The public debate around Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) in Canada has started up again. This time it’s over whether it should be available to people with mental health challenges.
A lot of people are weighing in on the topic, including religious groups — many of them opposed to MAID in general, and also against extending it to people facing mental health issues.
For most, it is a theoretical issue. But I can report that the debate sounds very different when you are among those who are ill, like I am.
Since 2023, I have been dealing with long COVID. It has robbed me of energy, vitality, wellness and the ability to think clearly (brain fog). As a result of this condition, I have had to leave my work as dean at Tyndale Seminary in Toronto — work I loved and miss very much.
When you have an illness like long COVID that stretches on for years without effective treatment, adequate research, or even basic symptom management, the issue of MAID looks entirely different.
I am part of an online long COVID community group with more than 20,000 Canadians. Most in the group lack consistent medical care, cannot work and have no long-term disability coverage. A significant percentage do not even have a family doctor; for those who do, their physicians are unsure how to help or don’t fully understand what they are facing. Their lives are sustained by family support and whatever financial reserves remain.
In that situation, mental health suffers. I know this first-hand. I went from being a busy, engaged and productive person to someone who needs to take a break on the couch every 20 minutes due to debilitating symptoms. I can understand why some might say: Why bother? Why not end it now?
In that context, I have learned something sobering: people who are ill do not begin by wanting MAID. But with troubling regularity, someone will share in the group that they have started that conversation with their doctor. Then others quietly admit they have, too. Not because they are drawn to death and want to die, but because they cannot see a viable path forward.
I used to track the times I have seen this in our group. I stopped because there were so many.
I am not a proponent of MAID. I am an evangelical Christian — someone who is ordained, a theologian, and a seminary leader. I have long identified as “pro-life” in a consistent sense, including a commitment to nonviolence and a deep unease with any form of killing. For years, I have grieved the reality that people might seek assistance in ending their lives.
But now I also see more clearly why some want to do that.
By God’s grace, my circumstances include supports that many do not have. And I have lived a full life — to age 62 — with family and career. Yet it is not difficult for me to imagine how, with just a few pieces of life arranged differently, I could find myself in far more desperate conditions.
From within the experience of illness, the public Christian conversation against MAID can sound strange, off-putting and not from a place of compassion. When the loudest and most frequent voices are directed against MAID, but almost nobody from Canadian churches is advocating for investment in research into long COVID, or for better disability support, it can sound — however unintentionally — hollow.
If Christians want to promote a credible, winning “pro-life” witness today, I suggest that their loudest, most persistent and most united voices should be for better care, a strengthened social safety net and serious investment in research. They should tell us what they are for, not just what they are against.
To be clear: MAID is not something I am personally considering. But from within communities of ongoing suffering in Canada, what people most need to hear — what they are straining to hear — are strong, sustained and compassionate commitments to care from people of faith.
Love, in other words. Otherwise, all the arguments against MAID by well-meaning Christians will sound, as the Apostle Paul said in Corinthians, like a “clanging cymbal.”
