Miriam Lancaster’s story sparked “outrage” after she shared that she was offered medical assistance in dying (MAID) after arriving at a hospital in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, with back pain.
In 2025, 84-year-old Lancaster was taken by ambulance to Vancouver General Hospital after waking up with severe back pain. She was removed from the ambulance and placed in the emergency room.
“The first person I remember coming to talk to me was a young doctor. And that’s where the story begins,” Lancaster recalled in an interview with “EWTN News Nightly.” “The first thing she said to me was, ‘I’d like to offer you MAID.’”
MAID is the euthanasia and assisted suicide law in Canada that allows a practicing doctor or nurse to administer or provide a drug that causes death to a patient.
After the doctor offered MAID, “I said, ‘No, thank you,’” Lancaster said. “I was certainly surprised, and there were so many other things on my mind.”
Lancaster said he was thinking: “Yesterday I was feeling fine. I got out of bed this morning, and suddenly I’m not feeling well. I’m in horrendous pain. So I need to know what’s causing the pain. Let’s not talk about end-of-life, please.”
“My husband, three years earlier, had also been offered MAID. He declined,” Lancaster said. As “practicing Catholics, we are not going to take steps to end our lives. That is in the Lord’s hands. So he refused MAID when he was in the hospital, and a few years later, there I am in the same hospital, and I gave the same answer.”
Later, Lancaster was transferred to UBC Hospital. “At that point, they already knew I had a small fracture in my sacrum. That’s a little bone at the base of my spine,” she said. “No surgery possible, so I stayed in bed, with some exercise of course, for three weeks.”
“When I got home, I thought, ‘Oh, I’ve been given a second chance here. I’m going to make the most of the time I have left,'” she said.
Lancaster said she and her daughter decided to travel to Cuba in the fall and Mexico and Guatemala in the spring. During the trip, Lancaster even went horseback riding on a volcano.
Amanda Achtman, who works to humanize the conversation around grief and death through the Dying to Meet You Project, told “EWTN News Nightly” that she hopes Lancaster’s story “encourages other seniors to speak out too” who have had similar experiences.
“Your story has gone completely viral in the media around the world because people are rightly outraged by the suggestion that you could have been offered death when you have so much life to live,” Achtman told Lancaster.
People who opt for MAID “are being killed via a lethal injection administered by a doctor or nurse directly,” Achtman said. “And now in Canada, 1 in every 20 deaths is the result of this premature rush to the end of life.”
Achtman also works with Canadian Physicians for Life on ethics education and teaches a bioethics course at St. Bernard’s School of Theology and Ministry. She was recently invited by the bishop of the Diocese of Victoria, Canada, to Vancouver Island, which she said is “literally the euthanasia capital of the world.”
“And there I met Miriam, but also others who shared with me experiences about unsolicited offers of euthanasia within the health system,” she said.
One woman shared her story with Achtman about “having had euthanasia mentioned by her family doctor, a cancer specialist, and even the funeral home.”
“Now, mentioning euthanasia is not prohibited in Canada, according to the Canadian Association of MAID Providers and Assessors — the government-funded group that is promoting it,” Achtman said. “There is no ban, and they emphasize that.”
“However, what I would emphasize is that simply being offered euthanasia kills a person, because it deflates and defeats a person’s sense of self-esteem, self-worth and worth,” she said.
©2026 Catholic News Agency. Published with permission. Original in English: 84-year-old woman speaks out after being offered euthanasia while visiting Canadian ER for back pain
