Respect for human life is not collapsing all at once. It is being carried there, one policy step at a time, on what American Thinker columnist Jeannie DeAngelis calls a “conveyor belt of progress.” Her October 6 opinion piece uses a single, disputed Canadian case to argue that the West has spent fifty years widening the circle of who may be disposed of — and that the elderly and infirm are now next in line.
At the center of the column is Brigitte Stegemann, an 83-year-old Canadian grandmother. According to DeAngelis, who cites Right to Life UK, Stegemann opposed euthanasia because it “violated her Christian faith.” After a stomach cancer diagnosis earlier this year, her granddaughter — also named Brigitte — says Stegemann repeatedly turned down Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying program each time it was offered. Stegemann’s family contends her deteriorating mental state made genuine consent impossible, and that she came to realize she had made a “mistake” by agreeing, at some earlier point, to something she did not fully understand.
The op-ed states that two days before the procedure, Stegemann was coherent enough to pull out her medical port while “bawling” inconsolably, telling those around her, “I don’t want the death shot.” Her family says a nurse pushed forward anyway, dismissing relatives advocating for the grandmother as “obstacles.” The family argued that Stegemann — suspected of being on the autism spectrum — was “not mentally capable of making such a significant decision independently” given her illness. That argument did not prevail.
On July 10, per the column, Stegemann was denied the right to life. On the day of her death, she was reportedly unresponsive when staff attempted to confirm she had withdrawn consent; ten minutes later, the procedure was carried out and she was placed in a body bag. DeAngelis writes that Stegemann was likely killed using a lethal drug protocol comparable to the classes of drugs used on death row prisoners, and notes that a police investigation is underway in Canada to determine the circumstances of the death.
A death cult, or a case of one bad nurse?
The column does not treat Stegemann’s case as an isolated tragedy. It treats it as a template. DeAngelis asks whether the new goal is to decide who is “euthanasia-worthy” and carry out the procedure “regardless of whether the victim agrees” — tie them down, shoot them up, carry them away, and call it population control. Whether at the front end via abortion or the back end via nonconsensual euthanasia, she writes, the result is the same: fewer people.
She anchors that claim in a quote from Benazir Bhutto at the 1994 U.N. International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo: “It is imperative that in the field of population control, global strategies and national plans work in unison.” Bhutto also said, according to the op-ed, that the document should “seek to promote the objective of planned parenthood, of population control.” DeAngelis offers the line as evidence of an explicit globalist blueprint rather than a coincidence of incentives.
Readers are also told that abortion has already done most of the work. Since 1973, she writes, roughly one third of the population now alive — an estimated 3 billion people — has been aborted. Drawing on a rough demographic estimate, she argues that had those people lived and reproduced, they could have had more than 2 billion children and grandchildren, putting the cumulative population difference at about 5 billion, or two thirds of the current world population. She frames this as a globalist dream achieved: 3 billion eliminated in 53 years, and more than 2 billion descendants who were never born at all.
For those who will not participate willingly, the op-ed gestures at other mechanisms — air, water, plastics, even shopping receipts — with hormone-disrupting chemicals doing the work world citizens might otherwise refuse. And if those measures move too slowly, she writes, there is always euthanasia imposed on the helpless without consent, with the administrators of death already fluent in procedures like injecting potassium chloride into a fetal heart.
The uncomfortable question at the back of the line
Where the piece turns beyond polemic is its argument about who the system eventually consumes. DeAngelis offers a dark inversion: those vying for the right to decide who lives and who dies may one day face the same sentence, imposed by a policy more progressive than the one they applied to the frail. Human dignity, she argues, does not slip over the edge into moral decay by itself. People dehumanize what they believe God ordained, gradually reducing its value to disposable material, and push it toward unnatural death for some selfish societal motive.
The column touches other categories too — genocide excused as war, feticide excused as choice, and mothers who kill their children framed as victims of mental illness — assembling them into a single trajectory of justification. Its theological claim is blunt: what the arbiters of life and death forget, she writes, is 1 Samuel 2:6 — “The LORD brings death and gives life; he brings down to the grave and raises up.”
That framing is the essay’s real argument, and it is a religious one. It holds that the authority over life and death is not delegated to governments, nurses, or committees, and that every expansion of that authority has followed the same pattern of rationalization. For those who accept the premise, the extension from abortion to assisted dying to nonconsensual euthanasia is not a slippery-slope fallacy but a documented sequence.
The next in line, DeAngelis concludes, may not be the unborn. Three billion of them, in her accounting, are already gone. More than likely, it is us.
Whether Stegemann’s death was an anomaly or an omen is now, in part, a question for Canadian police. The column’s purpose is to insist that by the time a case like hers reaches a courtroom, the conveyor belt has already moved on.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/10/how-long-before-they-deem-you-euthanasia-worthy/