Statistics are indispensable for understanding societies at the scale of modern states. But they cannot be mistaken for moral arguments. Two people may agree entirely about the numbers before them while disagreeing entirely about what those numbers mean. This is a lesson especially relevant today for those who wish to uphold Catholic values.
The Post Millennial recently highlighted a statistical comparison between Canada and the United States. In 2024, 16,499 Canadians received medical assistance in dying (MAiD), while 15,364 Americans died by firearm homicide. The comparison was also circulated by U.S. Senator Mike Lee as part of a criticism of Canada’s assisted-dying system and has made the rounds on social media, especially among conservatives and Christians.
The numbers are all the more surprising because these are absolute counts, not population-adjusted rates. Canada has roughly one-eighth the population of the United States: scaled to the American population, 16,499 Canadian deaths would correspond to roughly 132,000. The comparison is often accompanied by another startling statistic: MAiD now accompanies approximately one in 20 deaths in Canada.
To those of certain moral persuasions, these statistics appear self-evidently damning. But that appearance is precisely the problem. To insist upon the numbers alone is to make no progress in moral persuasion. The person who sees nothing wrong with MAiD need not dispute a single one of them.
One need not exercise much imagination to identify a moral outlook capable of harmonizing the condemnation of gun homicide with the defence of euthanasia. In a modern world increasingly dominated by a liberalism of consent and autonomy, the reconciliation should be obvious.
For those who champion these two values, gun homicides are obviously problematic because they involve the taking of life without consent. Their victims have their autonomy extinguished in the most definitive manner possible.
Conversely, the same liberal worldview can understand MAiD as a fulfillment, perhaps even the apotheosis, of consent and autonomy. Those who seek assisted suicide ostensibly do so of their own volition, often in response to serious and incurable illness and the suffering associated with it. If they understand what is to come and freely agree to the procedure, neither consent nor autonomy has necessarily been contravened. The sheer number of such deaths therefore presents no objection in principle.
Even more important to notice is that this would remain the case regardless of the numbers. Relative to population, Canada presently has more than eight and a half times as many MAiD deaths as the United States has firearm homicides. The liberal premises can be maintained without contradiction even if that ratio substantially increased — if the disparity became 10 or 20 times greater, one could still maintain the principles of autonomy and consent.
If each death represents the free and informed choice of the person concerned, increasing such numbers does not suddenly transform an exercise of autonomy into its violation.
What is necessary, then, is not an accumulation of numbers but a contest of principles.
Catholics, along with anyone else opposed to MAiD, must recognize that numbers are not self-interpreting. Too often, those concerned by abortion, euthanasia, family breakdown or any number of other social ills present an alarming statistic as though its moral significance were contained within it.
We announce that 16,499 Canadians died through MAiD, or that this amounts to one in 20 Canadian deaths, and expect the sheer magnitude of the number to complete an argument we have never actually made.
This is particularly ineffective when speaking to those who do not share our moral premises. Someone who believes that assisted death can be a legitimate exercise of autonomy need not deny that 16,499 Canadians received MAiD. He can accept the number, accept that it represents one in 20 deaths, and even accept that the rate is many times greater than firearm homicide in the U.S. None of this requires him to conclude that anything immoral has occurred.
To repeatedly insist upon the enormity of the statistic is therefore not persuasion. It is to mistake our interpretation of a fact for something contained within the fact itself.
None of this makes statistics unimportant. Quite the contrary: They tell us about prevalence, proportion, change and the scale at which our moral convictions have acquired social expression. But they cannot supply the convictions by which those developments are judged.
If Catholics believe that the MAiD death toll represents a profound moral failure, our task is not merely to make the number better known. We must explain why each of those deaths matters— and that requires recovering an account of human life, freedom, suffering and dignity capable of making the statistic intelligible.
The numbers may be startling. But they are not arguments.
Treating them as though they were risks speaking ever more loudly to people who have understood the numbers perfectly well and simply do not understand them as we do.
