Winning hearts and minds on the issue of euthanasia in Canada means deploying what Ontario pro-life speaker Blaise Alleyne calls “Heart Apologetics”: listening, understanding, and communicating truth with love.
On the euthanasia debate, it means appealing to reason and equality, a call for improved pain management and palliative care, and delivering a message of hope, Alleyne said.
“When we frame it as a suicide question, which is what it really is, a question about helping someone to end their own life, we tap into the cultural common ground: a belief in suicide prevention. And we make the case for human equality, that everyone should have an equal right to suicide prevention,” Alleyne said in an interview.
“We can make the case that suicide prevention is always the answer and that we should never give in to suicidal despair; but that there is always hope for meaning and purpose in life,” he said.
An unlikely counter-cultural artist-activist, Alleyne, 36, sports a blue-coloured mohawk. He is a technologist and a musician-songwriter (he plays violin).
“I’m interested in finding unity behind diversity at the intersection of culture and technology,” he wrote on his website.
Alleyne is also the eastern strategic initiatives director of the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform, which offers pro-life initiatives from Ontario to Newfoundland. When we spoke he was preparing to speak at the country’s largest pro-life demonstration, the annual March for Life in Ottawa on May 9. He is also the chair of the Toronto March for Life, which took place on May 11.
He told a recent audience in Hamilton, Ont., that MAiD proponents defend what they’re doing by calls to individual autonomy and “freedom of choice.”
“Finding meaning and purpose is the antidote” to the pro-choice arguments that promote MAID, Alleyne said. “A message of hope can change hearts and minds.”
“Should we ever prevent suicide?” he asked his audience. “If everyone has the right to die, we should dismantle suicide prevention,” Alleyne postulated.
But the reality is that “suicide is the ultimate self-harm,” he said.
Which leads him to ask, “Why do we quit on some people?” referring to MAID being considered acceptable for people with terminal illness, incurable medical conditions, and unbearable suffering.
He showed a video of a doctor working in palliative care research and discussing a survey where people shared having increased feelings of anxiety and depression due to their physical pain and suffering, a situation that leads some to suicide ideation, believing there is lack of meaning in their life.
Alleyne also presented a news story about a mother whose daughter was born with spina bifida. A doctor recommended MAiD and told the mother she was “selfish” when she rejected it.
Such mistreatment of individuals with disabilities amounts to a “deadly form of ableism,” he said.
People are “not comfortable with ableism. It is controversial, and rightly so,” he said.
The pro-life position is not about prolonging a person’s life for the sake of prolonging life, Alleyne said. The call is to help “eliminate the suffering, not the sufferer,” he said.
Given various surveys and anecdotal evidence from some patients living with terminal illness, debilitating health conditions, and socio-economic hardships, Alleyne said investment is badly needed to fund adequate mental health resources and effective pain management programs. Also needed is the building of a culture of compassion toward those who are vulnerable, to help people “find meaning, purpose, and closure at the end of their life.”
Danny Ricci, 39, an organizer of the talk, said Alleyne is an effective speaker because he’s “not looking for gotcha moments. It’s more about how to get people to think about the issues.”
“There’s a lack of knowledge in Canada. We need more awareness to get the word out that MAID is not the answer,” Ricci said.
“We need better palliative care in this country and access to it,” he said.
The next stage of the MAID debate will be extending it to individuals with mental illness.
On Feb. 1, 2024, the federal government announced that it was delaying its extension of MAID to individuals whose sole medical condition is mental illness until 2027.
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