Somehow the idea that someone can be perfectly sane and not want to live as long as possible is inconceivable to people.
They should really get over it. Just like those with different gender preferences they won't ever understand they will have to just take people's word that it's sincere and they're doing it of sound mind.
The rationalizations I hear people use are really hollow to me, like someone claiming a gay man just hasn't met the right woman yet. It's fundamentally different.
All of my friends who have taken their own lives struggled with it for years. I wish they weren't gone but I have to respect if after all therapy and help options were exhausted, they still were committed, then so be it. I wish they were here right now, of course I do. It fucking sucks.
It's personally traumatizing but as my final act of friendship I was there to support them in their decisions.
I had to sign off the release forms for my friend's ashes 6 years ago and drive up to santa barbara to give them to his mother. I remember sitting there in silence at her kitchen table with her when she said "we all knew it was the right thing."
I can not speak of you or your friends situations, but I disagree with your generalization:
>Somehow the idea that someone can be perfectly sane and not want to live as long as possible is inconceivable to people.
There are many people who have considered suicide, chosen not to follow through (or failed), and then realized that they were in an emotional state of mind. Suicide is a generally pathological phenomenon - horrible things will happen if we don't accept this as the null hypotheses in specific cases.
Sane people don't exist. Their vision is a product of the information they have been fed during their life and the cocktail of chemicals in their brains. Add some serotonin/dopamine or related substances and the whole view, the whole attitude changes immediately. MDMA-aided therapy should be made mandatory for such cases.
Morality of suicide is a completely different discussion. Euthanasia (in practice) comes down to whether government-licensed doctors should get to decide whose lives are worthy of living. Some people will be approved, some won't.
The implications are pretty troubling to me personally. Someone gets diagnosed with a sketchy mental condition, which in turn causes them to contemplate death, and then the very same doctors approve their euthanasia.
If I tell anybody to kill themselves I will rightfully get criminally charged. Someone approving an euthanasia is pretty close. Sure, they may want it, but so will people who get denied, one cannot say the act of approving is completely meaningless.
> Somehow the idea that someone can be perfectly sane and not want to live as long as possible is inconceivable to people.
You're confusing not wanting prolong life in a state of unbearable pain because of an incurable, terminal illness, and willful, intentional suicide or homicide. There is a very big difference.
In medicine, a distinction is made between ordinary and extraordinary care. Ordinary care concerns the basic needs of the patient such as air, food, water. Extraordinary care concerns medical treatments meant to cure or otherwise treat the disease or disorder. Typically, neither a patient nor anyone else can deprive a terminally ill patient of ordinary care. However, when providing of such things constitutes an "undue burden", such as when the body is no longer able to digest food or absorb liquids and the offering of food and drink actually causes harm, the patient may refuse food. At that point, you are accepting your powerlessness in the current situation, i.e., one in which the patient is in a state from which he cannot recover and for whom death is imminent.
Even treatments that may extend the life of the patient can be licitly refused by the patient if it would, again, pose an undue burden (for example, a weak, terminally ill patient may refuse CPR if his condition is such that the procedure, which is physically traumatic, while potentially able to extend the life of the patient by some small amount of time, would leave the patient in a state of great suffering during their last few hours).
So extension of life at any cost is not the goal of most people who oppose euthanasia. Natural law theory is perhaps the most vehemently opposed to euthanasia and will serve as an excellent resource for considering these kinds of questions.
I would caution you against making appeals to subjective feelings in a vacuum, which your examples attempt to do. This is dangerous because we are capable of feeling all sorts of things and being confused about all sorts of things. The crude subjectivism of our times puts excess emphasis on such things without understanding them in an objective context (which itself may be misunderstood or crudely understood).
I’m of the believe that people who are against assisted suicide have never had to provide end of life care to a person who died a painful death, riddled with disease and indescribable pain on the way out.
Seeing the final days of my grandfathers life, who died of colon cancer, being robbed of his dignity and condemned to suffering for an agonising six months made me a staunch advocate of assisted suicide.
> I’m of the believe that people who are against assisted suicide have never had to provide end of life care to a person who died a painful death, riddled with disease and indescribable pain on the way out.
Then your belief is wrong, and your claim utterly insulting and presumptuous. Having been in that situation, I will flatly reject the idea that somehow suffering robs a person of dignity. If anything, euthanasia is a perfidious assault on the dignity of a human being. The problem is with us and our attitude toward human beings and their suffering. We should do some soul-searching and take a good hard look at what really motivates us to think this way. We might be horrified at what we discover, as we should, and this horror might wake us from our moral slumber.
Be glad you didn't have the opportunity to be complicit in your grandfather's suicide and in his murder.
> Patients have to be Spanish citizens or legal residents and must be fully conscious when they request the procedures.
> A request is to be submitted twice in writing, 15 days apart. It must be approved by two separate doctors and an evaluation body, according to AFP news agency.
Given those requirements and safeguards, I'm having a difficult time understanding a rational argument against this law.
Agree 100%. I recently lost my Mum to cancer, and while the end wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been, it should have ended a day or two before it did. After battling for almost 3 years, there was no hope anymore. She couldn't eat or talk for two days, and on the last day wasn't lucid at all. In the proceeding years we had many, many conversations about death, and she was completely aware her cancer was a 100% death sentence.
A friend watched his Dad suffer immeasurable pain for 6 months from bone cancer, and the final 2 weeks were inhuman. He was begging the hospital staff, but they couldn't.
Three months after his Dad died, my friend committed suicide.
NOT allowing assisted suicide for terminally ill people is cruel and THAT should be the crime.
I have a small amount of experience with a similar process that exists in another country. It's easy enough to reason about the people in the last stages of cancer, but there are many other situations that are conceptually much murkier.
The first thing we need to make clear is that "severe, incurable, and unbearable" does not necessarily mean terminal or even physical pain. Plenty of psychiatric conditions often accompanying significant trauma are severe, incurable, and unbearable. But they're not terminal (except by suicide), and the reason they're incurable is because we know fuck all about psychic damage, and some might argue that if you've made it this far without killing yourself then it's de-facto bearable. And yet they definitely qualify unless the law specifically says that they don't, because "deemed unbearable by the patient" is not the same as definitively unbearable.
The biggest flaw I see in the model is if there's no significant determination of qualifications for whether a particular doctor should be allowed to approve the request (e.g. some might demand that the doctors be trained in appropriate specialties and have detailed knowledge of your history and situation), or whether you can ask 100 doctors who say no until you find 2 who say yes. I've seen firsthand that systems which don't mandate strict selection criteria create additional strife.
I think that fundamentally one has to decide whether a person gets to just say "I want to die" one day and forget that there are doctors involved. Because believe me there are many scenarios that basically feel that way to friends and family. Many people with trauma are extremely suicidal but also scared of the process. Do we establish a structure that makes it easy to get help dying or do we want to instead mandate state resources for helping them stay alive? For a lot of people the answer is not so clear _even_ when people want to be ok with letting people make their own choices.
[edit: sorry for using british slang, drive-by commenter. "fuck all" does indeed mean "nothing"]
I'll take a stab (I'm against similar laws). It's more a moral and emotive argument than a "rational" one, but many people believe that taking a human life -- apart from certain cases like self defense -- is wrong, even if it's your own. The thinking is that it's too important to be something we should decide individually (and that it should be for nature, or God, to decide). There's also the aspect that suffering sometimes just happens, and we don't usually get to decide when and how it's going to happen to us. I believe humans are inherently different from animals (a philosophical or religious debate), so I believe it is okay to put your dog down.
My uncle recently died of Parkinson's and my aunt soon after of cancer. Both suffered immensely (especially my uncle), but they believed it wasn't up to them to end it. Both also had huge support from loving family and friends, the way it should be. I know it's easy to say here at a distance, but there's honour in a valiant fight to the end.
I thought it was like a pandoras box of slippery slope histories once these things come into being and are accepted. They morph into other cases that don't match the clean and tidy first introduction/nice-first-impression cases but devolve into euthanasia and it's in your best interest to die sort of stuff. Have we seen expansions in euthanasia in countries that wound up adopting it where these initial provisions basically are eroded and replaced with more generous expansive allowances? I thought I read so much at some point somewhere, like Belgium allowing children to be able to request assisted suicide and things like that. Maybe I'm totally off here though.
I don’t think there’s quite enough information in the article to fully evaluate it. Depending on what the precise requirements are, what this “evaluation panel” involves, and how long the panel can take to make a decision, you could certainly have a rational objection there.
But, overall, it at least seems pretty good. I have always been incensed that if I were terminally ill in most US states, the law would treat me worse than my dog. Laws like this are a huge step in the right direction, IMO.
Edit: I’d be fully satisfied when the law allows me to specify when I want my own suffering ended via advance directive. It really shouldn’t be the burden of a terminally ill person to have to make those decisions at the end of their life.
Old people, or people in immense pain, may not be in full control of their faculties, even if they are not certified so.
My wife’s grandfather had dementia, and my wife’s uncle who was technically their carer, sucked them dry of all their money then blocked medical care coming to them. The grandparents wereegally independent. If he could coerce out an assisted suicide, it would have all happened much more quickly.
This is second hand info, not enough for the police to bother (they were notified) but knowing the characters involved and enough facts, completely believable.
It’s maybe not a show-stopper anec-argument but definitely something to bear in mind.
> Given those requirements and safeguards, I'm having a difficult time understanding a rational argument against this law.
Sometimes the inclined plane has a low coefficient of friction:
> Evidence of widespread evasion of such safeguards in Belgium and the Netherlands, where assisted suicide had previously been legalized, was dismissed as “anecdotal,” while the widening of its application in those countries, from the consenting adults originally envisaged, to children and the mentally ill, was waved away as the product of a different “medico-legal culture.” In essence, the [Supreme Court of Canada] said, it can’t happen here.
> This was not just an incidental point. This was central to the court’s reasoning, the thing that allowed it to ignore the precedent set in Rodriguez. Legalizing assisted suicide, relaxing the prohibition in place for centuries in virtually all Western countries, need not open the floodgates, as feared. It could be limited to consenting adults, of sound mind, in the last agonizing stages of a terminal illness – the sorts of people who had come before the court in Carter and Rodriguez, the sorts of cases that had moved the public to support their cause.
> Yet here we are, in 2020, considering whether to legalize assisted suicide for non-terminal cases, for the mentally ill, even for children – sorry, “mature minors.”
Excellent. Hopefully the UK will be next, and it gets extended so tht it doesn't only cover terminally ill people. Luckily I'm still young and healthy so I've got plenty of time until I'll need this, but I'll be pretty upset if not available when I do.
It's been hard enough to convince countries to legalize assisted suicide for people are terminally ill that I think we're unfortunately very far away from the entension to people who aren't. Aside from the religious angle, what are the biggest arguments against assisted suicide for people who aren't terminally ill?
Unfortunately, in the US, people have to rely on 2nd amendment rights to have such option.
Without guns, all other methods I know of are painful and non-instant: hanging, drug overdose, cutting veins, suffocation, what else?
It’s just sad that terminally ill people have to use a method that will put stigma and shame on how their live ended, doing it in secret and with mess.
Instead of a legal and graceful procedure, going away surrounded by family.
With international travel becoming so accessible I'm kind of surprised that suicide tourism (akin to medical tourism) isn't more of a thing. I wonder if there's a tacit understanding that opening that door would have diplomatic consequences.
I have a rather metabolic disorder which will likely end in it being ... quite bad. An acquaintance opened up to me and revealed that a great deal of his watchfulness around me (I could not help but notice) stemmed from the fact that his mother died of what I have when he was just a teen. According to him, she spent the last decade of her life in the furthest room of the house, intermittently screaming and/or begging for death, so I can understand some of the lack of ease he exhibits: he's waiting for the other shoe to drop.
While I'm aware of the various slippery slopes (and who might be greasing the plane), I can't help but think that a few people could have been spared quite a bit of suffering had euthanasia been available.
It was immoral of this acquaintance to tell you such a graphic story if he knew about your condition. If he was truly compassionate he would have kept it to himself or formulated it more tactfully instead of putting this into your mind. Maybe he was abusive towards you.
It's strange to me that people try to fight against legalizing assisted suicide. If there's one thing a person should have the right to do, it's to decide whether they want to continue their life or not.
It’s a complex subject, but these rulings are a direct result of our nihilist materialist pseudo-rational thinking and easily seem to get out of bounds. There unusually seem to be complex interpersonal relations involved too.
Belgium allowed a 24yo with severe depression to “decide” for assisted suicide (this seems to be frequent, I’ve heard of a similar case of a student this year), and the Netherlands wants to allow childhood euthanasia soon (it is already allowed for those over 12). Decision makers seem to believe that they are rational and ruling out religious moral opinions on these subjects, however we seem to be gravitating towards the buddhist nihilist view that life is suffering, and that our reason to live is to end suffering by vanishing.
> the Netherlands wants to allow childhood euthanasia soon
Doctors in the Netherlands want this simply as a better alternative to palliative sedation, which is already legal in NL and many other countries in the world.
Some children are terminally ill, and they are palliatively sedated when the parents and doctors agree that this is the best thing to do. The difference between palliative sedation and euthanasia in these cases is small, in the opinion of many Dutch people and doctors. Some quotes from a report[0] from the Dutch Association for Pediatrics, to give you an idea of what kind of cases we're talking about:
> 'Well, yeah, he had a period during which he was screaming from pain: "Help me, just help me!" That was truly horrible to see, that someone is really hitting his own head while begging for help. That went on for three days. Every time I called for a nurse and they could only increase his medicine further. And at one point a nurse came and said bluntly: "yes madam, your child has a brain tumour. Of course he is in pain". Well, I thought: "okay I guess"'.
> 'He didn't want to be sedated, because he said: "then I can no longer say whether I am in pain" [...] So we postponed that, but in the end he needed so much medicine that we asked him "do you want a little sleep medicine now?", and by then he wanted it". Child, 4 years old'
It's not the country that decides, it's the person and a panel of doctors, and there are requirements ( severe physical or mental issues). Point in case, there's a trial for murder on doctors that signed off on euthanasia for a woman which didn't fit the requirements - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-belgium-euthanasia-idUSKB...
Rather I think the point is we’re gravitating towards the idea that not all life is worth living, and the consciousness that must (alone) experience a given life should have primacy on decision rights of its continuation.
To relinquish some of the sacredness of life endowed by evolution is not to commit wholeheartedly to nihilism.
I have nothing against this law of course. But I'm sad this makes it to the news, and it's a huge deal, and everybody is talking about it.
We should really be making a huge deal about cancer and aging in general, and what our science can do to fix those things, and have the public know all the ins- and outs- of human physiology and cellular biology, and have parliaments around the world oil the way for better and more medical research and treatments. Take the fight to God.
Looks like the acceptance towards this is growing. If there was a service that wouldn't inconvenience anyone to manage my burial/cremation I would check out in a heartbeat.
A person may want to end their life for a variety of reasons, and not just because they are terminal or in excruciating pain. If a person is determined to "leave this world", for whatever reason, they are many ways to do it that no one can prevent: a gun shot, slashing their arms in the tub, gobbling medicine (not always reliable), etc.
IMO, a person who wants to leave should be allowed to have controlled death without a mess or violence. I agree that counseling should be required, like maybe 2 sessions, but don't agree that anyone should have the power to deny assistance to die. It's my choice to leave or stay; all we are debating is whether I have to do something messy or can have a goodbye meeting with my family and have a peaceful death.
My mom had pneumonia when she was 74. She had been very sick with rheumatoid arthritis for 30 years - bedridden in some of them, on crazy amounts of drugs for all of them, and for the last few years of her life, could only barely walk bent over a walker because of a failed hip replacement. Her body was shot, so when she went to the hospital for the pneumonia, she refused to let them treat her. If she took the oxygen mask off, she turned blue. The doctor wanted to send her home with an oxygen tank to lug around, but she could hardly walk as it was, so that was completely impractical. I guess she convinced the doctors she did want to leave, because they had a conference with us, said she was going to die, and allowed us to hasten it with morphine and Adavan. The shitty thing is, we (mainly me) had to go to the nurses station every 45 minutes to tell them she was "not comfortable" and get a morphine injection, and every hour do the same thing for Adavan. This went on for 9 hours, and it was only that short because they had her on 2 oxygen deliveries and I had to convince them that we couldn't keep doing this for 3-4 days. No one had eaten all day, my sisters are in the room crying their eyes out, and my mom had been unconscious for many hours. We knew what the end game was, but getting there was much more difficult that it needed to be. They could have easily put her on a drip for those 2 drugs to avoid adding to our suffering by forcing us to request drugs on some crazy schedule we had to track while our mother is dying. I am grateful they at least did it, but it was unnecessarily hard on us.
There are also cases where a person should be able to write a document, like a living will, that says "Under these circumstances, I want to be euthanized: haven't been able to communicate for N days" etc. There may be cirumstances, like an accident, where a person is not able to go to counseling or is not able to confirm their wishes verbally. That doesn't mean they've changed their mind. If a document is written when the person is sane (maybe someone needs to notarized that), there is no reason to not honor their wishes at the appropriate time.
We treat animals better than we treat people when it comes to end-of-life decisions, and that's a damn shame.
[+] [-] kristopolous|5 years ago|reply
They should really get over it. Just like those with different gender preferences they won't ever understand they will have to just take people's word that it's sincere and they're doing it of sound mind.
The rationalizations I hear people use are really hollow to me, like someone claiming a gay man just hasn't met the right woman yet. It's fundamentally different.
All of my friends who have taken their own lives struggled with it for years. I wish they weren't gone but I have to respect if after all therapy and help options were exhausted, they still were committed, then so be it. I wish they were here right now, of course I do. It fucking sucks.
It's personally traumatizing but as my final act of friendship I was there to support them in their decisions.
I had to sign off the release forms for my friend's ashes 6 years ago and drive up to santa barbara to give them to his mother. I remember sitting there in silence at her kitchen table with her when she said "we all knew it was the right thing."
[+] [-] dfhjgkljhf44|5 years ago|reply
>Somehow the idea that someone can be perfectly sane and not want to live as long as possible is inconceivable to people.
There are many people who have considered suicide, chosen not to follow through (or failed), and then realized that they were in an emotional state of mind. Suicide is a generally pathological phenomenon - horrible things will happen if we don't accept this as the null hypotheses in specific cases.
[+] [-] qwerty456127|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] auganov|5 years ago|reply
The implications are pretty troubling to me personally. Someone gets diagnosed with a sketchy mental condition, which in turn causes them to contemplate death, and then the very same doctors approve their euthanasia.
If I tell anybody to kill themselves I will rightfully get criminally charged. Someone approving an euthanasia is pretty close. Sure, they may want it, but so will people who get denied, one cannot say the act of approving is completely meaningless.
[+] [-] bobthechef|5 years ago|reply
You're confusing not wanting prolong life in a state of unbearable pain because of an incurable, terminal illness, and willful, intentional suicide or homicide. There is a very big difference.
In medicine, a distinction is made between ordinary and extraordinary care. Ordinary care concerns the basic needs of the patient such as air, food, water. Extraordinary care concerns medical treatments meant to cure or otherwise treat the disease or disorder. Typically, neither a patient nor anyone else can deprive a terminally ill patient of ordinary care. However, when providing of such things constitutes an "undue burden", such as when the body is no longer able to digest food or absorb liquids and the offering of food and drink actually causes harm, the patient may refuse food. At that point, you are accepting your powerlessness in the current situation, i.e., one in which the patient is in a state from which he cannot recover and for whom death is imminent.
Even treatments that may extend the life of the patient can be licitly refused by the patient if it would, again, pose an undue burden (for example, a weak, terminally ill patient may refuse CPR if his condition is such that the procedure, which is physically traumatic, while potentially able to extend the life of the patient by some small amount of time, would leave the patient in a state of great suffering during their last few hours).
So extension of life at any cost is not the goal of most people who oppose euthanasia. Natural law theory is perhaps the most vehemently opposed to euthanasia and will serve as an excellent resource for considering these kinds of questions.
I would caution you against making appeals to subjective feelings in a vacuum, which your examples attempt to do. This is dangerous because we are capable of feeling all sorts of things and being confused about all sorts of things. The crude subjectivism of our times puts excess emphasis on such things without understanding them in an objective context (which itself may be misunderstood or crudely understood).
[+] [-] jfim|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjeaff|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] wolfretcrap|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Orochikaku|5 years ago|reply
Seeing the final days of my grandfathers life, who died of colon cancer, being robbed of his dignity and condemned to suffering for an agonising six months made me a staunch advocate of assisted suicide.
[+] [-] 1123581321|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] camdenlock|5 years ago|reply
It’s a complex topic, for sure, but also a rather morally clear one.
[+] [-] bobthechef|5 years ago|reply
Then your belief is wrong, and your claim utterly insulting and presumptuous. Having been in that situation, I will flatly reject the idea that somehow suffering robs a person of dignity. If anything, euthanasia is a perfidious assault on the dignity of a human being. The problem is with us and our attitude toward human beings and their suffering. We should do some soul-searching and take a good hard look at what really motivates us to think this way. We might be horrified at what we discover, as we should, and this horror might wake us from our moral slumber.
Be glad you didn't have the opportunity to be complicit in your grandfather's suicide and in his murder.
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|5 years ago|reply
> A request is to be submitted twice in writing, 15 days apart. It must be approved by two separate doctors and an evaluation body, according to AFP news agency.
Given those requirements and safeguards, I'm having a difficult time understanding a rational argument against this law.
[+] [-] grecy|5 years ago|reply
A friend watched his Dad suffer immeasurable pain for 6 months from bone cancer, and the final 2 weeks were inhuman. He was begging the hospital staff, but they couldn't. Three months after his Dad died, my friend committed suicide.
NOT allowing assisted suicide for terminally ill people is cruel and THAT should be the crime.
[+] [-] BugsJustFindMe|5 years ago|reply
The first thing we need to make clear is that "severe, incurable, and unbearable" does not necessarily mean terminal or even physical pain. Plenty of psychiatric conditions often accompanying significant trauma are severe, incurable, and unbearable. But they're not terminal (except by suicide), and the reason they're incurable is because we know fuck all about psychic damage, and some might argue that if you've made it this far without killing yourself then it's de-facto bearable. And yet they definitely qualify unless the law specifically says that they don't, because "deemed unbearable by the patient" is not the same as definitively unbearable.
The biggest flaw I see in the model is if there's no significant determination of qualifications for whether a particular doctor should be allowed to approve the request (e.g. some might demand that the doctors be trained in appropriate specialties and have detailed knowledge of your history and situation), or whether you can ask 100 doctors who say no until you find 2 who say yes. I've seen firsthand that systems which don't mandate strict selection criteria create additional strife.
I think that fundamentally one has to decide whether a person gets to just say "I want to die" one day and forget that there are doctors involved. Because believe me there are many scenarios that basically feel that way to friends and family. Many people with trauma are extremely suicidal but also scared of the process. Do we establish a structure that makes it easy to get help dying or do we want to instead mandate state resources for helping them stay alive? For a lot of people the answer is not so clear _even_ when people want to be ok with letting people make their own choices.
[edit: sorry for using british slang, drive-by commenter. "fuck all" does indeed mean "nothing"]
[+] [-] benhoyt|5 years ago|reply
My uncle recently died of Parkinson's and my aunt soon after of cancer. Both suffered immensely (especially my uncle), but they believed it wasn't up to them to end it. Both also had huge support from loving family and friends, the way it should be. I know it's easy to say here at a distance, but there's honour in a valiant fight to the end.
[+] [-] jxramos|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paxys|5 years ago|reply
Religious - life is sacred, suicide is a sin etc.
It is unethical for physicians to be assisting in suicide or making decisions about who should live.
People (especially the elderly) can be coerced into it, even if they are of sound mind.
The healthcare industry & government will be incentivized to push people into this vs. spending money for treatment.
(These aren't my own opinions FYI)
[+] [-] pmiller2|5 years ago|reply
But, overall, it at least seems pretty good. I have always been incensed that if I were terminally ill in most US states, the law would treat me worse than my dog. Laws like this are a huge step in the right direction, IMO.
Edit: I’d be fully satisfied when the law allows me to specify when I want my own suffering ended via advance directive. It really shouldn’t be the burden of a terminally ill person to have to make those decisions at the end of their life.
[+] [-] rich_sasha|5 years ago|reply
My wife’s grandfather had dementia, and my wife’s uncle who was technically their carer, sucked them dry of all their money then blocked medical care coming to them. The grandparents wereegally independent. If he could coerce out an assisted suicide, it would have all happened much more quickly.
This is second hand info, not enough for the police to bother (they were notified) but knowing the characters involved and enough facts, completely believable.
It’s maybe not a show-stopper anec-argument but definitely something to bear in mind.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] wolfretcrap|5 years ago|reply
You can really easily convince some people to end their life despite them being perfectly reasonable with everything else in life.
[+] [-] throw0101a|5 years ago|reply
Sometimes the inclined plane has a low coefficient of friction:
> Evidence of widespread evasion of such safeguards in Belgium and the Netherlands, where assisted suicide had previously been legalized, was dismissed as “anecdotal,” while the widening of its application in those countries, from the consenting adults originally envisaged, to children and the mentally ill, was waved away as the product of a different “medico-legal culture.” In essence, the [Supreme Court of Canada] said, it can’t happen here.
> This was not just an incidental point. This was central to the court’s reasoning, the thing that allowed it to ignore the precedent set in Rodriguez. Legalizing assisted suicide, relaxing the prohibition in place for centuries in virtually all Western countries, need not open the floodgates, as feared. It could be limited to consenting adults, of sound mind, in the last agonizing stages of a terminal illness – the sorts of people who had come before the court in Carter and Rodriguez, the sorts of cases that had moved the public to support their cause.
> Yet here we are, in 2020, considering whether to legalize assisted suicide for non-terminal cases, for the mentally ill, even for children – sorry, “mature minors.”
* https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-on-assisted-...
* https://archive.is/hFXjJ (in case of paywall)
For that last part:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_euthanasia
[+] [-] nicoburns|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rjmorris|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coolspot|5 years ago|reply
Without guns, all other methods I know of are painful and non-instant: hanging, drug overdose, cutting veins, suffocation, what else?
It’s just sad that terminally ill people have to use a method that will put stigma and shame on how their live ended, doing it in secret and with mess. Instead of a legal and graceful procedure, going away surrounded by family.
[+] [-] mrec|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] at_a_remove|5 years ago|reply
While I'm aware of the various slippery slopes (and who might be greasing the plane), I can't help but think that a few people could have been spared quite a bit of suffering had euthanasia been available.
[+] [-] JesseMReeves|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nynx|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] superjan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomjen3|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanielleMolloy|5 years ago|reply
Belgium allowed a 24yo with severe depression to “decide” for assisted suicide (this seems to be frequent, I’ve heard of a similar case of a student this year), and the Netherlands wants to allow childhood euthanasia soon (it is already allowed for those over 12). Decision makers seem to believe that they are rational and ruling out religious moral opinions on these subjects, however we seem to be gravitating towards the buddhist nihilist view that life is suffering, and that our reason to live is to end suffering by vanishing.
[+] [-] float4|5 years ago|reply
Doctors in the Netherlands want this simply as a better alternative to palliative sedation, which is already legal in NL and many other countries in the world.
Some children are terminally ill, and they are palliatively sedated when the parents and doctors agree that this is the best thing to do. The difference between palliative sedation and euthanasia in these cases is small, in the opinion of many Dutch people and doctors. Some quotes from a report[0] from the Dutch Association for Pediatrics, to give you an idea of what kind of cases we're talking about:
> 'Well, yeah, he had a period during which he was screaming from pain: "Help me, just help me!" That was truly horrible to see, that someone is really hitting his own head while begging for help. That went on for three days. Every time I called for a nurse and they could only increase his medicine further. And at one point a nurse came and said bluntly: "yes madam, your child has a brain tumour. Of course he is in pain". Well, I thought: "okay I guess"'.
> 'He didn't want to be sedated, because he said: "then I can no longer say whether I am in pain" [...] So we postponed that, but in the end he needed so much medicine that we asked him "do you want a little sleep medicine now?", and by then he wanted it". Child, 4 years old'
[0] http://download.omroep.nl/nos/docs/280919_euthanasie.pdf
[+] [-] sofixa|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chronofar|5 years ago|reply
To relinquish some of the sacredness of life endowed by evolution is not to commit wholeheartedly to nihilism.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] oleander73|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsign|5 years ago|reply
We should really be making a huge deal about cancer and aging in general, and what our science can do to fix those things, and have the public know all the ins- and outs- of human physiology and cellular biology, and have parliaments around the world oil the way for better and more medical research and treatments. Take the fight to God.
[+] [-] someday_somehow|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucb1e|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BrandoElFollito|5 years ago|reply
I am of course aware that it must be well tested and everything, it would be a relief to everyone.
I am happy, wealthy to the point I want to be, living in a great country and a great place, have a great job and family.
So I am far from being depressed, and yet I want that device to have the choice. I do not need anyone to explain why this is a bad idea.
[+] [-] oleander73|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prirun|5 years ago|reply
IMO, a person who wants to leave should be allowed to have controlled death without a mess or violence. I agree that counseling should be required, like maybe 2 sessions, but don't agree that anyone should have the power to deny assistance to die. It's my choice to leave or stay; all we are debating is whether I have to do something messy or can have a goodbye meeting with my family and have a peaceful death.
My mom had pneumonia when she was 74. She had been very sick with rheumatoid arthritis for 30 years - bedridden in some of them, on crazy amounts of drugs for all of them, and for the last few years of her life, could only barely walk bent over a walker because of a failed hip replacement. Her body was shot, so when she went to the hospital for the pneumonia, she refused to let them treat her. If she took the oxygen mask off, she turned blue. The doctor wanted to send her home with an oxygen tank to lug around, but she could hardly walk as it was, so that was completely impractical. I guess she convinced the doctors she did want to leave, because they had a conference with us, said she was going to die, and allowed us to hasten it with morphine and Adavan. The shitty thing is, we (mainly me) had to go to the nurses station every 45 minutes to tell them she was "not comfortable" and get a morphine injection, and every hour do the same thing for Adavan. This went on for 9 hours, and it was only that short because they had her on 2 oxygen deliveries and I had to convince them that we couldn't keep doing this for 3-4 days. No one had eaten all day, my sisters are in the room crying their eyes out, and my mom had been unconscious for many hours. We knew what the end game was, but getting there was much more difficult that it needed to be. They could have easily put her on a drip for those 2 drugs to avoid adding to our suffering by forcing us to request drugs on some crazy schedule we had to track while our mother is dying. I am grateful they at least did it, but it was unnecessarily hard on us.
There are also cases where a person should be able to write a document, like a living will, that says "Under these circumstances, I want to be euthanized: haven't been able to communicate for N days" etc. There may be cirumstances, like an accident, where a person is not able to go to counseling or is not able to confirm their wishes verbally. That doesn't mean they've changed their mind. If a document is written when the person is sane (maybe someone needs to notarized that), there is no reason to not honor their wishes at the appropriate time.
We treat animals better than we treat people when it comes to end-of-life decisions, and that's a damn shame.
[+] [-] Darmody|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] throwaway30934|5 years ago|reply
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