Case reference: MAID-BC-2024-QPUU · Victoria, British Columbia · MAID raised by others; not requested · Recorded by the register as a MAID victim
Who she is
Heather Hancock was born in Alberta at 25 weeks, weighing one pound, six ounces. At two she was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, and doctors said she should be institutionalized because she “would never amount to anything.” Her disability is physical only. She went on to work as a unit clerk in health care, earned an office administration certificate, and became a writer and editor. In 2024, at 56, she published a faith-based novel, Sister Lost. She is an advocate with the Cerebral Palsy Research Network, pushing for better care for adults with CP.
“God put me into this world and he’s the only one taking me out,” she says.
What happened
Since about 2017, Hancock has had severe muscle spasms that can temporarily paralyze her. She says her family doctor retired in 2016, and that three years without proper care took their toll. In 2018, during a stay at Victoria General Hospital for uncontrolled pain, she says a hospitalist asked whether she had ever considered MAID. “The answer now and from this moment on is NO,” she told him. In 2019 she was back at the same hospital, on a different unit, in a bed in the hallway for her whole stay. She says MAID was offered again. She then left Vancouver Island for rural Saskatchewan.
During a stay at Medicine Hat Regional Hospital in Alberta, she says, a nurse watched her struggle and told her: “You really should consider MAID. You’re not living. You’re just existing.” When Hancock pushed back, she says, the nurse replied, “Now you’re just being selfish.” According to American Family News, the head nurse was “mortified,” and the nurse was removed from her care.
Why they were pushed toward MAID
In Hancock’s account, she was pressured by the very clinicians who were supposed to treat her pain, against a background of poor care for adults with cerebral palsy. “We require more healthcare dollars than able-bodied people and often do not get the same level of service; some doctors don’t even bother trying,” she told the New York Post. She says MAID is often presented as “a good solution to your situation.”
The hospital treating her did not respond to the Post’s request for comment.
In their own words
“I thought I misheard her; then the words settled into my being as she waited for an answer,” Hancock said of the nurse. “I asked her, ‘Who gives you the right to judge what’s living and what’s existing?’”
“They make you feel like you are less than human … like you have nothing to offer the world. Doctors couch it as ending people’s suffering when really they are killing you.” She told the Post that she has had to tell family and friends: if she ever dies and they are told she agreed to MAID, they should not believe it.
What this case shows
Heather Hancock has spent her life proving wrong the doctors who wrote her off at two. Decades later, she says, clinicians in two provinces suggested she would be better off dead. Her account shows how MAID can reach disabled patients as a suggestion, a judgment about whether their lives are worth living.
Sources
- New York Post: Canadian doctors accused of pushing medically assisted death on patients: ‘They make you feel less than human’
- American Family News: Years-long guilt trip didn’t work on God-fearing patient
- Live Action: Canadian health care providers repeatedly pressured woman with cerebral palsy to choose death
- Cerebral Palsy Research Network: CP Stories: Heather Hancock Defies the Odds
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