An 84-year-old Canadian woman says she was shocked after being offered medically assisted suicide — before other treatment options — when she visited an emergency room suffering from “excruciating pain” in her back last year.
Miriam Lancaster, a resident of the province of British Columbia, recounted how quickly ER doctors at Vancouver General Hospital offered her Medical Aid in Dying (MAID) in response to the cause of her pain — a fractured sacrum, or a break in a bone at the base of the spine connected to the pelvis.
“I was approached by a young lady doctor whose very first words out of her mouth is, ‘We would like to offer you MAID.’ I was taken aback,” Lancaster recalled in a March 18 post on the social media platform X.
“That’s the last thing on my mind. [I] just wanted to find out why I was in pain and did not want to die.”
After rejecting assisted suicide, Lancaster spent a month in the hospital doing rehab and has since recovered from her injuries.
“[I] recuperated nicely enough that I could take some trips,” the retired piano teacher said.
“So my recovery has been amazing. And there was no need for MAID to even be suggested.”
I met an 84-year-old woman who was offered euthanasia at a Canadian hospital practically upon arrival.
Miriam didn’t want to die. She recovered well and travelled to Cuba, Mexico, and Guatemala.
Stop offering death to people who have adventures to lead! pic.twitter.com/ZjEfSaKmix
— Amanda Achtman (@AmandaAchtman) March 18, 2026
Six weeks after she fractured her sacrum in April 2025, Lancaster walked her daughter down the aisle at her wedding, according to Canada’s National Post.
“She later travelled to Cuba (before the U.S. oil blockade), Mexico and, most recently, walked and rode on horseback up Guatemala’s Pacaya volcano,” the outlet reported.
Lancaster and her daughter, Jordan Weaver, said committing suicide goes against their Catholic faith.
“My mother and I are practicing Catholics. We would never accept MAID under any circumstances,” Weaver told the National Post.
“The doctor said, ‘Well, you could get rehab, but it will be a long road, and it will be very difficult. We don’t know what to expect,’” Weaver recounted.
Weaver said the hospital did offer other treatment options after she and her mother rejected MAID, but she’s stunned it was presented as a first option.
“My mother is not frail. She climbed a volcano in Guatemala,” she told the National Post. “She’s a dynamo. She reads books. She goes to the theater. She’s alert. She takes the public bus on her own. She’s active.”
“Her life is valuable to the people who care for her,” Weaver underscored.
Assisted death is legal across Canada — with its infamous socialized medicine structure. In the United States, according to the pro-assisted death group Compassion and Choices, it is legal in 13 states, plus the District of Columbia:
- California
- Colorado
- Delaware
- District of Columbia
- Hawaii
- Illinois
- Maine
- Montana
- New Jersey
- New Mexico
- New York
- Oregon
- Vermont
- Washington
MAID is typically offered to terminally ill patients who are in chronic, unmanageable pain.
Lancaster said her husband, who died from metastatic cancer in 2023, was offered assisted death.
“Of course, he turned it down,” Lancaster told the National Post. “We are churchgoers. We both are ready to go when the Lord calls us, and that’s what happened to him.”
While she understands the hospital was required to offer MAID as an option to her terminally ill husband, she said it was premature in her case.
“I had already seen that MAID gets presented pretty quickly, in this day and age. But I was a lot healthier. He had cancer,” Lancaster said.
Lancaster’s daughter agreed that the course of action shouldn’t have been offered to someone who wasn’t dying.
“[To] be offered MAID right off the bat for a non-life-threatening condition? It was a matter of pain management. The bone would eventually heal,” Weaver told the National Post.
“Just because someone is 84 does not mean they’re ready to go on the scrap heap of life. It’s an insult to seniors.”
Sadly, the growing phenomenon of assisted death reflects the disposable, nihilistic mindset of modern society, where human life is viewed through a lens of utility rather than intrinsic worth.
It should come as no surprise that liberals typically support assisted suicide, while conservatives generally oppose it.
Assisted death is increasingly being normalized as a “treatment option” in a strained, single-payer health care systems (such as in Canada) where ongoing medical care costs the government money.
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