“What Happens After Killing Is Legalized: Inside Canada’s Euthanasia Experiment and Beyond” with Alex Schadenberg | Ep. 17

What happens after killing is legalized?

In this episode of Bioethics Babe, I sit down with Alex Schadenberg, Executive Director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, to examine what Canada’s euthanasia regime reveals about medicine, consent, and human dignity.

Euthanasia and assisted suicide are often framed as compassion about choice, autonomy, and relief from suffering. But as Canada’s MAiD system shows, once killing becomes legal, safeguards collapse, definitions expand, and the most vulnerable people are placed at risk.

In this conversation, we discuss:

• The moral difference between euthanasia, assisted suicide, and end-of-life care
• Why killing is always wrong and why every human life has inherent value
• How “quality of life” arguments become tools for discrimination
• Disturbing Canadian cases involving euthanasia without true consent
• Why disability, mental illness, poverty, and isolation increasingly intersect with euthanasia
• How safeguards are used to pass laws  then are quietly dismantled
• What the United States can learn from Canada, Europe, New Zealand, and Australia
• Why the “slippery slope” is no longer theoretical, but measurable

This is a difficult conversation, but a necessary one.

If we redefine care as killing, what happens to medicine, trust, and our responsibility to protect one another?