There is something about the language of “medical assistance in dying” that makes the whole thing sound almost antiseptic.
Quiet room. Relatives and friends gathered around. A doctor or nurse practitioner. A few medications. Someone closes his eyes. Everyone says goodbye. Then death.
That is the picture Canada’s euthanasia advocates want the public to see and the narrative they have been promulgating for decades.
But there is another question that deserves far more attention: What actually happens inside the body after those drugs enter the bloodstream? I have written about this before, and NRLC has even created and provides fact sheets on this topic. (You can find them at nrlc.org)
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That question becomes especially important because of testimony given before the Canadian Senate by Dr. Joel Zivot, an anesthesiologist and critical-care physician who has studied what happens during lethal injection in the United States.
That testimony is chilling, and after five years, it is finally getting the attention it deserves.
What Dr. Zivot found should make every American following the expansion of assisted suicide deeply uncomfortable and downright terrified.
Zivot and other researchers examined autopsy reports from prisoners executed by lethal injection. In one later analysis of 43 executions, pulmonary edema appeared in 33 cases, about 77 percent. Among executions using midazolam, it appeared in more than 82 percent. Pulmonary edema means fluid accumulates in the lungs. In severe cases, researchers reported froth filling the airways.
Earlier examinations of a larger collection of execution autopsies reported evidence of pulmonary edema in roughly 84 percent of cases. Experts have compared the resulting sensation, if the prisoner remains conscious, to suffocation, drowning, or waterboarding.
That’s right. Drowning. Waterboarding.
We recognize those words immediately because we understand what they mean. We know why waterboarding became synonymous with torture. The terror comes from the sensation that you cannot breathe and cannot escape.
Now comes the part that should stop us cold.
Dr. Zivot then argued that Canadian assisted suicide pharmacology is similar enough that the same lung injury is plausible, and that a paralytic can hide distress. Those who promote and profit from the Canadian plan say the propofol produces a deep coma before the paralytic arrives and therefore prevents awareness or suffering.
But consider what happens next.
Rocuronium paralyzes the muscles.
That includes the muscles required to breathe.
Dying With Dignity Canada describes the sequence plainly. Midazolam relaxes the person. Propofol induces a deep coma. Rocuronium then paralyzes the muscles, and if respiration has not already stopped, it stops. Without breathing, oxygen no longer reaches the organs. The organs shut down. The heart eventually stops.
Dr. Zivot challenged claims that because the person dying seems peaceful, they are internally experiencing a peaceful death.
During the Canadian Senate debate, his argument received serious attention precisely because a paralytic eliminates visible movement. A person whose muscles cannot move cannot sit up, struggle, gesture, or gasp normally. What observers see from outside cannot, by itself, reveal everything occurring inside.
The science indicates that the person is drowning.
But the Canadian government and those who support the country’s assisted suicide program insist that these deaths are peaceful, and they deny the one test that could prove it. Dr. Joel Zivot told the Senate that U.S. lethal-injection autopsies often showed fluid-filled lungs, which he compared to drowning, and warned that paralytics can hide outward signs of distress. He said autopsies of at least 200 Canadian assisted suicide victims could settle the question.
That study has never been done.
What’s worse is that families who question an assisted suicide death can find themselves on the wrong side of the bureaucracy. After Donna Duncan was killed by assisted suicide, her daughters spent years trying to access the records regarding their mother’s death. They are not alone. Other families have raised similar concerns about access to charts, coroner reviews, and proof of consent.
Without autopsies and full records, claims that these deaths are peaceful cannot be fully verified, and warnings of hidden suffering cannot simply be brushed aside.
Canada legalized assisted euthanasia in 2016. The eligibility framework later expanded beyond people whose natural deaths were reasonably foreseeable. Canadian law now allows assisted suicide for some people with serious disabilities or illnesses who satisfy statutory requirements even when death is not imminent. Eligibility when mental illness is the sole underlying condition remains delayed until at least March 17, 2027, and a 2026 parliamentary committee recommended excluding it indefinitely.
Americans should pay close attention. Two states this year, New York and Illinois, enacted similar laws. This debate no longer belongs to another country.
Today, in America, laws similar to Canada’s are in effect in California, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, New Jersey, New Mexico, Delaware, Illinois, New York, and the District of Columbia, among others. Additional states also considered this type of legislation during 2026. American laws generally differ from Canada’s system, particularly because U.S. statutes typically involve self-administered medication for terminally ill adults rather than clinician-administered euthanasia.
But Canada still gives America something worth examining closely. Canada has taught us that words can make death sound gentle. Words like assistance, dignity, choice, and compassion. The poison ingested knows none of these words.
The drugs enter the bloodstream. Consciousness disappears. Muscles stop working. Breathing stops. The body loses oxygen. The heart stops.
And a human being who entered that room alive leaves it dead, and in many instances having experienced the same effects of waterboarding.
When medicine intentionally stops a person from breathing and calls the result care, Americans contemplating assisted-death laws deserve to know exactly what happens after the poison is ingested.
LifeNews.com Note: Raimundo Rojas is the Outreach Director for the National Right to Life Committee. He is a former president of Florida Right to Life and has presented the pro-life message to millions in Spanish-language media outlets. He represents NRLC at the United Nations as an NGO. Rojas was born in Santiago de las Vegas, Havana, Cuba and he and his family escaped to the United States in 1968.
