The CARDUS Paper

CARDUS recently published a perspectives paper I wrote entitled, “For Such a Time as This: Articulating a Christian Ethic of Disability in the Context of MAiD.”

In this paper, I trace the legalization and ongoing normalization and expansion of Canada’s MAiD regime back to the outpouring of public support from both Christian and non-Christians that Saskatchewan farmer, Robert Latimer, garnered for the purported “mercy-killing” of his twelve-year-old daughter, Tracy, who had Cerebral Palsy.

Through this examination of the Latimer case as an origin of the acceptance, legalization, and ongoing push for the further expansion of MAiD in Canada, I demonstrate the ways in which ableism—

—has impacted the way MAiD is viewed and practiced in Canada.—has impacted the way MAiD is viewed and practiced in Canada.—has impacted the way MAiD is viewed and practiced in Canada.

I then go on to draw on literature from the academic fields of disability theology and disability ethics, as well as biblical texts in order to articulate a Christian ethic of disability in the context of MAiD.

More specifically, I delineate how disability theology, with its focus on understanding and interpreting the gospel of Jesus Christ, God, and humanity against the backdrop of the historical and contemporary experiences of people with disabilities, and disability ethics, with its focus on ensuring that the perspectives of people with lived experience of disability are central to discussions and debates about ethical issues involving disability and people with disabilities, operate as complements to one another in exposing and disrupting the medical and systemic ableism that devalues the lives of disabled people and makes them vulnerable to dying by MAiD.

The doctors told my parents that I was severely brain damaged, that I probably wouldn’t live very long (their estimates kept changing, from 3 hours, to 3 days, to 3 months, to 3 years), that, even if I somehow managed to survive, I would never walk, talk, or think, and that the best thing that my parents could do would be to put me into an institution and forget they ever had me.

Fortunately for me, my mom was a strong-willed German woman, who had lost her own father at a young age during the war, and who was determined not to let any child of hers experience that sense of fear and abandonment. Even more fortunately for me, my mom was also a woman of deep Christian faith,

Consequently, even though she was very unaccustomed to challenging those in authority, she firmly told the doctors advising her to put me into an institution, “No way, Jose!”—or, rather, the German equivalent thereof!

And instead, she took me home, not really knowing what my diagnosis was, or what my future held.

Tracy Latimer and the Beginning of My Advocacy

Fast forward almost (gulp!) sixty years, and I have spent the majority of my adult life as a disability rights advocate, working to try to prevent the increasing social acceptance and ultimate legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia for disabled people.

It was the murder of Tracy Latimer by her father in 1993, and the widespread media and public support that Robert Latimer garnered for this purported mercy killing, that first prompted me to become involved in the disability rights opposition to euthanasia and assisted suicide.

I can vividly remember watching with horror an installment of a CBC newsmagazine which posed the question, “When is it right to kill a disabled child?”

Shortly after the mainstream media began reporting how Robert Latimer killed Tracy by putting her in his truck and suffocating her with carbon monoxide, I said to my mother,

“I was pretty hard to take care of when I was young because I cried a lot and was generally demanding. Did you and dad ever, just in passing, consider doing what Latimer did to me?”

My mother replied matter-of-factly,

“No of course not, dear. That would go against everything we believe as Christians. And besides,’’ Mom added, in her pragmatic German way, “we didn’t have a car.”

When Christian Responses Made Me Feel Vulnerable

But I soon found out that not everyone shared my mom’s understanding of the connection between one’s Christian faith and how one viewed Robert Latimer’s killing of his daughter.

Disturbingly, I saw the mainstream media’s sympathetic portrayal of Robert Latimer reflected by some of my fellow Christians who argued that we should not condemn Robert Latimer for ending his daughter’s life because we can’t fully understand how hard it was for him to look after her or how hard it was for him, as a father, to watch his daughter suffer.

It seemed to me that the fact that Robert Latimer was nondisabled and a father meant that the majority of Canadians, Christian or not, found it much easier to identify with Robert than with Tracy.

I thus realized the likelihood that these same comments would be made if any of my friends with disabilities—or even if I, myself—were killed by a parent.

It was the first time in my life that I truly felt vulnerable as a Canadian, and a Christian, with disabilities.

MAiD, Disability, and Autonomy

Various pushes to legalize assisted suicide and euthanasia continued through the 1990s and into the first decades of the new millennium.

With each push to legalize or expand Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia (AS&E)—now referred to as “Medical Assistance in Dying” (MAiD) — in Canada came depictions of living with disabilities that characterized being dependent on others for assistance with basic needs like eating, dressing, and going to the toilet, as a life without dignity, and thus a fate worse than death.

Hence, I repeatedly witnessed the viability and the value of disabled lives like mine being debated in courtrooms, classrooms, and the media.

To my continual dismay, I repeatedly found people identifying as Christians on both sides of the debate.

Much to my consternation, I continue to find people identifying as Christians on both sides of the debate about the ongoing normalization and push for the further expansion of MAiD in Canada.

It was really this frustration that prompted me to approach my colleagues at CARDUS with the proposal for this paper.

From the outset, my two ultimate aims for this paper were to demonstrate the ways in which ableism—most basically defined as prejudice and discrimination on the basis of disability—has an impact on the way MAiD is viewed and practiced in Canada, and to help Christians and non-Christians gain a better understanding of how a Christian worldview shapes—or ought to shape—the way in which MAiD is understood and viewed, particularly in relation to disability.

as being clearly contradictory to the model of inherent human dependence on God and on one another that is presented in Scripture.as being clearly contradictory to the model of inherent human dependence on God and on one another that is presented in Scripture.

Concluding Thoughts

I end the paper with the following call to action:

“[E]very Christian in Canada has a responsibility to become aware of the direct dangers that ableism poses to disabled people, and to work to be genuine neighbours to them by affirming the value of their lives and consciously striving to mitigate the lethal dangers of medical, systemic, and internalized ableism. God alone knows how he could use us as Christians—and non-Christians, for that matter—to help dismantle ableism in our country and to save lives, if we were to actually get serious about doing this. May it be so.”

Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying: Eugenics Under Another Name?

In this article, Capurri undertakes a study of the Canadian Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) program initiated in 2016 and undergoing expansion ever since. This study tries to understand how it is that the Canadian government frames assisted dying as a viable and beneficial practice to both individuals and the public purse, while also exploring the rationale for its decision-making. The study begins by examining MAiD and its projected expansion (expected for March 2027) to cover a larger group of applicants than those initially qualifying when it was started.

Capurri argues that the program is first and foremost rooted in eugenics and economics as priorities in Canada at the government/administrative and society levels. Along with MAiD’s evident eugenic underpinnings, she interrogates the economic forms of logic that shape how governments enact and support policies, specifically during periods of financial recession.

In her overall analysis, she cautions about the serious implications that legalized assistance in dying could have not only on the individuals directly affected and their immediate families and friends, but also on the larger society. Capurri’s study thus provides crucial insights into both the eugenic underpinnings of Canada’s MAiD regime and the ethical toll that MAiD is taking on Canadian society.

Capurri, V. “Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying: Eugenics Under Another Name?” Canadian Journal of Disability Studies 14, no. 1 (2025): 45–70. https://doi.org/10.15353/cjds.v14i1.1210.

The Life Worth Living

More than 2,000 years ago, Aristotle said: “let there be a law that no deformed child shall live.”

This idea is alive and well today. During the past century, American Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. argued that the United States can forcibly sterilize intellectually disabled women and philosopher Peter Singer argued for the right of parents to euthanize certain cognitively disabled infants.

The Life Worth Living explores how and why such arguments persist by investigating the exclusion of and discrimination against disabled people across the history of Western moral philosophy. In this book, Joel Michael Reynolds argues that this history demonstrates a fundamental mischaracterization of the meaning of disability, thanks to the conflation of lived experiences of disability with those of pain and suffering.

Building on decades of activism and scholarship in the field, Reynolds, a leading disability ethicist, shows how longstanding views of disability are misguided and unjust, and he lays out a vision of what an anti-ableist moral future requires. Joel Reynolds’ scholarship thus provides crucial insight into the ways in which ableism in moral philosophy and medicine results in the devaluation of the lives of disabled people from the time of ancient Greece right up to the Western world of the present day.

Reynolds, J.M. The Life Worth Living: Disability, Pain, and Morality. University of Minnesota Press, 2022.

Vulnerable Communion by Thomas Reynolds

In this book, Thomas Reynolds questions the ideals of self-sufficiency and autonomy upon which our culture is based, and argues that “The idea of an autonomous and self-constituting person is an illusion. It neglects the role community has in identity formation. Relation with others is primary, not secondary” (p. 83).

He further posits that the Christian story is one of strength coming from weakness, of wholeness emerging from brokenness, and of power in vulnerability. Hence, Thomas Reynolds’ book provides some important insights into the ways in which Disability Theology offers a powerful critique of our obsession with self-sufficiency and autonomy, both in Western society generally and within the church.

Reynolds, T.E. Vulnerable Communion: A Theology of Disability and Hospitality. Brazos, 2008.

Disability Theology by John Swinton

In this article, leading disability theologian, John Swinton, defines disability theology in the following terms, “disability theology is the attempt by disabled and non-disabled Christians to understand and interpret the gospel of Jesus Christ, God, and humanity against the backdrop of the historical and contemporary experiences of people with disabilities. It has come to refer to a variety of perspectives and methods designed to give voice to the rich and diverse theological meanings of the human experience of disability” (p. 249).

Swinton goes on to argue that, when it comes to disability, the tendency within the pastoral and ethical literature has been to concentrate on issues around pastoral care and ethics.

Here disability is seen as a pastoral or ethical issue with little or no concentrated attention paid to the theological implications. The focus is on ethical dilemmas, such as whether or not prenatal testing for disability is appropriate, or pastoral matters around how to make sure that churches are accessible to people in wheelchairs. There is of course nothing wrong with such approaches. We all need pastoral care and all of us need the tools to deal with complex ethical challenges.

Disability theology acknowledges the importance of such things but seeks to push further into a broader range of theological issues, which includes but is not defined by the pastoral and the ethical. Most crucially, Swinton emphasizes the fact that disability theology centers the lived experience of disabled people in discerning and articulating the diverse theological meanings of disability.

Thus, although Swinton, of course, does not apply disability theology to the issue of MAiD in this article, his formulation of the definition and function of disability theology effectively illustrates what makes it an essential component in articulating a Christian ethic of disability in the context of MAiD.

Swinton, J. “Disability Theology.” In The New Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine, edited by M. Allen. Cambridge University Press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108885959.018.