RIGHT TO DIE

Thirteen America states and the District of Columbia allow some form of “medical aid in dying” or “dying with dignity” where a medical doctor or a competent adult self-administers a lethal dose of a morphine combination or a combination involving pentobarbital and/or secobarbital. The median time it takes to die from these drug combinations is 53 minutes. This dying process is known as PAD (physician assisted dying) and can occur only when the patient is terminally ill with a life expectancy of generally less than six months.

Canada, on the other hand, has a “medical assistance in dying” (MAID) law enacted in 2016 that allows patients with “grievous and irremediable” medical conditions to request a lethal drug administered by a physician or self-administered by the patient whose death is “reasonably foreseeable.” MAID eligibility was expanded in 2021 to patients with “grievous and irremediable” conditions whose deaths are not “reasonably foreseeable.” These patients became known as “Track 2” MAID patients.

Suffering from severe Type 1 diabetes (beginning at age 4) and blindness in one eye (the result of a car accident in 2017), 26-year-old Kiano Vafaeian was euthanized on December 30, 2025 in British Columbia. The Vafaeian case has sparked social controversy in Canada since 2022 after a Toronto doctor approved the then 22-year-old’s request for MAID—an approval that was rescinded after the young man’s parents launched a successful social media campaign to block the euthanasia, citing their son’s history of mental illness.

This parental intervention ultimately forced Vafaeian to go to British Columbia to seek and secure medical approval for MAID. The man was suffering from depression brought on by a lifelong debilitating medical condition and a physically disabling condition brought by an auto accident. He simply did not want to live with these severe life conditions.

Vafaeian consulted with a doctor who agreed with and approved his MAID choice. That should have ended the matter. He was an adult capable of making his own life choices, even the choice to end his life. The parents are now upset because their son’s MAID choice was medically fulfilled on December 30.

In my humble opinion, the parents should respect their son’s choice and get on down the road with life. They had no right, much less the means, to force their son to accept the conditions of life that were causing him so much suffering. He was no longer a son but a man when he made that life-ending choice—a choice that was much better than a suicide in the parents’ bathroom.

I don’t subscribe to the notion that a person should be allowed to walk into a doctor’s office and exclaim, “hook me up, Doc … I’m ready for the other side journey.”

But I do believe an adult suffering, either incurably or unconscionably from whatever condition, should be allowed to make a MAID choice free of intervention from family members or other parties. We may not have a choice about being born, just as more often than not we do not have a choice about the life-suffering conditions that impact our lives during our lifetimes, but we damn sure should have a MAID choice when life becomes unbearable to us.