(LifeSiteNews) — The great victory of suicide activists has been to sanitize and medicalize the killing of human beings. We cannot use words like “suicide” or “killing”; we must instead use false, propagandistic language like “medical aid in dying” or, preferably, the official-sounding acronym “MAID.” Suicide and killing still make us uncomfortable, and so the terms have been whisked carefully out of sight.

The propaganda constantly being pumped into the public is that a death by lethal injection is not only morally acceptable, but beautiful and peaceful. Conversely, dying naturally is presented as grim, painful, and horrible both for the person who is dying and for his or her family. The CBC and other press outlets have consistently presented restrictions on euthanasia as cruel measures that force people to experience awful pain.

Occasionally, we catch glimpses of the truth. “An Ontario man groaned, grimaced and repeated ‘help me’ while undergoing doctor-assisted death after one of the drugs didn’t produce the anticipated level of sedation, initially leaving him conscious,” Sharon Kirkey reported in the National Post on June 3.

The man, referred to as Mr. D., “experienced signs of physical and psychological distress, including groaning, guarding (tensing muscles) and grimacing,” and his “behavioral signs of distress escalated to repeated verbalizations, including ‘help me’ that continued until sedation was achieved with propofol and a comatose state was confirmed.” The family’s final memories of their father are traumatic.

Suddenly, it was clear that Mr. D. was not just dying—he was being killed, and the doctor was botching it. His last words, it seems, were calls to his family for help.

Another example from Kirkey: “Cases of MAID that do not proceed as planned were highlighted last week in media reports involving the 2024 death of Bradley Stewart, an Ontario man who resumed breathing after being pronounced dead by a London, Ont., family doctor and MAID provider — a traumatic experience his siblings who witnessed his mishandled death are still recovering from.”

One sibling noted that at first, “we couldn’t talk about it… Going through MAID and losing somebody twice in a matter of a couple of hours” was “too much.” After Stewart began breathing again, the doctor—James MacLean, who recently attracted international attention after approving a man for euthanasia in a Tim Horton’s parking lot—had to come back and kill him again. MacLean continues to kill, but now under clinical supervision.

These stories reminded me of the botched Belgian euthanasia in 2022. Thirty-six-year-old Alexina Wattiez decided to die by lethal injection after a cancer diagnosis. The family expected her death to be swift and silent; they left the room. After a moment, they heard screams. “I recognized her voice,” her partner said. “Afterwards we saw her lying on the bed with her eyes and mouth open.”

A post-mortem examination revealed the truth: Alexina had been suffocated to death. Some news reports indicate that the doctor used a pillow when the drugs failed to kill her; others say that the nurses took turns holding the pillow over the young woman’s face until she asphyxiated.

Euthanasia advocates hate these stories because when the mask slips, people catch an unvarnished glimpse at what is going on behind all the soothing, medicalized language: killing people. To mainstream the idea that medical professionals should kill patients, we must use terms that distract from that reality: end-of-life care; physician-assisted death; medical aid in dying. Euthanasia activists paint a picture of people being put out of their suffering surrounded by their loved ones as soothing music plays in the background, dying peacefully and with dignity.

If you didn’t know better, you’d hardly think someone was being killed—and that’s the point.