Yes, that's me. Thank you.
Thank you for inviting us to speak to the committee tonight. I will deliver our remarks and Professor Grant will answer questions.
Professor Grant and I are legal scholars with a combined 75 years of collective experience working on violence against women. We've published multiple papers on track 2 MAID. If MAID is extended to those whose sole disabling condition is mental illness, it will disproportionately end the lives of mentally ill women, just as track 2 already disproportionately ends the lives of disabled women. As scholars who have devoted their lives to ending violence against women, we urge you not to take this discriminatory path.
The UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities highlighted the ableist assumptions underlying track 2 and urged its repeal, including the planned extension to mental illness. The committee expressed its concern about the disproportionate number of women accessing track 2 and the role of gender-based violence in the marginalization of disabled women.
It's important to understand that when one allows doctors to provide MAID to people to end difficult lives as opposed to hastening difficult deaths, one inevitably targets the most marginalized Canadians. Health Canada data backs this up. Approximately 59% of all track 2 deaths in 2022 and 2023 were women, as were 57% in 2024. Track 2 recipients are younger, more likely to live alone and more likely to report loneliness, perceived burdensomeness and a lack of dignity in their lives as reasons for seeking MAID. Ontario data suggests they are more likely to live in the most marginalized neighbourhoods and less likely to have family members as next of kin. Professor Grant has demonstrated the discriminatory impact of track 2 on women, which will only worsen if MAID is extended to mental illness.
When we examine the jurisdictions that allow psychiatric euthanasia, we see it's overwhelmingly women who are dying. In one study, researchers found that of 100 patients who applied for psychiatric euthanasia in Belgium based on at least one psychiatric disorder, 77% were women. Those women were on average just 47 years old. Dr. Marie Nicolini and her colleagues found that between 69% and 77% of those receiving psychiatric euthanasia in countries where it is allowed are women.
Research helps explain why this pattern occurs. Dr. Nicolini explains that the gender breakdown for psychiatric euthanasia is virtually identical to the gender breakdown for attempted suicide. Almost twice as many women attempt suicide, but more men complete it, because men choose more violent means to end their lives. Most women who attempt suicide do not go on to die from suicide. Psychiatric euthanasia risks turning the disproportionate numbers of women who attempt suicide into completed suicide by offering a way to die that is portrayed as peaceful and painless.
Male violence contributes to women's mental illness through such conditions as depression and PTSD, but this violence is also disproportionately targeted at women with mental illness. Stats Canada data indicate that 25.9% of women with mental illness report sexual violence, at least double the rate experienced by other women. People with mental health disabilities also face three times the risk of intimate partner violence.
Alarmingly, male violence also contributes to suicidality. A recent study published in The Lancet demonstrated that women who have experienced intimate partner violence were four times more likely than other women to have attempted suicide. Those who had experienced sexual abuse within a relationship were seven times more likely to have attempted suicide. Data from the Netherlands and Belgium show that 36% of those who died from psychiatric MAID had a history of trauma—for example, from physical and sexual abuse. We know that it is women who are disproportionately subjected to physical and sexual violence, yet Canada collects no data on the role of trauma in MAID requests.