the technocrat is really, when all the talk about women's rights or reproduce rights, or age-ism or parental rights or children's rights is said and done, the one who gets to make the decision.

Underpinning all of this is the idea that the infant is not "self-aware":

"An infant is not self-aware and cannot 'commit suicide,'" one report explains about the lunacy of expanding MAiD to include babies. "Infants want to live, eat and be held by their parents."

The key here is "self-awareness". What, exactly, defines a "person", and how is the "awareness" of that entity manifest and known? Indeed, can personhood ever really be defined, exhaustively and all-inclusively, or can we only aspire to symbolize its infinite depths of utter uniqueness by symbolizing it with the word "person"? Do any of us, ever, ever reach total, all-encompassing "self-awareness"? And even if we do, how do we communicate that to someone else? And must they be entirely self-aware too? And how do we know we are "self-aware" and what is the magic age that that happens, or is that too, an infinite chasm of uniqueness which we can only symbolize? Is the ability to communicate that awareness somehow constitutive of our very "personhood"? Does the fact that I, a grown man of 66 years, still want to live, to eat, and even to be held by my parents, make me an infant, or does it just make me human? In short, who said an infant is not self-aware? and how do "they" know it? The bottom line is that knowledge and self-awareness are pretty poor determinants of what constitutes a "self" and a "person". That is the deepest of all mysteries, and it is the question at the heart of all philosophy and of all science and of all religion and worship. And the best and wisest answer has been to honor that mystery by protection of the youngest and tenderest stages of life, because when that stage is reduced to mere awareness or a mere resource or defined as this or that chemical reaction or materialist paradigm, all other stages are reduced to that as well.

Or to put it in a very different form, the truest and best measure of is what is fully human does not arise at some "age of reason" or when the bishop comes by to slap someone in the face, but is fully present at the outset and ab initio; the acorn is still an oak, and the only seed of the oak is an acorn. It's why, in some churches, infants and children are not packed off to "Sunday school" where they can learn to be "self-aware" in some sort of semi-human-until-'self-awareness'-limbo" awaiting the day of the episcopal slap in the face, but instead enter the communion line with their parents, and are, with them, full members of that great society of the communio sanctorum even in infancy... That life, and that person, are sacred, even and especially, in infancy.