(LifeSiteNews) — Robert Munsch, the iconic children’s author who penned classics such as Love You Forever and The Paper Bag Princess, has been approved for euthanasia.

The New York Times broke the news in a long profile of Munsch published on September 14 titled, “When Dementia Steals the Imagination of a Children’s Book Writer.” Munsch told the Times that soon after he was diagnosed with dementia in 2021, he applied for “medical aid in dying.”

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The 80-year-old author told the Times that many of his memories are slipping away from him, and that he is losing his creative processes and his ability to think as he once did. “I can feel it going further and further away,” he said. He also lost many memories after suffering a stroke in 2008, although therapy did much to recover his faculties.

This time, however, Munsch applied for euthanasia. “Hello Doc – come and kill me!” he told the Times. “How much time do I have? Fifteen seconds!” He noted that the date of his lethal injection has not yet been chosen, and that by law he must be able to consent to euthanasia just before he is killed.

“I have to pick the moment when I can ask for it,” he explained. He noted that part of what prompted his decision was watching one of his brothers pass away from Lou Gehrig’s disease. Robert Munsch’s choice to apply for euthanasia will likely have a significant impact on normalizing “MAiD,” which already constitutes over 4 percent of annual recorded deaths in Canada.

Born in the United States, Munsch moved to Canada in 1975 and authored over 70 children’s books. He has sold over 30 million books, which have been translated into at least 20 languages.

Munsch’s 1986 classic Love You Forever has been much beloved by the pro-life movement. The story beautifully highlights the extraordinary love between a mother and her son. First, she holds him and rocks him each night, singing quietly: “I’ll love you forever, I’ll like you for always, as long as I’m living, my baby you’ll be.” When he is grown and she is very old and dying, he gathers his mother in his arms in turn; the book ends with the son cradling his own daughter and singing the lullaby to her.

Munsch wrote the story – which stayed on the bestseller list in Canada for three straight years – after two of his own children were stillborn; he eventually adopted three. His longtime publisher rejected it, and he had to find another to bring it to print. “The strange thing was that it was also the bestselling kid’s book in the USA, only nobody knew it, including me,” Munsch wrote on his website. “It never occurred to me that it could be an invisible bestseller.”

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Munsch’s work has earned him the Order of Canada, a star on Canada’s Walk of Fame, and one of the best-known names in children’s literature. The news that he will join over 60,000 other Canadians in dying by euthanasia is frankly heartbreaking. His decision does not merely send a message about autonomy and “medical choice”; it sends the message to generations of readers that a life with dementia is not worth living. These decisions, when made by famous cultural icons, unfortunately make a powerful statement.

Indeed, Munsch told the Times that he joked to his wife Ann that if he waited too long to consent to “medical aid in dying” and loses the capacity to meet the requirements for informed consent, “you’re stuck with me being a lump.” What a sad and tragic description of an elderly dementia-sufferer from a man who wrote Love You Forever.