Ontario woman seeks and is approved for MAID after no longer being able to cook for family

An Ontario woman was approved for medically assisted suicide after she became unable to cook for her family. While she ultimately decided not to proceed, the case has renewed questions about how Canada’s assisted-dying system is being applied. 

In an op-ed published in The New York Times, psychiatry professors at the University of Toronto who work with patients who have advanced cancer, Dr. Gary Rodin and Dr. Madeline Li, wrote about the case. The pair explained that the woman was a caregiver for her family and sought medical assistance in dying (MAID) after she lost the ability to cook for them.

“She felt she had lost her value to her family. Through counselling, she came to understand that her family valued who she was, not what she did for them. She decided not to go through with ending her life, at least for now. That Christmas, her family gathered and she sat proudly at the table, while others did the cooking and serving,” the doctors wrote.

They also detailed another patient, a man in his 80s, who was approved for MAID after refusing a treatment that could extend his life.

“He survived the Holocaust as a child and viewed the freedom to choose the timing of his own death as a way of reclaiming what Hitler had taken away from his parents,” they said. “However, his living family’s grief mattered to him, too, and they had concerns about him giving up too soon.”

The physicians argued that Canada’s MAID system has evolved considerably since it was first introduced. When Canada legalized MAID in 2016, eligibility was limited to people whose natural death was “reasonably foreseeable.” That requirement was removed in 2021 following changes to the law, allowing more individuals to qualify.

“Too many people are receiving the procedure without the opportunity for careful reflection about it with a health provider,” Rodin and Li wrote. “In some cases, patients are being approved who should not be. Reports have emerged of people seeking assisted death in the context of poverty or loneliness, raising concerns that they may feel they have no other options. In other cases, including for many of our cancer patients, medical assistance in dying may be the right choice eventually, but there’s a risk of rushing into it and shortening what can be a meaningful period in patients’ lives.”

Last month, the granddaughter of an 83-year-old Ontario woman spoke with the Daily Mail, where she revealed that her grandmother was killed via MAID against her will. The elderly woman reportedly got “every question wrong” in the cognitive test administered to determine whether a person seeking MAID has the ability to consent. Despite this, the assisted suicide was carried out.