Canadian euthanasia 'doctor' says 'nobody more grateful' for her work than her patients

Abortionist and euthanasia provider Dr. Ellen Wiebe said in a BBC documentary, “I love my job” because “there’s nobody more grateful than my patients and their families.” Wiebe is a one of the doctors committed to taking lives in Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) program that has made the country a destination for assisted suicide.

Wiebe welcomed an interview with disabled woman Liz Carr by saying she wasn’t formal but “we also don’t need to touch hands.” The interview with Wiebe is part of a documentary that Carr has produced called Better off Dead that details the growing euthanasia industry.

When Carr wonders if the doctor ever was concerned that Canada’s euthanasia program will go too far in its search for victims, Wiebe shuts down that debate.

“What you're saying is to protect what you consider vulnerable people. You are condemning others to unbearable suffering, unbearable suffering, and I am so glad, so glad that I'm Canadian and that we have this law so that people can choose that or not choose that, but to say that somebody has to suffer like that is simply cruel,” she told Carr, who then asks Wiebe, “Do you love your job?”

“I love my job. You know, I always loved being a doctor and I delivered over a thousand babies, and I took care of families, but this is the very best work I've ever done in the last seven years. And people ask me why? And I think, well, doctors like grateful patients, and nobody's more grateful than my patients now and their families.”

Wiebe says the real choice for her patients is whether they want to die at home or in the hospital. “Sometimes most people want to die in their own homes, yeah, and so I would be in their home. And of course, many people are in hospital, in hospice, in care homes. And then there are people who don't feel comfortable dying at home," she says, noting that it might be upsetting for the spouse to have a memory of their husband or wife dying there.

Carr asks Wiebe if she ever says no, and the doctor is mildly offended and reminds the interviewer that Canada has “a law, and I obey this law, and so there are people who are not eligible under the law. Now, there are the situations where I might find somebody not eligible or eligible when another person won't because of the way our law is written,” Wiebe says enigmatically.

Wiebe calls Carr “different” for accepting her disabled state and not wanting to end her life. “So Liz, right now, you love life and you want to live, but there's lots of nasty illnesses you might get,” she warns Carr, saying that she might get “terminal cancer” and then she would have “to deal with chemotherapy and radiation.”

“Wouldn't you be thrilled if you had the choice to say, ‘I will go this far and no further?'”

In March, Canada decided not to extend the "eligibility" of its euthanasia program to the mentally ill, a category that could also include drug addicts and alcoholics. Critics say that is not just euthanasia but eugenics. But Health Minister Mark Holland announced that the proposed program expansion will proceed in 2027.

Given the annual escalation in the use of the MAiD program and when the figures for 2023 are tallied, the total number of deaths could now total 60,000 and it accounts for 4.6 percent of all fatalities in Canada.