Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sackettuck. My guest today is a doctor who made a remarkable mid-career switch, which took her from a focus on the first moments of life to the last. She trained as a specialist in obstetrics. She has overseen literally thousands of births, but in recent, she's given up maternity care in favour of a focus on the end of life.

She's become a practitioner of medical assistance in dying or made, for short.

The term used for Canada's program of legalised euthanasia.

Under Canadian law, it is legal for a qualified healthcare professional to end the life of an individual who wishes to die if they have a terminal illness

or if they are in an advanced state of irreversible decline and have enduring and intolerable

physical or psychological suffering.

In 2021, more than 10,000 Canadians were assisted in their dying.

That's 3% of all deaths and a number higher than in any other country with a form of legalised

euthanasia.

So has Canada made assisted dying too easy? Stephanie Green

joins me now on the line from Victoria in Canada. Welcome to Hard Talk. Thanks for having me.

It's a pleasure to have you on the show, Dr. Green. Now, your particular focus for the last few years

has been offering medical assistance in dying.

What does that actually mean you do?

Mostly it means I talk to a lot of patients.

I meet with families and patients who are interested in talking about their end-of-life choices,

specifically about the possibility of an assisted death.

I do a lot of education, a lot of

informing patients what that is, what it isn't, what other options might be. We talk about the

process, the procedure. There's a very rigorous process that needs to happen if they want to go

down that path. So we work together through that process if necessary. And of course, ultimately for some,

it's a matter of offering the procedure itself and actually administering the medications that will

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