Brigitte Stegemann and the Dark Reality of MAiD in Canada

“The Church is convinced of the necessity to reaffirm as definitive teaching that euthanasia is a crime against human life because, in this act, one chooses directly to cause the death of another innocent human being.”

― Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Samaritanus Bonus, 2020

Brigitte Stegemann was an 83-year-old mother of two, the second-youngest of fourteen children, a German immigrant who was deaf in one ear and could barely hear out of the other. Her family called her “GG,” or “Oma.”

In February, in the Ontario care home where she had lived for two years, she was diagnosed with stage four stomach cancer. On Friday, July 10, at about 11 a.m., a doctor ended her life by lethal injection under Canada’s “medical assistance in dying” (MAiD) program.

In itself, this is a tragically unremarkable thing in Canada. Nearly 80,000 people have died in this manner since 2016, when assisted suicide and euthanasia were first legalized in Canada.

Stegemann’s story, however, is currently rocketing around the globe. Eleven days after her death, GG’s granddaughter, also named Brigitte, posted the family’s deeply disturbing account of what happened on Facebook.

Our 83-year-old Christian grandmother was euthanised against her will under Canada's assisted dying system – she died covered in blood with her hands clasped in prayer https://t.co/u50K1sT75X

— Daily Mail (@DailyMail) September 20, 2026

According to the family, Stegemann never clearly asked for euthanasia. She had in fact refused it on the grounds of her faith, had failed the test meant to establish her capacity to consent, had wept two days beforehand and said she had made a mistake.

On the very morning of her death, her family says, she gave no answer at all when the doctor asked whether it was all right to give her the “medicine.” The doctor went ahead anyway.

GG’s Family Says She was Pressured to Accept MAiD

Brigitte, the granddaughter, had been GG’s caregiver for twelve years and held her power of attorney. She says that the care home phoned her “often every day or every other day” about medications and appointments.

However, about two months before GG’s death, a meeting was held to discuss MAiD. “At that time,” the family writes, “GG clearly stated that she did not wish to pursue it. As a devout Christian, she explicitly expressed that MAiD conflicted with her personal beliefs and faith.”

Shortly afterward the granddaughter left on a ten-day vacation. The home kept calling her about routine matters. What it did not tell her, the family says, was that staff had twice met privately with GG to discuss MAiD again.

When the family confronted the nurse involved, she told them, “I’m advocating for her.” Asked who had raised the subject, she reportedly answered, “I don’t need to tell you anything.”

Then came the so-called capacity assessment on July 7. Asked whether she had any siblings, GG said she had none (She was one of fourteen.). Asked whether any were still living, she said no (She had spoken to one of them within the past month and a half.).

The doctor then explained MAiD to her, the family recalls, “as receiving medication, feeling peace, falling asleep,” and promised that she “would not lose control of her bowels.” The doctor spoke, the granddaughter says, in “really loose terms, never using the words death or dying,” to a woman whose first language was German and who could barely hear.

The family says they were then sent out of the room. The granddaughter’s request to stay, as power of attorney, was refused. When the doctor came out, she announced: “I have deemed her capable of making her own decisions.” The procedure was scheduled for Friday.

Unfortunately, it gets worse. The next day the home called to say the date had been moved up to Thursday. Why? Because the doctor had an opening. The family objected and the original date was restored.

The Troubling Events of GG’s Final Hours

That Wednesday, the granddaughter sat with GG and asked whether she was sure. “I used very frank terms,” she told the Daily Mail. “I said: ‘Do you know that you’re going to die on Friday?’” GG, the family writes, “appeared confused and visibly distressed. She responded with words to the effect of, ‘I’m going to die Friday? They’re going to kill me Friday?’” The family says, “She was bawling. Inconsolable,” and that she repeatedly stated, “I’ve made a mistake.”

On Friday morning the family took her out to the patio for strawberry ice cream, and her pastor prayed with her. Within ten minutes an administrator was outside insisting she come back in for the IV, nearly two hours early. When the family returned to the room they found “a significant, alarming amount of blood covering GG, the bedding, and the surrounding area,” due to botched attempts at inserting the IV into GG’s arm. The granddaughter told the Daily Mail it was “a phenomenal amount of blood,” and that the nurse had worked without gloves.

Then the doctor arrived, told GG she was there to give her “medicine,” and asked if that was all right. “By this point,” the family writes, “GG was silent, her hands tightly clasped together in a fixed prayer position.” The granddaughter told the Daily Mail: “My Oma is not moving. She doesn’t open her eyes. She doesn’t nod. She doesn’t say anything, and the doctor just said: ‘Okay, well, I’m going to proceed.’”

The family had been assured that a final, explicit verbal consent would be required on the day. However, they say that it was not given. A few minutes later GG was dead.

The family has since filed a complaint with Ontario’s Chief Coroner. Belleville Police have confirmed the case is under investigation. The care home and the physician have not commented publicly; the Daily Mail reports that they maintain GG legally consented.

“She was a vulnerable human being,” the granddaughter told the Daily Mail, “and they saw an opportunity.”

The Consequences of Treating Death as a Solution

So far, we only have the family’s own account of what happened to GG. However, their tale is sadly consonant with the numerous other stories of abuse coming out of Canada, where euthanasia and assisted suicide deaths have become shockingly common.

In 2024, according to Health Canada’s report, 16,499 Canadians were killed by their doctors. That is 5.1 percent of every death in the country, one in twenty. In Quebec it is 7.9 percent. Since legalization in 2016 the total stands at 76,475.

The same report tells us why so many people were killed. Among those killed, 48 percent cited “perceived burden on family, friends or caregivers” as part of their suffering. Among the 732 people euthanized in 2024 under the so-called “Track 2” (i.e., people who were not dying at all), 45 percent cited “isolation or loneliness.” In other words, the state is killing lonely people because they are lonely.

GG’s story is but one of countless examples of what happens when a healthcare system begins to treat death as a “treatment” for illness and suffering. Suddenly the temptation for doctors, nurses, and other healthcare providers is to reach for the easy solution to difficult problems, and to couch it in terms of compassion and care.

Ontario’s Chief Coroner has convened a committee to review the Track 2 deaths. Its reports describe people euthanized amid social and housing vulnerability, patients whose mental illness and addictions had not been adequately treated, and one man with a history of suicidal ideation whose psychiatrist asked him in session whether he knew about MAiD, and whose MAiD provider then drove him to the place where he was killed.

And it is about to get worse. In March 2027, unless Parliament acts, Canadians whose only illness is mental will become eligible. A parliamentary committee reported in June that 25 of the 32 organizations it consulted opposed the expansion. Quebec already permits advance requests, so that a person with dementia can be killed years after signing a form.

The Slippery Slope Pro-Lifers Warned About

This is the slippery slope that pro-lifers have warned about for decades, and which euthanasia advocates always mock. Canada is sliding down it faster than any nation on earth. Where does it stop? If a woman who cannot remember how many siblings she has, or can barely hear, can “consent” to her own death, who cannot? If the care home itself can fill out the application, what exactly is a “safeguard”?

Meanwhile, who is watching the people doing the killing? Dr. Ramona Coelho, a family physician in London, Ontario, told the Catholic Register in August that “no one in Canada is doing enough” to hold MAiD providers accountable, and that “there should be an independent review before the death, rather than a paperwork review afterward.”

Alex Schadenberg of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition put it this way: “What happens next isn’t a test of this family. It’s a test of whether Canadian oversight of assisted death can do anything at all when someone walks in with a timeline, a Power of Attorney, and a name.”

Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre called the case “disgusting.” “We have a sworn duty to protect the most vulnerable,” he said. “This story demands action. The Liberal government must strengthen and enforce safeguards to protect vulnerable Canadians from pressure and abuse.”

The Church’s Warnings Are Coming True in Canada

The Church has been warning about this outcome for decades and reiterating it with ever great insistence in recent years.

In 2020, in Samaritanus Bonus, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the Vatican’s doctrinal office, warned specifically about what happens after legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia.

In such countries, wrote the CDF, “wide margins of ambiguity are left open in end-of-life law,” with the result that “neither patients nor families are consulted in final decisions about care.”

In a damning paragraph seemingly aimed directly at the case of GG, the CDF warned:

In some countries of the world, tens of thousands of people have already died by euthanasia, and many of them because they displayed psychological suffering or depression. Physicians themselves report that abuses frequently occur when the lives of persons who would never have desired euthanasia are terminated. The request for death is in many cases itself a symptom of disease, aggravated by isolation and discomfort. The Church discerns in these difficulties an occasion for a spiritual purification that allows hope to become truly theological when it is focused on God and only on God.

The document went on to reiterate the teaching that I wrote about last week, namely that

euthanasia is an act of homicide that no end can justify and that does not tolerate any form of complicity or active or passive collaboration. Those who approve laws of euthanasia and assisted suicide, therefore, become accomplices of a grave sin that others will execute. They are also guilty of scandal because by such laws they contribute to the distortion of conscience, even among the faithful.

In April, Cardinal Frank Leo of Toronto wrote to Prime Minister Carney urging him to support Bill C-218, which would stop the expansion to mental illness. “It is with great disappointment and anguish,” he wrote, “that we have seen our country expand MAiD at a rapid and alarming rate.” He asked the Prime Minister “to choose life and not death; to help build a civilization that cares for those suffering and does not eliminate them.”

The Canadian bishops’ conference has backed it.

The Christian Response to Suffering Is Compassion, Not Death

Just last week, on September 16, Pope Leo XIV returned to the words of the Second Vatican Council at his general audience, naming “any kind of homicide, genocide, abortion, euthanasia, and even voluntary suicide” among the things “opposed to life itself.”

Last week, I wrote about how the UK had rejected assisted suicide – just one in a number of jurisdictions who have recently pushed back against enormous pressure from agents of the culture of death. Let us hope and pray that GG’s tragic story serves some good by acting as a further warning about what happens when nations turn their back on fundamental human rights and dignity and embrace death as a solution.

Instead, we should, as the CDF exhorted us to, look to the example of the Good Samaritan as emblematic of the Christian response to suffering.

The Gospel of Life is a gospel of compassion and mercy directed to actual persons, weak and sinful, to relieve their suffering, to support them in the life of grace, and if possible, to heal them from their wounds.

The CDF continues to say:

It is not enough, however, to share their pain; one needs to immerse oneself in the fruits of the Paschal Mystery of Christ who conquers sin and death, with the will “to dispel the misery of another, as if it were his own”. The greatest misery consists in the loss of hope in the face of death. This hope is proclaimed by the Christian witness, which, to be effective, must be lived in faith and encompass everyone—families, nurses, and physicians. It must engage the pastoral resources of the diocese and of Catholic healthcare centers, which are called to live with faith the duty to accompany the sick in all of the stages of illness, and in particular in the critical and terminal stages of life as defined in this letter.