No Joke! Canada has approved a woman for death because she could no longer cook for her family. She was in her seventies, the matriarch who had built Sunday dinners and Christmas tables. When age took the kitchen from her, she concluded she had lost her value. She asked for Medical Assistance in Dying. The state said yes.
She was not terminally ill. She was not in unrelenting physical agony. She could not scramble the eggs, and that was enough.
The case comes from two University of Toronto psychiatrists, Gary Rodin and Madeline Li, writing in the New York Times under the title "We Implemented Canada's Assisted Dying Law. We're Concerned." These are not outside critics. They helped build the system. They still support legal assisted death. What alarms them is how little the law now requires before a life is ended. Canadian rules do not oblige a clinician to steer a patient toward counseling, support, or any other help. Approval can come first. Reflection, if it comes at all, comes later.
Counseling showed her that her family valued who she was, not what she cooked. She stepped back, at least for now. At Christmas she sat at the head of the table while others cooked and served. A life the paperwork had already cleared for disposal was still there.
Once the law dropped the requirement that natural death be "reasonably foreseeable," the gate was no longer terminal illness. It became a feeling of being finished — a feeling a bureaucracy is now willing to treat as a diagnosis.
This is how euthanasia becomes mainstream. It does not arrive announcing that the useless may be put down. It arrives as compassion for the dying, then expands to the depressed, the poor, the lonely, and finally the woman who can no longer feed her own. Each step is defended as an exception. The exceptions become the practice. Doctors who wrote the guidelines are now asking for a pause, because the machine they designed no longer pauses.
A society that will sign off on death for a lost recipe has already answered the harder question. Worth is no longer inherent. It is functional. When the function fails, the person may be deleted.
The woman in this story was fortunate: someone still talked to her before the needle. The next applicant may not get that conversation.
In a system this permissive, the inability to scramble an egg is no longer a reason to ask for help. It is a reason to die.
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