‘When My Doctor Offered to Help Me Take My Life’ by Bill Gardner

In a blog post entitled When My Doctor Offered to Help Me Take My Life, Bill Gardner shares the story of how his surgeon offered him medical assistance in dying (MAID) after radiation treatment failed to treat his throat cancer. In Bill’s telling, his surgeon presented palliative care and MAID as his only two treatment options after telling him that he had ‘months, not years’ to live. However, Bill lived long enough to write this blog post in January 2023, eighteen months after the interaction occurred. In the blog post, Bill shares his belief that MAID should not be ‘normalized as a standard treatment option for the end of life.’ He believes that his surgeon should have considered him to be ineligible for MAID under Canadian law, because Bill had not told him that his suffering was unbearable. He further states his belief that the increased use of MAID in Canada constitutes a crisis and predicts that over time, MAID will be prioritized because the healthcare system, in his opinion, always moves towards efficiency. Since MAID is a drug treatment that is cheaper and easier to administer than palliative or mental health care, he argues that, ‘Left to itself, the system will, as if pulled by gravity, move toward suicide instead of healing.’ In a follow-up blog post, Bill expands on his concerns about MAID. First, he is concerned that marginalized people may choose MAID because they are unable to access palliative care or other supports, like adequate housing. To Bill, if someone chooses MAID because they are coerced by circumstance, MAID becomes murder. On this point, he links to news stories about Amir Farsoud and Roger Foley, whose experiences have been circulated widely in disability rights advocacy against MAID. Second, Bill believes that MAID normalizes suicide at the end of life. He is concerned that cancer patients are routinely offered MAID while they are at an elevated risk of suicide or depression because of their diagnosis. His concern is grounded in his experience as a researcher, where he designs and evaluates suicide prevention programs, and his experience as a cancer patient, where he was never screened for suicide risk.

In his blog, Bill identifies himself as a medical school professor, a child psychologist, a mental health services researcher and a Christian. Christian theology appears throughout his blog. In his initial post, however, he rejects Pope John Paul II’s criticism that medical euthanasia is part of a secular ‘culture of death.’ Instead, Bill writes that he is not opposed to MAID in all circumstances. He believes it is appropriate as a last resort or in extremis situations. Rather, Bill believes that access to MAID should be much more restricted than it is currently in Canada, and in his blog, he presents the two most common arguments against MAID: that broad access to MAID goes against the societal value of preventing suicide and that the wide availability of MAID results in the coercion of vulnerable people. By using both arguments, he bridges the gap between criticisms of MAID that were common prior to legalization, which focused on suicide prevention, and more recent criticisms following the Truchon decision, which focus on the need to protect vulnerable people.