A cancer patient in Canada has been granted assisted suicide within days after waiting ten weeks to get through a chemotherapy “backlog”.
Dan Quayle, 52, from British Columbia, waited ten weeks for cancer treatment before turning to assisted suicide, which was granted to him in just two days.
Despite wanting to extend his life through treatment, Mr Quayle finally went through with assisted suicide.
His widow, Katheleen Carmichael, lamenting the circumstances of her husband’s death, said: “I think I could still have my Dan if he had gotten treatment sooner. If we had more money, we could have gone to the States. But we’re just regular people.”
Cancer was the most common underlying cause of assisted suicide in Canada in 2022 at 63%, according to official statistics.
Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD), as it is known in Canada, was responsible for 13,241 deaths in Canada in 2022, an increase of 31.2% compared with the previous year, and now accounts for 4% of all Canadian deaths.
SPUC comment
A SPUC spokesperson said: “Patients let down by health services and unable to afford private care are turning to assisted suicide because they feel there is simply no alternative but death. The UK must heed these warnings coming out of Canada and elsewhere or replay the same disaster.
“Assisted suicide isn’t about ‘choice’. Rather, it’s a robbing of all hope enabled by the dire view that a person might be better off dead. When a patient is denied treatment and other essentials that make life liveable, their lives indeed become too much to bear, as we see in the shocking case of Dan Quayle, who was ultimately abandoned by the state.
“Dan just wanted to live and enjoy as much time as possible with his loved ones. Rather than ushering him into an early grave, the Canadian health system should have granted him that final wish.”
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