According to a recent survey, 27 percent of Canadians believe that medical assistance in dying (MAID)—the country’s official term for euthanasia—should be available to those whose sole complaint is poverty. The government is now poised to offer this form of “healthcare” to the mentally ill. Lionel Shriver, a longtime supporter of euthanasia, examines the results of Ottawa’s very lax regulations around legalized medical murder, and the horrific consequences. Take the case of forty-one-year-old Sean Tagert, who couldn’t afford the round-the-clock home care he needed, and didn’t want to move into an institution far from his son. He chose death, and the doctors were quick to accommodate him:

All health systems have finite resources, so let’s assume that sixteen-hour care was all British Columbia could afford. If Tagert couldn’t manage on that support, we wouldn’t encourage a bureaucracy to give in to blackmail: If you don’t give me 24-hour care, I’ll kill myself. On the other hand, the availability of assisted dying as a solution to his problems must have made it more likely that Tagert would choose death, as opposed to giving institutional care a go and perhaps discovering that seeing his son somewhat less often wasn’t the end of the world. In general, then, legalizing assisted dying without fierce limits on who qualifies may increase the likelihood that, rather than find more creative escapes from their predicaments, people give in to despair.

The woman who has most alarmed critics of MAID’s prospective extension to the mentally ill is Lisa Pauli, who is queueing up for assisted dying months in advance. At forty-seven, Pauli has been anorexic for the better part of 40 years and now holds out no hope of defeating the disorder. She weighs 92 pounds and goes days without solid food. Pauli’s psychiatrist assures her that once the law in Canada becomes more encompassing next year, she’ll probably be eligible for assisted dying. Yet it takes one look at Lisa Pauli’s picture to conclude that she doesn’t need a lethal injection. She needs a sandwich.

[O]ne of the major concerns of too-ready access to assisted dying is that people are moody, fickle, and changeable. One day, one month, or even one year, our outlook can be unbearably bleak, and the challenges of the future can appear insurmountable. But fortunes and frames of mind can pick up, clouds lift: we get a new job, fall in love, finally put a bereavement behind us, after which the prospect of asking to die may strike us as preposterous. Many a failed suicide has been grateful in retrospect for having botched the job.

Between the explosion of thousands of Hizballah pagers on September 17 and now, Iran’s geopolitical clout has shrunk dramatically: Hizballah, Iran’s most important striking force, has retreated to lick its wounds; Iranian influence in Syria has collapsed; Iran’s attempts to attack Israel via Gaza have proved self-defeating; its missile and drone arsenal have proved impotent; and its territorial defenses have proved useless in the face of Israeli airpower. Edward Luttwak considers what might happen next:

The myth of Iranian power was ironically propagated by the United States itself. Right at the start of his first term, in January 2009, Barack Obama was terrified that he would be maneuvered into fighting a war against Iran. . . . Obama started his tenure by apologizing for America’s erstwhile support for the shah. And beyond showing contrition for the past, the then-president also set a new rule, one that lasted all the way to October 2024: Iran may attack anyone, but none may attack Iran.

[Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s] variegated fighters, in light trucks and jeeps, could have been stopped by a few hundred well-trained soldiers. But neither Hizballah nor Iran’s own Revolutionary Guards could react. Hizballah no longer has any large units capable of crossing the border to fight rebels in Syria, as they had done so many times before. As for the Revolutionary Guards, they were commandeering civilian airliners to fly troops into Damascus airport to support Assad. But then Israel made clear that it would not allow Iran’s troops so close to its border, and Iran no longer had credible counter-threats.

Now Iran’s population is discovering that it has spent decades in poverty to pay for the massive build-up of the Revolutionary Guards and all their militias. And for what? They have elaborate bases and showy headquarters, but their expensive ballistic missiles can only be used against defenseless Arabs, not Israel with its Arrow interceptors. As for Hizballah, clearly it cannot even defend itself, let alone Iran’s remaining allies in the region. Perhaps, in short, the dictatorship will finally be challenged in the streets of Iran’s cities, at scale and in earnest.