Canadians: Send an urgent message to legislators urging them to stop Trudeau’s ‘Online Harms Act’
(LifeSiteNews) — TV star Liz Carr is a household name in the United Kingdom, and her face is instantly recognizable to the millions of people who tuned into the BBC crime drama Silent Witness between 2013 and 2021.
Carr has been disabled since childhood. Her eyes loom hugely in her prematurely wrinkled face, and she has depended on wheelchairs to get around since she was 14. When I first saw her on television, I had a shock, but – presumably like everyone else in Britain – I have become used to her appearance and admire her gutsy refusal to allow arthrogryposis multiplex congenita to ruin her life.
But of late I’ve had even more reason to admire Carr: a disabled rights activist, she is using her celebrity, and not inconsiderable talents, to fight against the legalization of active euthanasia in the United Kingdom. Carr believes – as do I – that bringing killing into British medicine will put not only the terminally ill but the disabled at risk of an untimely end. And to get her message across, she has starred in a fantastic BBC documentary called Better Off Dead.
Caveat: Before I give the 55-minute film a five-star review, I must warn parents that Carr formed a same-sex civil partnership in 2010, refers in the documentary to her female companion as her “wife,” and shares with her a brief kiss on the lips. You may not want your kids to see this documentary. But besides that, my thoughts on the subject echo what British women’s rights activist Posey Parker said to me when I thanked her profusely for speaking to a pro-life newspaper about transgenderism: We need all the allies we can get.
When it comes to exposing the evils of Canada’s euthanasia regime, Liz Carr is a terrific ally. In the most dramatic segment of the documentary, she visits the notorious abortionist and so-called “MAiD” (Medical Assistance in Dying, i.e. lethal injection) doctor Ellen Wiebe in British Columbia.
“Don’t eat anything,” Carr tells her companion in the elevator to Wiebe’s office, and it’s unclear if she’s joking. “Don’t drink anything.”
From her first gravelly “Hello,” Wiebe seems slightly demonic. I’m sorry to use the word because it borders on detraction, but the legal serial killer really did give me the strong impression that she is possessed. In the documentary, she wriggles and giggles as she discusses her grisly work. Her eyes shine. She literally grins after saying the “number one reason” people choose “MAiD” is “autonomy and control.” She tilts her head and grins again as she repeats “autonomy and control.” It’s as if she’s channeling hell. And when she talks about “unbearable suffering” and the “nasty illnesses” that Carr might get, Wiebe laughs delightedly.
“I love my job,” she enthuses when Carr weakly asks. “This is the very best work I’ve ever done these last seven years.”
Carr’s face is grim as she drives her electric wheelchair out of Wiebe’s office.
“Let’s get out of here,” she whispers.
Carr also interviews the daughter of a disabled woman who was fast-tracked for MAiD despite being mentally ill and a disabled man who initially chose MAiD because he was in danger of homelessness. My feelings of triumph that Carr had thoroughly exposed the egregious Dr. Wiebe to the British public morphed into embarrassment for my native country. When I left Canada for Scotland in 2009, I could not have predicted it would fall so low or care for the disabled so less.
I also could not have predicted that my healthy, handsome husband would fall ill with cancer before our eighth wedding anniversary and be confined to a wheelchair by our 1fifteen. As I watched Carr and her fellow disabled activists chatting and sharing a meal from their own electric wheelchairs, it suddenly dawned on me that some of their experiences were now my husband’s, too.
Carr begins her documentary by revealing that people often assume that people like her are “better off dead.” How horrifying to think that there may now be some thinking that about my husband. And what I thought when Wiebe asked Carr if she wouldn’t be “thrilled” to have the option of MAiD if she got terminal cancer and had to go through chemo and radiotherapy–! Well, it can’t be printed, so I’ll stop there.
Canadians: Send an urgent message to legislators urging them to stop Trudeau’s ‘Online Harms Act’