'Dead people don't collect disability benefits': Is pause on euthanizing the mentally ill in Canada just smoke and mirrors?



After announcing on Wednesday that it was pumping the brakes on making the mentally ill eligible for euthanasia in Canada, Carney's Liberal government killed Conservative legislation that would have made the pause permanent.

"If the government truly believed in preventing MAID for cases of mental illness, then they would have supported our bill," Conservative MP Tamara Jansen, the author of the defeated bill, said in a statement shared with Blaze News. "But when Canadians needed action, the Liberals chose politics."

'The cost savings associated with [euthanizing] the mentally ill could reach up to CAD $63.076 billion.'

Since Canada legalized euthanasia nationwide under ex-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2016, the resultant Medical Assistance in Dying program has been grossly liberalized, becoming a leading cause of death in Canada and claiming the lives of ineligible victims.

The Liberal government, now headed by globalist Prime Minister Mark Carney, expanded the program in February 2024 to enable euthanizing people suffering solely from mental illness.

While the original plan was for the mentally ill to be eligible for extermination the following month, their eligibility date was pushed back to March 2027.

Sean Fraser, Canada's attorney general, announced on Wednesday that the government would once again hold off on offering MAID to the mentally ill.

"Serious concerns remain regarding the safe and consistent evaluation of marketing authorization applications for mental illness," stated Fraser. "Canada will therefore not proceed with the planned expansion when mental illness is the sole underlying medical condition."

RELATED: Canada kills 83-year-old Christian grandmother without consent, family claims — outrage ensues

Canadian Attorney General Sean Fraser. Arlyn McAdorey/Bloomberg/Getty Images.

Conservative MP Tamara Jansen had a bill ready to codify the government's rejection of MAID for the mentally ill and to affirm that "a mental disorder is not a grievous and irremediable medical condition" that alone would satisfy the eligibility criteria for MAID.

The preamble of "The Right to Recover Act" stresses that "vulnerable Canadians should receive suicide prevention counseling rather than access to medical assistance in dying" and that "Canada’s medical assistance in dying regime risks normalizing assisted dying as a solution for those suffering from a mental disorder."

The bill was, however, defeated in a 187-141 vote in parliament on Wednesday. All but two Liberal members of parliament voted in opposition.

'They can still be killed by euthanasia in Canada if they have another medical condition.'

Fraser cited the bill's use of the term "mental disorder" as opposed to "mental illness" as the primary reason for why the Liberals voted in opposition.

"Mental disorder," he suggested, could be interpreted to include some of the neurologically degenerative diseases that presently can be provided as cause for MAID.

"Disagreement over terminology was not a reason to kill this necessary bill," said Jansen. "Conservatives were prepared to work through those concerns at committee. But with less than six months remaining before the current exclusion expires, Parliament does not have time to let technical disagreements stand in the way of action."

Nicole Scheidl, the executive director of Canadian Physicians for Life, also isn't buying the government's explanation for killing the bill.

Scheidl indicated to Blaze News that it was a way for the Liberals to "shoehorn" advanced consent for MAID into the alternative, yet-to-be produced bill that Fraser suggested will be introduced later in the parliamentary session "so that there's very limited time to debate."

"They want to shut down debate, and so they're going to hold that [mentally ill] population hostage to allow them to push through euthanasia for dementia," said Scheidl.

Fraser, whose office did not respond to Blaze News' request for comment, admitted this week that the government ultimately wants to "allow adults diagnosed with a disease such as Alzheimer’s at an early stage to make an advance request for MAID."

In the meantime, Canada can still kill the mentally ill, Alex Schadenberg, the executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, told Blaze News.

"Right now under the law, someone who has a mental illness — even if that mental illness is driving them to suicidal ideation — they can still be killed by euthanasia in Canada if they have another medical condition," said Schadenberg. "So if someone, let's say, had a difficult condition of diabetes, it would be the diabetes they'd be approved for."

Schadenberg cited the case of 26-year-old Kiano Vafaeian, who was euthanized on Dec. 30, 2025. His family told Global News that while diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes and partial vision loss, Vafaeian's primary struggle was with mental health issues.

"He said everything the doctors needed to hear in order to approve him," said his mother, Margaret Marsilla. "Was he actually feeling that way? I strongly believe not."

"A large number of Canadians have something that would qualify them for euthanasia," Scheidl told Blaze News. "So then if they're depressed on top of that, and they can't really think straight, and they're more inclined to choose that option, then there's nothing to protect them. There's nothing to stop it. The [MAID] assessments are not really effective at seeing if people are suicidal or depressed."

The same government that has made it easy for vulnerable people like Vafaeian to check out has boasted of the savings associated with the program.

Canada's Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer noted in an October 2020 report that 6,465 deaths under what was then a more restrictive MAID program would result in a total gross reduction in health care costs of $109.2 million in 2021.

"Their estimates were very, very low and their numbers were way off because they underestimated the number of deaths we would have," said Schadenberg.

In a study published in February 2025, researchers at Western University explored the "potential economic savings from expanding medical assistance in dying in Canada, where it is currently a leading cause of death, to include vulnerable groups that cost the government more than they contribute in taxes," including Indians, the homeless, the retired elderly, drug addicts, and the mentally ill.

"The cost savings associated with the mentally ill could reach up to CAD $63.076 billion," said the researchers, "while for the retired elderly population, the savings could be CAD $54.2 billion in the voluntary scenario or as high as CAD $1.2 trillion in a nonvoluntary scenario."

"Dead people don't cost money," Schadenberg told Blaze News. "Dead people don't collect pensions. Dead people don't collect disability benefits. And you've got a government, well, provincially and federally, that are running massive deficits. So a lot of incentive."

While the Canadian government has not officially rolled out a nonvoluntary MAID program, Scheidl noted that there is already plenty of "coercion that is happening under the umbrella of this regime."

"There are a lot of individuals who feel they have no choice," said Scheidl. "They are dealing with either caregivers who are completely burnt out and can't care for them [or] they have no other health care options. Hospice is denied to them. Palliative care is not available. Pain care is completely inadequate."

"We're wholly inadequate in our care for those who are suffering or at the end of life. But we're very, very good and very, very fast at delivering euthanasia."

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Silicon Valley didn’t birth the transhumanist project. This forgotten Moscow librarian did.



Most people blame the nation’s treacherous climb to AI domination and the dystopian push for human enhancement on Silicon Valley.

But Glenn Beck says the true genesis of the transhumanist project traces back to a man who lived nearly a century before Silicon Valley was even a concept. Nikolai Fyodorov, a Moscow librarian and nearly forgotten 19th-century thinker, penned his vision for humanity in the 1880s, and it had all the makings of the chilling blueprint we are watching rapidly come to fruition today.

Fyodorov, Glenn explains, believed and taught anyone who would listen that “every religion and every philosophy had gotten the assignment wrong.”

“He thought death was not a fact of nature to be made peace with. He said death was the enemy, and the entire human race needed to be united using science. And they had one job: stop death,” he recounts.

This “common task” of stopping death led Fyodorov to suggest that all the “scattered atoms of every human being who had ever died” be gathered in order to “resurrect all generations.”

His plan to create space for the risen dead was to “colonize space.”

While Fyodorov has largely been forgotten in the modern age, he had the ear of many writers we still revere today.

“Tolstoy sat at this man’s feet. Dostoevsky read him; wrote back that he agreed essentially with everything he said,” says Glenn.

But perhaps most notably, Fyodorov took in and mentored Konstantin Tsiolkovsky — a deaf, rejected boy who would eventually write the “rocket equation” and become “the father of Soviet rocketry.”

“Every Soviet cosmonaut, Sputnik, the space race that put us on the moon — all of that traces back through that kid and to the old man in the library whose reason for wanting rockets was that he needed somewhere to put all the resurrected dead,” says Glenn.

Roughly 40 years after Fyodorov’s 1880s lectures, his dark vision got a scientific vocabulary thanks to a Jesuit paleontologist named Teilhard de Chardin and a Russian geochemist named Vladimir Vernadsky. Together, they coined the term “noosphere” — “a layer of thought that wrapped the planet” that would be “the next stage of human evolution,” Glenn explains.

“Teilhard took it the furthest. He said all human consciousness needed to converge into one, and he called this the point of omega,” he adds, noting that his book on this subject was published only following his death because the Catholic Church “thought he was out of his mind.”

About five years later, when the book was translated into English, it was none other than Julian Huxley — brother of “Brave New World" author Aldous Huxley, president of the British Eugenics Society, and first director-general of UNESCO — who wrote the introduction.

“Julian Huxley gave the movement its name. His phrase was: man remaining man but transcending himself,” says Glenn.

While UNESCO refused to adopt Huxley’s pamphlet "UNESCO: Its Purpose and Its Philosophy," forcing him to “publish it under his own name,” it still embraced him as its chief leader.

“So nobody can say the United Nations was founded as a transhumanist project, but they can't say that the man who wrote it down wasn't running their agency for two years [and] wasn’t the founding guy,” says Glenn.

Pieced together, this story blows his mind.

“The chain is a Moscow librarian who said, ‘Nobody should die. We should resurrect everybody. We have to beat death.' And he passed it on to a kid who became the rocket scientist for the Soviet space program. … The whole program was given a scientific vocabulary in Paris by a priest and walked into the permanent architecture of the postwar world by a eugenist who had a famous last name,” Glenn summarizes.

The lesson here is that today’s tech lords are fighting over a project older than they are.

“These guys didn't all meet in a smoke-filled room. There's no conspiracy here. It's just books, students, and time,” says Glenn.

“Why am I telling you this story? Because you can't understand the men currently shaping our life until you understand what they are fighting over as an inheritance.”

To hear more, watch the video above.

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'It's insanity': Massachusetts Democrats pass bill that would make it open season on viable babies



"It's insanity," James Lyons told Blaze News about the latest abortion bill making its way through the Massachusetts legislature. Lyons, a former state representative and past chairman of the Massachusetts Republican Party, added, "And it has to stop."

A long-standing line, one that most radical abortion legislation rarely crosses, is viability outside the womb. The rate of survival for a baby born during the 23rd week of pregnancy is 23%-27%, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. At 24 weeks the survival rate jumps dramatically to 42%-59%.

'The legislation promises that an already ominous shadow will grow even darker over the state.'

Democrats in the Massachusetts House overwhelmingly passed a bill in a 199-33 vote on Wednesday that would greatly expand abortion access past 24 weeks, effectively making it open season on viable human beings.

Advocates for the unborn have emphasized the extreme nature of this legislation and called for the state Senate to kill it outright.

Massachusetts law currently prohibits abortion past 24 weeks unless executed by a doctor who has determined it is necessary to preserve the life of the mother; necessary to preserve the mother's physical or mental health; warranted because of a lethal fetal anomaly or diagnosis; or warranted "because of a grave fetal diagnosis that indicates that the fetus is incompatible with sustained life outside of the uterus without extraordinary medical interventions."

The bill recently passed by the House, H. 5595, would scrap these requirements for late-term abortions, enabling an abortion to be committed against a preborn baby past 24 weeks solely "based upon the professional judgment of the physician."

H. 5595 would also change state law to bar any medical review process from overriding the decision by a doctor and patient to execute a late-term abortion, and would eliminate the requirement that except in an emergency situation, late-term abortions must be performed "in a hospital duly authorized to provide facilities for obstetrical services."

RELATED: 'Very s***ty': Gay couple sue surrogate mother who REFUSED to abort baby with minor birth defect: Report

Bromberger Hoover Photography/Getty Images

Lyons further told Blaze News, "It is absolutely unconscionable what these people are doing in Massachusetts."

He then noted that this is the latest in a sequence of radical pro-abortion maneuvers, including:

  • the 2020 Roe Act, which not only codified abortion rights into state law, enabled abortions after 24 weeks with the now-threatened restrictions, and lowered the age at which women can seek abortion without the consent of a parent or judge, but scrapped a provision in state law that required doctors to "take all reasonable steps ... to preserve the life and health of the aborted child" if the baby survived the attempted abortion; and
  • Gov. Maura Healey's (D) taxpayer-funded initiative to attack crisis pregnancy centers, which she complained were dissuading women from getting abortions.

"The reason that they're getting away with it is because the Massachusetts legislature is dominated by radical leftists, and they unfortunately have done everything they can possibly do to silence any opposition," said Lyons, who changed parties from Democrat to Republican in 1983 in part because of President Ronald Reagan but also because "there was no question about it that the Democratic Party was being taken over ... by the radical left."

Democratic state Rep. Christine Barber, a radical leftist with endorsements by Planned Parenthood and Reproductive Equity Now, told the Boston Globe that the late-term abortion bill is aimed at sparing residents from the inconvenience of having to travel out of state to kill their preborn children.

"Patients have to leave to other states, leave their support network, and pay out of pocket," Barber said. "You should be able to get care that your doctors are recommending here in Massachusetts."

'The fight is not over.'

Barber cited as an example the trip that one resident, Kate Dineen, made to Maryland in 2022 to kill her 33-week-old baby. The boy suffered a stroke in utero and was reportedly given a 50% chance of dying before delivery. Dineen had a Maryland abortionist administer a lethal injection to the boy, whose remains she later delivered in Boston.

Reproductive Equity Now, an organization that has also used the out-of-state execution of Dineen's baby to promote this legislation, celebrated the passage of H. 5595.

Claire Teylouni, interim co-executive director of the pro-abortion group, stated, "We are thrilled to see the Massachusetts House of Representatives take this crucial step to expand abortion access across the Commonwealth."

Advocates for the unborn alternatively condemned Democrats' campaign against the preborn.

Fr. Daniel Pacholec, direct of the Respect Life Office for the Catholic Diocese of Springfield, noted, "Massachusetts already has one of the most progressive abortion laws in the country, and this goes even further. This should make everyone squeamish. This is not a partisan issue. This is about human decency."

Massachusetts Citizens for Life noted that "the bill passed despite the concerns of thousands of Massachusetts residents who contacted legislators and shared their opposition, and despite the fact that it would allow unborn children who are capable of feeling pain and surviving outside the womb to be killed."

"Women experiencing unimaginable, heart-wrenching pregnancy complications absolutely deserve all the support they need, but that support is not what this bill provides," said Myrna Maloney Flynn, president of MCFL, in a statement shared by the diocese. "Instead, this bill ensures increased abortion industry profits and taxpayer-funded late-term procedures. The legislation promises that an already ominous shadow will grow even darker over the state of Massachusetts."

The MCFL has stressed that "the fight is not over" and urged Bay Staters to urge their state senators to oppose the version before them now, S.1563.

The Massachusetts Family Institute has also condemned the bill, noting that it would "end virtually all abortion restrictions in Massachusetts, allowing abortion at full term with no medical justification or second opinion required — for any reason, or none at all."

When asked whether the goal of this and related legislation is to make the Bay State a national abortion destination, Lyons told Blaze News, "It certainly seems that way. And as a matter of fact, the Shield Act that was put in place was a direct result of the pressure that they were seeing outside of Massachusetts to let people know you can come here and we will protect you."

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'Very s***ty': Gay couple sue surrogate mother who REFUSED to abort baby with minor birth defect: Report



A legal battle has cast an unflattering light on the ugly business of surrogacy as well as on the eugenicist mentality that predominates in Canada — a country whose health care system was founded by a eugenicist, where euthanasia is now a leading cause of death, and where there are no legal limits on abortion.

According to a damning new report from the National Post in which the names of parties involved were withheld, a homosexual couple is suing a surrogate mother who two years ago refused their request to abort the baby boy over whom they now have legal custody.

'They are suing the woman who brought their son to them.'

The lawsuit, filed in Ontario Superior Court in May, alleges that the surrogate mother failed to keep the gay couple informed about the health status of the baby, endangered the baby, caused the homosexuals so much emotional distress that one missed work for two months, and violated the plaintiffs' confidentiality, reported the Post.

The target of the lawsuit, a resident of Ontario's Muskoka region who works as a correctional officer, has denied all of the allegations and told the Post, "You know I'm a single mom, you know I have a daughter, and you're basically suing me for my house. It seems very s***ty, it's just awful."

"I just feel used," continued the woman, who claimed that the plaintiffs have indicated they are seeking roughly $600,000 in damages. "They didn't get the perfect child they wanted, and they threw me away."

It is unlawful under Canada's Assisted Human Reproduction Act to pay a woman to be a surrogate mother or to pay to arrange the services of a surrogate mother. Surrogacy is not, however, prohibited "so long as a surrogate mother in Canada makes this decision for altruistic reasons (i.e., without financial or other gain)."

A surrogate mother can only be repaid for out-of-pocket costs directly related to her pregnancy.

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BSIP/Education Images/Universal Images Group/Getty Image

The surrogate mother targeted by the lawsuit told the Post that she became interested in surrogacy after seeing a pair of close friends face reproductive obstacles.

After her profile was shared on the website of the referral organization Surrogacy in Canada Online, the woman was inundated with messages from individuals seeking her services, she claimed. Following an extensive screening process, she ultimately entered a contract with the homosexual couple now suing her.

According to the surrogate mother who underwent in-vitro fertilization with embryos produced with a donor egg and each of the homosexual's sperm, her relationship with the couple was positive until June 2024, when she informed them that an ultrasound indicated the baby had a cleft lip and potentially a cleft palate and minor heart defect as well.

The couple said in a letter reviewed by the Post, "Considering that medical tests indicate that the fetus has, or is likely to have, a genetic, chromosomal or other abnormality or defect, and in accordance with article 8.5 (a) of our surrogacy agreement ... we want to inform you of our wish that the pregnancy be terminated."

"Although very difficult, this decision is free and informed," added the couple, which is being represented by Jonathan Lancaster, a litigator at the Toronto-headquartered firm Fasken.

While proposed legislation criminalizing the coercion of pregnant women to abort their babies was defeated in 2010, Juliet Guichon, a bioethics professor at the University of Calgary, told the Post that Canadian law makes clear that the decision of whether to abort a baby ultimately rests with the expectant mother.

The surrogate mother refused to kill the 22-week-old baby over what she regarded as a superficial condition.

After hearing from doctors at Mount Sinai Hospital that the baby was generally healthy, the homosexual couple allegedly greenlit the continuation of the pregnancy.

The relationship between the surrogate mother and the homosexual couple continued to deteriorate when the woman decided to keep to the original plan of having the baby delivered at home by midwives.

The surrogate mother noted that the child had breathing problems on delivery but was provided oxygen by the midwives and then promptly taken to a hospital.

The homosexual couple who sought the baby's death ended up taking him home, then effectively suspended contact with the surrogate, according to the mother.

Under Ontario's All Families Are Equal Act, "the child ceases to be the child of the surrogate and the surrogate ceases to be a parent of the child" if the surrogate has entered into a surrogacy agreement before the child is conceived, has received independent legal advice in advance of entering the agreement, and the child is conceived through assisted reproduction.

The surrogate mother only enjoys the rights and responsibilities of a parent with respect to the child until the baby is 7 days old.

RELATED: Britain's first homosexual 'parent' via baby purchase charged with rape, sexual exploitation

PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP/Getty Images

After repeated requests for her outstanding expenses — including for lost income and transportation costs — allegedly went unanswered, the surrogate mother attempted to take the homosexual couple to small-claims court only to discover that her surrogacy contract required the resolution of such disputes by arbitration.

'The practice of surrogacy itself cannot be reconciled with the dignity and rights of the two persons it most directly concerns.'

The Post reported that the homosexual couple subsequently filed a lawsuit, alleging that the mother put the baby's health at risk by negligent behavior and by "failing to follow the (parents') direction regarding decisions affecting the fetus' medical care"; violated their confidentiality; and caused them emotional distress.

Blaze News did not immediately receive a response from the couple's attorney.

"What I find most difficult in this is they are suing the woman who brought their son to them," Sally Rhoads-Heinrich, the owner of Surrogacy in Canada Online, told the Post. "How is their son going to feel some day if he learns that?"

Guichon, who emphasized that the homosexual couple sought to end the baby's life over a medical condition that "can be completely overcome by surgery and therapy," noted that "the question arises as to whether it is in the best interests of the child to be raised by these people."

A political declaration calling for the global abolition of surrogacy was launched at a high-level side event at the U.N. Human Rights Council last month co-hosted by the Vatican and the governments of Italy, Chile, and Cameroon.

"The practice of surrogacy itself cannot be reconciled with the dignity and rights of the two persons it most directly concerns," said Archbishop Ettore Balestrero, an Italian prelate of the Catholic Church who works in the diplomatic service of the Holy See.

"The human person can never be the basis of a commercial contract. Every child has the right to an origin that is fully human. And under the convention on the rights of the child, the child also has the right to preserve his or her identity and as far as possible to know and be cared for by his or her parents," continued Balestrero. "Surrogacy equally violates the dignity of the woman. It is rarely the privileged who carry children for others. The market of surrogacy is built overwhelmingly on the material need of women in situations of poverty and economic vulnerability."

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Priest breaks hip — now Canada apparently wants him dead



Rev. Lawrence Holland fell in his bathroom on Christmas Day and suffered a hip fracture. While the 79-year-old Catholic priest went to a nearby hospital in search of help, health care workers at the facility apparently had a final solution in mind: state-facilitated suicide.

Since the Canadian federal government under ex-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau legalized medically assisted suicide nationwide in 2016, the so-called Medical Assistance in Dying program has been grossly liberalized.

'The moment you lose hope, the devil comes in.'

Initially, MAID applicants had to be 18 or older and suffering from a "grievous and irremediable medical condition" causing "enduring physical or psychological suffering that is intolerable" to them. Now, persons struggling with anxiety, autism, depression, economic hardship, PTSD, and other survivable issues appear to be fair game.

Next year, persons suffering solely from a mental illness will also be eligible.

MAID — which Canada's Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer boasted in October 2020 would, with expanded access, "result in a net reduction in health care costs for the provincial governments" — is now among the leading causes of death in Canada, accounting for over 5% of all deaths in Canada in 2024.

"It's a false compassion," Rev. Holland told the B.C. Catholic, the Archdiocese of Vancouver's biweekly publication.

The hobbled priest claimed that a doctor and a nurse at Vancouver General Hospital, directly affiliated with the British Columbia Ministry of Health, offered him MAID while he was recovering from his hip fracture, which is hardly a terminal condition. The priest further claimed that both medical professionals knew he is a Catholic priest.

"I think I was very shocked," said Holland. "It is such a sensitive subject."

Rev. Larry Lynn, pro-life chaplain for the Archdiocese of Vancouver, said, "This must surely be among the most appalling examples of Canada’s coercive and insensitive euthanasia regime."

RELATED: Euthanasia and the lie of the 'good death'

Mininyx Doodle/Getty Images

Although he was left "kind of silent" for a moment when the topic of assisted suicide was first apparently broached, Rev. Holland emphasized to the doctor that he, a Catholic priest, was morally opposed to the practice.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that direct euthanasia is "morally unacceptable"; that such actions constitute "a murder gravely contrary to the dignity of the human person and to the respect due to the living God, his Creator; and that "even if death is thought imminent, the ordinary care owed to a sick person cannot be legitimately interrupted."

The Catholic Church has long campaigned against assisted suicide.

The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops noted in 2023, for instance, that "euthanasia and assisted suicide (MAID) have always been, and will always be, morally unacceptable because they are affronts to human dignity and violations of natural and divine law."

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has similarly and repeatedly condemned the practice, affirming that "we are dealing here with 'a violation of the divine law, an offense against the dignity of the human person, a crime against life, and an attack on humanity.'"

Just last month, Catholic bishops in New York published a guidebook reiterating the church's moral teaching "that this practice is objectively immoral and must be avoided, despite the false veil of compassion with which it is sold." The state was apparently in need of a reminder given its recent adoption of a law legalizing doctor-assisted suicide.

Even when dealing with a patient from a "faith community" that's opposed to MAID, the Canadian Association of MAID Assessors and Providers still recommends that Canadian health care professionals make the pitch for assisted suicide.

After informing his doctor that he was opposed to assisted suicide, Rev. Holland recalled the doctor explaining that he "just wanted to make sure that, if a [terminal] diagnosis came up or not ... I knew the different services I had access to."

Rev. Holland told the B.C. Catholic that weeks later, a nurse also raised the matter of MAID with him.

A spokesman for Vancouver Coastal Health, which runs the hospital, told the B.C. Catholic that "staff may consider bringing up MAID based on their clinical judgment, provided they possess the necessary knowledge and skills to do so."

Staff are also "responsible for answering questions when patients bring up the topic of MAID," added the spokesman.

Rev. Ronald Sequeria, the Catholic chaplain serving at Vancouver General Hospital, suggested there was something demonic about how MAID-pushers prey on suffering patients' despair — especially when suffering can be redemptive.

"The moment you lose hope, the devil comes in, in different personalities, and says, 'Do you want MAID? I don’t want people to suffer,'" said Rev. Sequeira.

"God makes us more pure, more strong, through the suffering when we offer it up," said the chaplain. "So we give hope — help them not to lose hope."

Rev. Holland drove home this point, stressing that enduring pain "can encourage growth."

"It can motivate you, it can open up new worlds, new vistas, new opportunities," added the priest.

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