Killing Grandma

The state has declared war on the living:

In my 2016 book The Challenge of Euthanasia I noted how some Western nations are leading the way in perverse policies of killing to be “compassionate”. I especially highlighted countries like the Netherlands and Canada. Sadly, but not surprisingly, things have only gotten worse in those nations, and state sponsored killing is spiralling out of control.

Consider just one recent horror story concerning the situation in Canada. The Daily Mail just ran a story with this shocking headline: “Our 83-year-old Christian grandmother was euthanised against her will under Canada’s assisted dying system – she died covered in blood with her hands clasped in prayer.” It begins:

Two days before her Christian grandmother’s assisted dying procedure in Ontario, Canada, Brigitte Kranendonk sat her down to make sure she knew exactly what was going to happen. ‘I used very frank terms. I said: “Do you know that you’re going to die on Friday?”’ The 83-year-old was in visible disbelief and began crying for 45 minutes. ‘I’ve made a mistake,’ Brigitte Stegemann, known affectionately to her family as ‘GG’ or ‘Oma’, wailed.

 

‘She was bawling. Inconsolable,’ Kranendonk, a real estate agent who shares the same first name with her late grandmother, tells the Daily Mail. In a cognitive test, designed to ascertain whether she was sound of mind enough to consent to Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD), Stegemann ‘got every question wrong’, believing her two living siblings to be dead, according to Kranendonk.

 

Yet 48 hours after she wept uncontrollably at the notion of MAiD, Stegemann is said to have died with her hands clasped in prayer, covered in her own blood due to a botched first attempt at connecting the IV, administered by a nurse allegedly not wearing gloves.

 

Kranendonk is currently in the process of desperately appealing to the Chief Coroner’s Office in Ontario, as well as the Patient Ombudsman and Belleville Police, in a bid to ascertain whether what happened the morning of July 10 at The Pearl care home in Cannifton was legal. Bereaved and distraught, she claims MAiD practitioners took advantage of her grandmother’s vulnerability to perform the procedure, which she alleges was carried out without express consent. https://trib.al/vqrDMuf

Her story is just the tip of the iceberg. US Senator Mike Lee just posted this on X: “State-administered death is now more common in Canada than gun homicide is in the U.S. That didn’t happen by accident.” He used these figures:

Deaths from assisted dying: 16499
Deaths from firearm homicide: 15364
More people died through Canada’s assisted dying program than were killed with guns in the United States.

Kathleen Stock just released a book warning against assisted death: Do Not Go Gentle. I quoted from it here: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2026/09/13/a-big-win-against-the-pro-death-lobby/

In the book, penned before the Stegemann case, she looks at the killing hotspots such as Belgium, the Netherlands, and Oregon. She said this:

But of all the systems in which things seem to be going wrong, Canada’s is the most notorious. In 2023, 4.7% of all Canadian deaths were due to ‘medical assistance in dying’, or ‘MAID’ for short. There are reports of people being granted an assisted death because of non-terminal conditions such as chemical sensitivity to cigarette smoke, the effects of long Covid, or blindness. Poverty, homelessness, a lack of daily support, and feeling like a burden mean that many are choosing early death as an alternative to struggling on.

 

One applicant for an assisted death told a reporter she had no income and was unable to access food banks. ‘An increase [in income support] is the only thing that could save my life. I have no other reason to want to apply for assisted suicide, other than I simply cannot afford to keep on living.’ A woman with motor neurone disease opted for assisted death because she wasn’t offered enough carer hours at home. ‘Ultimately it was not a genetic disease that took me out, it was a system,’ her farewell note read.

 

As is the case in Belgium and the Netherlands, plans to extend the Canadian service to physically healthy people with severe psychological suffering have been formally approved, though implementation is postponed until 2027. Many health professionals feel out of their depth. One worried doctor told colleagues on a private forum that he doesn’t want assisted death ‘to become the solution to every kind of suffering out there’. (pp. 82-83)

A brand-new article is also worth discussing here. John A. Petrakis just published “What’s behind the rise of euthanasia in the West? Living on Borrowed Time” in The American Mind. He closes his piece by discussing “Nihilism, postmodern style”. He writes:

The liberalization of euthanasia laws not only offends the West’s pre-modern moral and religious traditions but also cannot be justified on the uniquely modern idea that euthanasia is a rational means of enhancing the individual’s willful control over his body and life. The deeper problem, however, is that this development is best understood as an expression of the radically skeptical postmodern spirit, which seeks cultural disruption for its own sake.

 

By annihilating the conviction that human life is valuable and worth preserving, euthanasia stands as a powerful addition to what Philip Rieff calls the “deathworks” of our anti-culture, whose inversions and negations of our civilizational inheritance ultimately lead to the negation of the human being. Indeed, shorn of any higher meaning, human life is readily reducible to the lowest common denominator — a bare pain/pleasure calculus that plays one of two roles in existing euthanasia regimes: either a restriction on voluntary cases or a requirement for non-voluntary ones. Were the spirit of nihilism to gain greater momentum, one should expect that the former role will eventually be abandoned, even if the latter is retained as the last available guardrail against wanton killing.

 

One might object that the causes of legal change should not be sought in nebulous metacultural theories but instead in material, socioeconomic reality. However, the material explanation offers no rosier picture in the case of euthanasia. The countries that have legalized it tend to have aging populations, below-replacement fertility rates, and unsustainable health care spending.

 

In this context, it would not be fanciful to suggest that our modern governing elites might be interested in legalizing and normalizing euthanasia for reasons of social utility — thus coming full circle to the worldview of the Social Darwinists, though our elites are more likely motivated by cost-cutting than genetic purification. Whether this explanation is more compelling (or comforting) than the cultural explanation is left to the reader, with the reminder that the two are not mutually exclusive. https://americanmind.org/salvo/whats-behind-the-rise-of-euthanasia-in-the-west/

The West has certainly become a culture of death. And when the state becomes complicit in this, and even promotes and encourages it, then you know that the West may well be on its last legs. Pray that your mother or grandmother does not meet the same horrific fate as Brigitte Stegemann did.

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