My Canadian parents are in their 80's so naturally a lot of their friends of the same age are dying. And two of them have been via MAID.
In one case, which was surprising to me, a man who had survived cancer - he was not terminal but certainly wasn't getting any better - elected to die via MAID after his wife died. She passed, he called his doctor and less than a week later he was also dead. He got a chance to visit his family, apparently drive around his hobby farm one more time and then that was it. He didn't want to deal with being alone and seriously ill.
Another friend was in renal and congestive heart failure and possibly could have lived longer but they were driving 100km daily to get to the nearest dialysis clinic and again, this person was definitely dying. So made and appointment and decided to go sooner rather than suffer along for an indeterminate amount of time.
It's quite surprising to me, but these people are in their mid to late 80's and of sound mind and know what they want.
My dad (age 75) got diagnosed with ALS and within a month of the diagnosis opted for MAID. He had only just lost control of one leg, but he knew what was coming. As much as we begged him for more time, he didn't want any of it.
Till his dying breath he kept repeating how thankful he was that he lived in a country that didn't force him to live on when he didn't want to.
He was a clear Track 1 case, and I realize Track 2 cases are more complicated, but just wanted to add my story as reporting on MAID spins out of control in our culture war milieu.
To be honest, my grand parents both died in their nineties and their last two years were really sad. It was not so much the physical decline but the mental one. At the end, while technically alive, so little of who they were as persons remained, they might as well have been dead.
I fully understand someone in their 80s knowing the end is near choosing to leave on their own term.
It's not at all surprising to me! I fully expect to want to euthanise myself once I'm done with life (and I'm going to be pretty upset if it's not an option for me when it gets to that point).
People tell me I'll change my mind (perhaps similarly to how people treat people who say they don't want kids). But I doubt I will. I've seen lot's of older people (and people who's lives are not good) still want this when it comes to the time when it applies. The only reason it's not more commonplace is social stigma (and legal obstacles) against it.
In your first example, I suspect there was probably other things present you weren't made aware of. Currently the requirements in Canada include (only copy those relevant to your example).
-have a serious and incurable illness, disease or disability (excluding a mental illness until March 17, 2027)
-be in an advanced state of irreversible decline in capability
-have enduring and intolerable physical or psychological suffering that cannot be alleviated under conditions the person considers acceptable
Yeah, I get that. Once you've accepted death is inevitable, you start to think carefully about what kind of death you want.
My parents both died of glioblastomas, a particularly aggressive form of brain cancer. As the surgeon explained after the biopsy, "This is what you will die from." 3 months from diagnosis to death for my mom, a year and change for my dad. Seeing that process up close made very clear to me what I wanted for myself.
I get the thought of medically-assisted suicide wigs some people out, and we have to be careful to make sure the urge isn't just a temporary distortion of mood and thought. But having seen it up close, I am very much not interested in spending months dying slowly and dragging my family through hell just to make sure random people not involved don't have to think about hard things or deal with their feelings about death.
>She passed, he called his doctor and less than a week later he was also dead.
this doesn't sound right? MAiD has a 90-day waiting period. He had to have started that process before his wife passed, and just picked the date after she passed.
I know it's morbid to discuss but the relief of financial burden on society is also significant. Not only do they die with dignity, but they are giving back to society.
> In one case, which was surprising to me, a man who had survived cancer - he was not terminal but certainly wasn't getting any better - elected to die via MAID after his wife died. She passed, he called his doctor and less than a week later he was also dead. He got a chance to visit his family, apparently drive around his hobby farm one more time and then that was it. He didn't want to deal with being alone and seriously ill.
For some reason this made me emotional. I think I would make the same choice if I were in this position.
I don't want my health holding back my family or depleting my wealth. I am 100% for MAID. If you have ever had persistent pain you know how little of it is required before you want to check out. People should be able when they want to.
There is a HUGE amount of things you can criticize about MAID specifically (and should) but honestly there are only a few reason why we shouldn't let the living dead go:
- it's a slippery slope
- they are young, they might revive (metaphorically speaking)
- you believe god will punish them with eternal suffering or something, but then a lot of religions are fine with monks willfully passing one "through meditation" in old age
To be clear I mean "in general". Wrt. MAID specifically e.g., a week seem .... very short ... enough for some short term depressive bout or mental leap of judgment to end your live. But then like I said there is a lot to criticize about MAID.
But granting the living dead peace is, I think, not the problem here.
Health care can do a lot these days and extend a persons life by a lot, but with this the question about the quality of life arises. Assisted dying is one answer to this. Personally, half-way through life, I plan to avoid it by keeping myself fit with exercises, cycling and running.
Losing a very long term partner is a horrible blow. You go through the grief to get to better times on the other side--but if there's no other side to get to, why go through it?
My memory is that the Canadian rules require more time than that so he probably had already set it up.
After watching my father die with COPD, it because obvious that euthanasia happens in the US all the time. He opted out of lung-reduction surgery and was ready to die. So the hospital withheld IV hydration and provided a morphine drip and he was gone in 36 hours. How long can one live without water, a few days max? So that's what killed him. My sister-in-law who's a physician told me that's how it's typically done. I was horrified at the time.
During the recent debate around the Assisted Dying Bill in the UK, I listened to a radio phone-in in which a palliative care doctor explained that it wasn't possible to relieve all suffering for all patients. They relayed an example of a person who had spent their last days vomiting fully-formed faeces.
If we can prevent five, ten or perhaps twenty percent of people having gruesome deaths, then not doing so feels like a moral failing.
Right, but there's a problem - the UK is in a real mess! Social services, medical services, all the services are underfunded and crumbling. There is a cost of living crisis as wages have barely moved in 15 years, food banks are everywhere, and now "multibanks" are popping up.
Our country first needs to ensure that people can choose to live, and if needed be cared for; nobody should feel pushed into assisted dying because of financial reasons.
I say this as someone who will be in pain for the rest of my life, and euthanasia has been on my mind at times. As much as I might "benefit" from such a law in the future, I don't believe it should be passed until we have a stable society with good services and safety nets.
There is no "we". There are people and their bodies and their wishes. And authoritarians who want a say on it. Doesn't matter if nice sounding words like law and democracy are used to describe the tyranny.
A more important point is that even in a more normal palliative care situation, which previously may have involved a borderline illegal increase of drugs near the end to hasten and ease death, might now be recorded as an assisted death instead.
So a more interesting stat might be the expected quality of life adjusted years that have been cut off by the assisted deaths.
I'm not sure if QUALY can go negative but some measure that can might be appropriate when talking about assisted death.
Even if this is true, it appeals to extremes to make a point. People agajnst the motion are against the misuses of assisted suicide due to conditions that may get better in time, or misunderstandings, or conditions of a mental nature which may change or be cured.
While people should have autonomy over their lives we should not be legalizing assisting them. This is a path that is well-trodden. Many dictatorships have "mercifully euthanized" various sectors of people. It always starts out as the disabled, cancer-stricken, or unviable. Then it becomes a simple way to get rid of the people deemed to be a burden. Suddenly being depressed is a good way to get the needle. Can't perform your job well enough? Yep you guessed it, needle. Or I guess these days they've made sarco pods for the personalized gas chamber experience. This isn't even a slippery slope, we're watching it happen in real time as the bar for euthanasia continues to be lowered.
There's been several cases that MAID has willfully disobeyed the law. Doctors not filing the correct paperwork, rushing patients, etc. We are already seeing the sprouts of a system that if allowed to continue will become a virtual Soylent Green.
Of course I'll be downvoted for this by the bleeding hearts but history has not been kind to people who allow this.
"They relayed an example of a person who had spent their last days vomiting fully-formed faeces."
Sounds like a fully-formed exaggeration. Vomiting once or twice a day is not spending your last days vomiting. More frequent vomiting? The supply could not possibly meet the demand. Especially if the patient stopped eating.
Anyone who has worked at a hospital can tell you how many people die in needless pain and suffering when nothing more can really be done for them. They just wait out the clock in pain or do increasingly horrible procedures that give them a little more time with terrible quality of life. 5% is probably an underestimate of that number.
Nurses/doctors don't like to speak up about that part and people don't want to confront it. But MAID is probably the more humane option in these cases.
My grandma always told me when she couldn’t go on her walks anymore she didn’t consider life worth living. When she got dementia she was placed in a closed hospice, to “protect her”. Now she only walks when I visit, and I only see a shell of the woman she was.
Anecdotal of course, but why do people think it’s an ethics question when society is individualistic as can be? There is no choice in being born, why don’t we get a choice in when we leave?
The BBC article title now says "Assisted dying" not "euthanasia".
Often, the distinction hinges on whether the patient or a medical practitioner administers a substance that brings about death. The Canadian policy actually provides for both, but as I understand it the stats being cited in the article combine both, so only a subset of the tally are "euthanasia" deaths.
Fifteen years ago, flying into Vancouver, a local told me charities would give homeless people one-way bus tickets there from colder regions of Canada to prevent winter deaths. No return tickets in spring. Calls into question what we consider "charitable" when the solution is just moving vulnerable people elsewhere.
Worrying parallel: will euthanasia become another "solution" for those who can't afford proper care and treatment? Moving homeless people to warmer cities and offering euthanasia to those who can't afford treatment both avoid fixing the underlying problems.
People have made arguments against abuse in vulnerable populations, which I think is an important argument. But one thing that I really haven't seen explored, and specifically where this applies to suicidal ideation, is the extent to which this is considered a 'condition' or not.
The human body / brain has extremely powerful mechanisms for ensuring certain 'drives' that are essential for the survival and propagation as a species. This is what is biologically 'normal' / 'healthy'. Whether we agree with these drives or not philosophically is another thing. But if someone is anorexic, we recognise that their drive for hunger has been compromised, and make sure to restore it. We don't go "oh it's ok, their desire not to eat is voluntary". Psychiatric diseases are complex. To just assume "will" can never be compromised in disease is naive. And equally more naive is to assume that there is no action that one could do to restore the diseased processes such that that will would be reversed.
So the fact that when it comes to suicidal ideation we are less prone to say "this is a disease which circumvents the brain's normal processes that create the imperative urge to survive, leaving one suicidal", and we just go "wouldn't it be nice if they could end their life peacefully without consequences" is bizzare.
Note that in the situation where a degree of suicidality is not the main issue, and we're talking about palliation by physicians, current laws and practices absolutely do not prevent a doctor from taking actions that are intended to palliate rather than prolong a life of suffering. So the euthanasia bill isn't really about that. It's about supporting people who actively want to die, by providing "assistance". Discussing whether their circumstances warrant them wanting to die is a red herring, no matter how dire those circumstances may be.
I understand that there is probably some sort of fear of murder or untimely death by doctors "throwing up their hands" or pressure from inheritors to "move on"
However the hard line makes no sense. In most places that human euthanasia is illegal no one has any problem killing animals because it is more merciful than allowing them to spend their final time suffering tremendously.
My first instinct on seeing that number was "wow that's too high".
My more thought-through reaction became "Actually, that number is still way too low".
It's not necessarily true that 19 in 20 people didn't get to choose how they die, but there's something to the converse.
It's always surprising to me the... Quesiness people have in discussing this. In the land of the free, what possible freedom is more fundamental to life than when to be done with it? I wonder if the higher uptake in Quebec is because it's a more secular society than some of our other provinces.
From personal perspective, I very much hundred percent totally want the freedom to have the option to decide how I go. From there, I don't want to stand in anybody way who also desires same freedom. A lot of counter-arguments seem thinly veiled religious origins -- Some are legitimate concerns about potential for abuse, but still a lot reek of disingenuity in core motivations.
Terminal lucidity is a thing I don't see mentioned here.
It is well known that even some advanced dementia patients days or hours before death can exhibit lucid coherence, even speaking and recognizing loved one before death.
Having watched my mother decay from Alzheimer's for 10+ years, I know for sure there is much more left to her than she can express, and every once and a while she speaks in clear sentences, says names of loved ones or pets, and when she talks--even though we barely understand 20% of what she says--it's clear she knows what she's saying based on her facial expressions.
I will also say it's one of the joys of my life to sit with these people, many of whom are "waiting to die" and just talk to them with and listen to them (even when I can't understand them). They light up, and they especially light up when I play them old music on a bluetooth speaker. Some sing, some sway, some even try to dance. Many cannot talk at all but they can still sing the lyrics.
I find it overall very unnerving how quiet this is and how the Canadian press never really finds issues with this.
I often saw Japanese media moving lock-step with the police (in terms of vocabulary to use for certain crimes, how to report certain issues), and thought it was creepy as hell. However, the complete lack of questioning of the purpose behind a sudden legalization of euthanasia (in a country with public healthcare and an inherent potential conflict of interest), and the entire concept of having "experts" sign off on it without any legal overview is creepy.
Even using "medicalized" terms like MAID instead of euthanasia is unnerving to me.
Put in another way, given how hard it is for people to see doctors, I wonder how much worse it would be without MAID? As it would clearly be worse, is this a mere sanitized form of cost cutting to deal with growing medical costs associated with treating the aging population?
My Mom escaped from some suffering by accessing MAID when the pain and suffering from her terminal cancer became too much for her to bear. She died in her own home surrounded by beloved family and friends, on her own terms.
I'm grateful that she was able to do this, and was spared a period of inhumane suffering at the end of her life.
It's hard and it makes me very sad, but I'm glad she could go this way. It would have been more difficult for her and everyone if she was forced to live through a hellish torture as cancer slowly took her life. In the end she beat cancer by taking herself out with it.
Euthanasia without good cheap universal healthcare is just a way to get rid of people in a sick society.
Canada might not be the worst but their healthcare only cover 60-70% of canadians' need. And it's slowly getting worse with the private sector eating the market.
>Assisted dying now accounts for one in 20 Canada deaths
>While the number of assisted deaths in Canada is growing, the country still falls behind the Netherlands, where euthanasia accounted for around 5% of total deaths last year.
A more enlightening statistic, but obviously harder to collect, would be what percentage of missed life-years could be attributed to MAID. I suspect it would be a much smaller percentage.
It's also worth noting that for every MAID horror story in this article, there is probably at least one horror story about a needlessly painful and drawn-out death that could have been avoided if MAID had been legal.
[+] [-] guyzero|1 year ago|reply
In one case, which was surprising to me, a man who had survived cancer - he was not terminal but certainly wasn't getting any better - elected to die via MAID after his wife died. She passed, he called his doctor and less than a week later he was also dead. He got a chance to visit his family, apparently drive around his hobby farm one more time and then that was it. He didn't want to deal with being alone and seriously ill.
Another friend was in renal and congestive heart failure and possibly could have lived longer but they were driving 100km daily to get to the nearest dialysis clinic and again, this person was definitely dying. So made and appointment and decided to go sooner rather than suffer along for an indeterminate amount of time.
It's quite surprising to me, but these people are in their mid to late 80's and of sound mind and know what they want.
[+] [-] pj_mukh|1 year ago|reply
Till his dying breath he kept repeating how thankful he was that he lived in a country that didn't force him to live on when he didn't want to.
He was a clear Track 1 case, and I realize Track 2 cases are more complicated, but just wanted to add my story as reporting on MAID spins out of control in our culture war milieu.
[+] [-] RandomThoughts3|1 year ago|reply
I fully understand someone in their 80s knowing the end is near choosing to leave on their own term.
[+] [-] nicoburns|1 year ago|reply
People tell me I'll change my mind (perhaps similarly to how people treat people who say they don't want kids). But I doubt I will. I've seen lot's of older people (and people who's lives are not good) still want this when it comes to the time when it applies. The only reason it's not more commonplace is social stigma (and legal obstacles) against it.
[+] [-] darth_avocado|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] heroprotagonist|1 year ago|reply
Then he had to hang himself, because there was no legal or easy way to humanely end his own life.
Apparently he did it wrong, but died anyway. Just more slowly and more painfully, without any support.
[+] [-] giarc|1 year ago|reply
-have a serious and incurable illness, disease or disability (excluding a mental illness until March 17, 2027)
-be in an advanced state of irreversible decline in capability
-have enduring and intolerable physical or psychological suffering that cannot be alleviated under conditions the person considers acceptable
https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/cj-jp/ad-am/bk-di.html#s1
[+] [-] wpietri|1 year ago|reply
My parents both died of glioblastomas, a particularly aggressive form of brain cancer. As the surgeon explained after the biopsy, "This is what you will die from." 3 months from diagnosis to death for my mom, a year and change for my dad. Seeing that process up close made very clear to me what I wanted for myself.
All of this was reinforced for me by the experience of Brittany Maynard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittany_Maynard
She was diagnosed with a glioblastoma and was given 6 months to live. She moved from California to Oregon so she could die in a controlled and humane manner. She wrote about that here: https://www.cnn.com/2014/10/07/opinion/maynard-assisted-suic...
I get the thought of medically-assisted suicide wigs some people out, and we have to be careful to make sure the urge isn't just a temporary distortion of mood and thought. But having seen it up close, I am very much not interested in spending months dying slowly and dragging my family through hell just to make sure random people not involved don't have to think about hard things or deal with their feelings about death.
[+] [-] notatoad|1 year ago|reply
this doesn't sound right? MAiD has a 90-day waiting period. He had to have started that process before his wife passed, and just picked the date after she passed.
[+] [-] Salgat|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] malshe|1 year ago|reply
For some reason this made me emotional. I think I would make the same choice if I were in this position.
[+] [-] mattmaroon|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bamboozled|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] datavirtue|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dathinab|1 year ago|reply
- it's a slippery slope
- they are young, they might revive (metaphorically speaking)
- you believe god will punish them with eternal suffering or something, but then a lot of religions are fine with monks willfully passing one "through meditation" in old age
To be clear I mean "in general". Wrt. MAID specifically e.g., a week seem .... very short ... enough for some short term depressive bout or mental leap of judgment to end your live. But then like I said there is a lot to criticize about MAID.
But granting the living dead peace is, I think, not the problem here.
[+] [-] voisin|1 year ago|reply
This is wild. How can they differentiate between grief and actual clear thinking desire?
[+] [-] rahimnathwani|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] TomK32|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] LorenPechtel|1 year ago|reply
Losing a very long term partner is a horrible blow. You go through the grief to get to better times on the other side--but if there's no other side to get to, why go through it?
My memory is that the Canadian rules require more time than that so he probably had already set it up.
[+] [-] apwell23|1 year ago|reply
Whats suprising to me is that these parents choose to punish their kids instead of end of ending their life. selfish fucks!!
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] MichaelMoser123|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] anonzzzies|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dogman1050|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] gnfargbl|1 year ago|reply
If we can prevent five, ten or perhaps twenty percent of people having gruesome deaths, then not doing so feels like a moral failing.
[+] [-] GordonS|1 year ago|reply
Our country first needs to ensure that people can choose to live, and if needed be cared for; nobody should feel pushed into assisted dying because of financial reasons.
I say this as someone who will be in pain for the rest of my life, and euthanasia has been on my mind at times. As much as I might "benefit" from such a law in the future, I don't believe it should be passed until we have a stable society with good services and safety nets.
[+] [-] afh1|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ZeroGravitas|1 year ago|reply
So a more interesting stat might be the expected quality of life adjusted years that have been cut off by the assisted deaths.
I'm not sure if QUALY can go negative but some measure that can might be appropriate when talking about assisted death.
[+] [-] hackeraccount|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] nurettin|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] zer8k|1 year ago|reply
While people should have autonomy over their lives we should not be legalizing assisting them. This is a path that is well-trodden. Many dictatorships have "mercifully euthanized" various sectors of people. It always starts out as the disabled, cancer-stricken, or unviable. Then it becomes a simple way to get rid of the people deemed to be a burden. Suddenly being depressed is a good way to get the needle. Can't perform your job well enough? Yep you guessed it, needle. Or I guess these days they've made sarco pods for the personalized gas chamber experience. This isn't even a slippery slope, we're watching it happen in real time as the bar for euthanasia continues to be lowered.
There's been several cases that MAID has willfully disobeyed the law. Doctors not filing the correct paperwork, rushing patients, etc. We are already seeing the sprouts of a system that if allowed to continue will become a virtual Soylent Green.
Of course I'll be downvoted for this by the bleeding hearts but history has not been kind to people who allow this.
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] SapporoChris|1 year ago|reply
Sounds like a fully-formed exaggeration. Vomiting once or twice a day is not spending your last days vomiting. More frequent vomiting? The supply could not possibly meet the demand. Especially if the patient stopped eating.
[+] [-] zaptheimpaler|1 year ago|reply
Nurses/doctors don't like to speak up about that part and people don't want to confront it. But MAID is probably the more humane option in these cases.
[+] [-] dathos|1 year ago|reply
Anecdotal of course, but why do people think it’s an ethics question when society is individualistic as can be? There is no choice in being born, why don’t we get a choice in when we leave?
[+] [-] abeppu|1 year ago|reply
The BBC article title now says "Assisted dying" not "euthanasia". Often, the distinction hinges on whether the patient or a medical practitioner administers a substance that brings about death. The Canadian policy actually provides for both, but as I understand it the stats being cited in the article combine both, so only a subset of the tally are "euthanasia" deaths.
[+] [-] ben30|1 year ago|reply
Worrying parallel: will euthanasia become another "solution" for those who can't afford proper care and treatment? Moving homeless people to warmer cities and offering euthanasia to those who can't afford treatment both avoid fixing the underlying problems.
[+] [-] djoldman|1 year ago|reply
> The vast majority – around 96% - had a death deemed "reasonably foreseeable", due to severe medical conditions such as cancer.
[+] [-] tpoacher|1 year ago|reply
The human body / brain has extremely powerful mechanisms for ensuring certain 'drives' that are essential for the survival and propagation as a species. This is what is biologically 'normal' / 'healthy'. Whether we agree with these drives or not philosophically is another thing. But if someone is anorexic, we recognise that their drive for hunger has been compromised, and make sure to restore it. We don't go "oh it's ok, their desire not to eat is voluntary". Psychiatric diseases are complex. To just assume "will" can never be compromised in disease is naive. And equally more naive is to assume that there is no action that one could do to restore the diseased processes such that that will would be reversed.
So the fact that when it comes to suicidal ideation we are less prone to say "this is a disease which circumvents the brain's normal processes that create the imperative urge to survive, leaving one suicidal", and we just go "wouldn't it be nice if they could end their life peacefully without consequences" is bizzare.
Note that in the situation where a degree of suicidality is not the main issue, and we're talking about palliation by physicians, current laws and practices absolutely do not prevent a doctor from taking actions that are intended to palliate rather than prolong a life of suffering. So the euthanasia bill isn't really about that. It's about supporting people who actively want to die, by providing "assistance". Discussing whether their circumstances warrant them wanting to die is a red herring, no matter how dire those circumstances may be.
[+] [-] citizenpaul|1 year ago|reply
However the hard line makes no sense. In most places that human euthanasia is illegal no one has any problem killing animals because it is more merciful than allowing them to spend their final time suffering tremendously.
[+] [-] Noumenon72|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] NikolaNovak|1 year ago|reply
It's not necessarily true that 19 in 20 people didn't get to choose how they die, but there's something to the converse.
It's always surprising to me the... Quesiness people have in discussing this. In the land of the free, what possible freedom is more fundamental to life than when to be done with it? I wonder if the higher uptake in Quebec is because it's a more secular society than some of our other provinces.
From personal perspective, I very much hundred percent totally want the freedom to have the option to decide how I go. From there, I don't want to stand in anybody way who also desires same freedom. A lot of counter-arguments seem thinly veiled religious origins -- Some are legitimate concerns about potential for abuse, but still a lot reek of disingenuity in core motivations.
[+] [-] sys32768|1 year ago|reply
It is well known that even some advanced dementia patients days or hours before death can exhibit lucid coherence, even speaking and recognizing loved one before death.
Having watched my mother decay from Alzheimer's for 10+ years, I know for sure there is much more left to her than she can express, and every once and a while she speaks in clear sentences, says names of loved ones or pets, and when she talks--even though we barely understand 20% of what she says--it's clear she knows what she's saying based on her facial expressions.
I will also say it's one of the joys of my life to sit with these people, many of whom are "waiting to die" and just talk to them with and listen to them (even when I can't understand them). They light up, and they especially light up when I play them old music on a bluetooth speaker. Some sing, some sway, some even try to dance. Many cannot talk at all but they can still sing the lyrics.
[+] [-] jbm|1 year ago|reply
I often saw Japanese media moving lock-step with the police (in terms of vocabulary to use for certain crimes, how to report certain issues), and thought it was creepy as hell. However, the complete lack of questioning of the purpose behind a sudden legalization of euthanasia (in a country with public healthcare and an inherent potential conflict of interest), and the entire concept of having "experts" sign off on it without any legal overview is creepy.
Even using "medicalized" terms like MAID instead of euthanasia is unnerving to me.
Put in another way, given how hard it is for people to see doctors, I wonder how much worse it would be without MAID? As it would clearly be worse, is this a mere sanitized form of cost cutting to deal with growing medical costs associated with treating the aging population?
[+] [-] elevaet|1 year ago|reply
I'm grateful that she was able to do this, and was spared a period of inhumane suffering at the end of her life.
It's hard and it makes me very sad, but I'm glad she could go this way. It would have been more difficult for her and everyone if she was forced to live through a hellish torture as cancer slowly took her life. In the end she beat cancer by taking herself out with it.
[+] [-] h1fra|1 year ago|reply
Canada might not be the worst but their healthcare only cover 60-70% of canadians' need. And it's slowly getting worse with the private sector eating the market.
[+] [-] reverendsteveii|1 year ago|reply
>Assisted dying now accounts for one in 20 Canada deaths
>While the number of assisted deaths in Canada is growing, the country still falls behind the Netherlands, where euthanasia accounted for around 5% of total deaths last year.
1/20 != 5% ???
[+] [-] frankus|1 year ago|reply
It's also worth noting that for every MAID horror story in this article, there is probably at least one horror story about a needlessly painful and drawn-out death that could have been avoided if MAID had been legal.
[+] [-] niceice|1 year ago|reply
Around 96% of recipients identified as white people, who account for about 70% of Canada's population. It is unclear what caused this disparity."
Any good hypothesis about this?
[+] [-] patrickhogan1|1 year ago|reply