Disability rights advocates urge putting the brakes on assisted suicide

Matt Vallière (at left), executive director of the Patients Rights Action Fund, and Inclusion Canada CEO Krista Carr (at right) discuss opposition to assisted suicide at a Religion News Association panel moderated by EWTN News President Montse Alvarado (center) on April 4, 2025. / Credit: Ken Oliver/CNA

Washington D.C., Apr 4, 2025 / 19:52 pm (CNA).

Advocates for those with disabilities focused on what they call troubling trends in government-backed assisted suicide programs in the United States and Canada during a panel on the subject held Friday at the 2025 annual conference of the Religion News Association.

Although physician-assisted suicide is still illegal in most parts of the world, the practice is currently legal in about a dozen countries, including Canada, Germany, Spain, and Belgium, along with 10 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.

The phenomenon is causing growing concern for patients’ rights advocates and disability rights advocates who have warned that jurisdictions that allow assisted suicide are failing to provide necessary life-affirming care for vulnerable populations in need of it and are rather encouraging suicide as a cheaper, quicker, and easier option.

According to Matt Vallière, executive director of the Patients Rights Action Fund, U.S. state-level assisted suicide programs are discriminatory against people with life-threatening conditions and are a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Vallière spoke at the conference along with Krista Carr, CEO of Inclusion Canada, during an April 4 panel moderated by EWTN News President Montse Alvarado.

Illustrating the problem, Vallière pointed out that many states do “not guarantee palliative care,” yet “they will pay for every instance of assisted suicide.”

“I don’t call that autonomy, I call that eugenics,” he emphasized.

In Canada, Carr’s organization has filed a lawsuit against Canada’s medical assistance in dying (MAID) program. The lawsuit focuses on the country’s expansion of MAID to include people with disabilities that are not immediately life-threatening. 

Canada has expanded the program, Carr explained, to “people with an incurable disease or disability who are not dying, so they’re not at [the] end of life and their death is not reasonably foreseeable,” Carr indicated. She noted the government plans to expand the program even further in 2027 to include people who have mental illnesses. 

Carr warned that “it’s being called a choice,” but “it’s not a choice.” Similar to Vallière’s concerns with the United States, Carr said assisted suicide is being pushed on people who are in “a desperate situation where they can’t get the support they need.”

According to Carr, Canada does not guarantee a right to live a decent life, but “we do have a right, a funded right, to a lethal injection.”

Carr noted that last week, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities recommended that Canada repeal the application of the MAID program to people “whose natural death is not reasonably foreseeable” as well as halt extension of the program to people whose “sole underlying medical condition is a mental illness.”