With the discussion of whether assisted dying should be allowed in Scotland befing brought up again, I was wondering what other people thought of the topic.
Do you think people should be allowed to choose when to end their own life?
What laws need to be put into place to prevent abuses in the system?
How do we account for people changing their mind or mental decline causing people to no longer be able to consent to a procedure they previously requested?
Yeah, it’s not like it’s done on a whim. As long as there is someone on staff that is comfortable administering it, I have no problem with it. I wouldn’t want it to be forced as an option if there is no one on staff comfortable doing it. But transferring to a place that does offer it should be an option for those cases.
We already have it in Switzerland.
I’m all for it. I actually had to promise my mum to off her in case she ever get’s dementia. (She had to care for her own mother with dementia for almost a decade, to the point where everyone in the family was just glad when she finally died).
promise my mum to off her in case she ever [gets] dementia
My dad has what we call a ‘DNR’ order after his time as an EMT prolonging the life of some elderly people who didn’t. He also now has a ‘living will’ after an affliction that will kill him in the next decade and is not feasibly preventable. Before his brain is too far gone from oxygen deprivation and he can’t be judged fit to make the call, he’s got provisions and criteria to end his life. He still had to meet with a psyche to ensure it’s what he wanted, a blessing since a former EMT who’s worked on the Water has more than enough information and no need to ask permission.
Get something on paper. I have no idea what the laws are like in Switzerland, but a verbal promise may not be enough.
She already made sort of will for the case when she’s mentally impaired which would give me power over medical decisions (not quite sure what all the proper english terms here are).
Okay, good. I hope you never have to use it, friend!
Yup. On the other side I have a slight feeling she’s actively trying to spare me from it. She’s 60 now and just picked up climbing and caving … and not the “guided tourist” stuff. I think she’s now looking into diving …
That’s awesome! Glad to hear it!
I have no idea about Switzerland, but a lot of these death with dignity laws do not include dementia and the like. You may want to check out what the legal options and realities are.
I’ve watched both of my grandmas head down this same road, preparing for my mom to do the same. It’s absolutely terrifying and I was seriously looking at moving somewhere that would give me the option, only to find it doesn’t exist currently in my country (US).
I was in favor of this until I started reading Marta Russel. She lays out the history of using the concept of assisted dying to do things like get rid of people with disabilities, increase profits for hospitals, decrease funding for home nurses, convince people who are no longer productive that they shouldn’t live anymore, etc etc. It seems like a good idea on paper, because bodily autonomy and stuff, but capitalist ghouls coerce people into it.
Guess everyone should suffer because there is the possibility of abuse that we already know about and could take steps to avoid.
May I ask were you live? I live in Sweden and would personally trust our medical system not to abuse such tools but depending on were you are I do understand that you might be worried.
Anyways I don’t really see it as a problem with assisted death but with the system using it
Anything can be corrupted by capitalist ghouls. I wouldn’t let that fear stop me from doing the right thing. People shouldn’t be forced to suffer, and should be allowed to choose when to die.
Anything can be corrupted by capitalist ghouls.
People shouldn’t be forced to sufferCan you really not see that capitalist “ghouls” (they’re just people) have already corrupted society enough, that they are the very reason people are suffering in the first place, and that making those who are suffering kill themselves off the “reasonable” solution, instead of ending the suffering enforced on them by capitalists, is very actively playing along with said capitalists, rather than the ones whose suffering you claim to be concerned with?
Cause nobody ever died of slowly and painfully of cancer except that capitalist forced it on them? Come on. Capitalism sucks a lot, but it’s not the source of ALL problems.
In Oregon, you have to be able to administer it to yourself. It’s not something someone else does to you.
Some people get it as an insurance policy of sorts. So it’s an option during end of life care, but not necessarily one they take.
I am curious about what happens with the med if left unused. Like, do people tuck it away like spare antibiotic eye drops?
It’s done with a medico in attendance, who then takes the apparatus and spare media on leaving.
I Would be in favor of assisted dying being introduced for anyone who need it.
No one should be forced to live against their will.
Also its better to let a person die peacefully than having them die in gruesome ways (jumping in front of a car/train, jumping from a building, hanging themselves with family and loved ones having to see them in this state, etc …
Also its better to let a person die peacefully than having them die in gruesome ways
you know what would be even better? Creating a society where millions of people aren’t suffering to the point where they see no other option in the first place.
The two ideas are not mutually exclusive. you could create the society and still give people freedom to decide when to end their lives.
What a great idea! Society should just simply not have any disease! That way there will be no suffering!
Why hasn’t anyone else thought of that???
It bothers me that in the U.S., we extend that courtesy to pets who are suffering from terminal issues. But we expect loved ones to hang on and suffer for no real reason other then the vague notion that the imaginary sky man would disapprove.
My grandma passed away 2 months shy of her 101st birthday. I visited her a few weeks before she passed, she was gaunt, skeletal, couldn’t see us and was reacting to hallucination caused by their body slowly shutting down. She didn’t even know my Mom and I were even there, and when we told her her daughter was there to see her, she said “No, I don’t believe it” while staring blanking into the corner of the room. She wasn’t suffering from dementia, it was cancer that came back which was killing her. What reason would we not allow a loved pet to suffer though that, but a blood relative, hell yeah, let them lay and suffer for weeks, months, years.
I don’t have any grand ideas on how to prevent abuse, I just think it’s humane to not let a thinking being suffer needlessly.
It’s the same for the young end of the spectrum, I’ve seen lots of kids and adults who were born with a bad disability to be permanently wheelchair bound unable to care for themselves or even communicate. But “they were breathing on their own when they came out, so we can’t do anything about it now” because sky daddie might be mad
And then ofc the whole stress added onto the parents who will have to primarily care for the child for the rest. Of. Their. Lives.
I think a legitimate concern for that one is what do you define as a disability worth terminating the baby’s life for. Some would likely abuse it for eugenics.
Not being able to live without any assistance and no hope of improving seems like a reasonable criteria. In fact, with that criteria they can remove the assistance and let the child (or adults) suffocate and die right now, but they can’t use drugs to ease the suffering and speed up the process or it is ‘murder’.
There are many things we can put in place to mitigate the concerns about eugenics, like requiring two doctor’s to agree that it is appropriate in addition to consent of family/guardians/other legally responsible persons.
None of us could live without any assistance.
With minimal reading comprehension you could have inferred that the assistance in the example was breathing for the person since they would suffocate without the assistance.
Im the hopes of avoiding a similar stupid post, that does not mean I think anyone who need needs a machine should die. That was an example of a situation where doctors can currently let a patient die through ‘inaction’ by removing the assistance that is taking care of vital functions like breathing. Think brain dead people or someone whose cancer is so bad that they refuse care that could keep them alive, but have no option to end the suffering faster.
Good investment and R&D for better early pregnancy testing would be a good start, if we can accurately predict disabilities early enough for an abortion it would head off a lot of issues later on
But for post birth disabilities, yea, but it’s hard to even have that conversation because many would just shut the conversation down entirely with “life is life” or some BS like that
if we can accurately predict disabilities early enough for an abortion it would head off a lot of issues later on
That literally already is eugenics.
And the fact that you consider people advocating that disabled lives have just as much value as abled lives as “BS” tells me you really don’t care, because even if you won’t admit it, you are a eugenicist.^ see, found one already lmao
Yea no, to cross the line into eugenics the state or other authority needs to mandate that X or Y disabilities need to be aborted even over the objections of the parents
Simply giving the parents and their doctors the tools and legalities to detect and come to their own decisions, is not
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This would seem like the kind of question that sounds at first like a single question but causes a number of others to be unpacked. For example, would someone see a difference between simply pulling a plug, ceasing to feed someone, and administering a drug, or would this being politicized be too much of a fear…
A few things come to mind here as certainties for me. To start out, if a society for whatever reason greenlights the concept, definitely don’t institutionalize/politicize it. The moment it even becomes a debate in the public sphere, pull the heck out, the concept is lost. I might not have the greatest relationship with life, but the same thoughtpath makes it hard to comprehend being all willy-nilly about it. In such a society, if anything, I’d say it should be by an individual’s own breath that the candle is blown out, so to speak. Going by the same literary device, if the individual cannot produce the exhale to do that, shrug your shoulders. I would not put a dog down for this reason. By the same token, everyone should recognize the gravity of all this, which in most cases nobody does.
Pulling the plug is like assisted suicide, but with a ton of suffering as the body fails slowly. Stopping a feeding tube is killing through starvation.
Assisted suicide would reduce the pain and suffering in both cases by allowing for pain reduction and shortening the time span.
I’m strongly in favour of assisted dying. If an animal is too ill and can’t be cured, we do the humane thing and put them down so they don’t suffer. Yet if a human who is terminally ill, you’re just told to suffer. How do animals have more rights than we do in death?
I’ve never understood how it’s considered the “moral choice” from opponents of assisted dying to let people suffer.
It should be available to anyone as long as informed consent can be achieved and they’re of sound mind in the view of at least a few medical professionals.
I think it should be available as a medical directive, like a DNR order with specific criteria, and require several doctors to evaluate the criteria unanimously, and no family to object if the patient can’t give informed consent, only whatever form of consent they can give.
It should be called off if the patient objects, regardless of their ability to give informed consent.
Scenario I’m picturing is a person with dementia who previously filled out a form stating that if they’re no longer themselves or able to function, and other criteria they specified beforehand, and doctors agree the circumstances have been met, and the family doesn’t object, it should be able to proceed even though someone with advanced dementia cannot consent because they cannot fully understand. If they say no it must stop.I feel concern about people with mood disorders seeking that route, which is why I want a medical professional to say they’re of sound mind.
Ultimately it’s your life and your body, so you should be able to have that autonomy, but I think it’s responsible to pause if a doctor says you’re not in a rational place to make that type of choice.For sure. When your own body becomes a prison, you should have a say on whether you want out.
No, for several reasons.
Death is final. There is no coming back from it.
A cure, or at least an effective treatment, might be just around the corner. HIV used to be a death sentence; it isn’t any more (and from what I understand, carriers can now have unprotected sex without passing it on). I wonder how much medical research into treating HIV wouldn’t have been possible without sufferers to try out potential treatments. Maybe it would still be a death sentence today if assisted suicide had allowed people to escape it.
There is no way to be 100% certain someone isn’t being pressured to die. If they answer all the questions correctly, that only shows they know the right answers; it doesn’t show they are being truthful.
Justifying assisted suicide on the basis of the worst cases is not sufficient. There will always be worst cases. Let’s say we define a limited set of the worst cases; those are now effectively solved and everything else jumps up a level. There is now a new set of worst cases. How long before someone catching the common cold gets put to death? You may say this is ridiculous but the worst case justification means that the cold WILL eventually rise to the top, and there WILL be arguments like “giving evolution a helping hand”, or “for the benefit of the species”, and as we will by then be routinely applying AS there’ll only be a low bar to jump.
If palliative care isn’t producing sufficient quality of life, we can put people into a medically induced coma (IANAD so there may be good reasons we can’t, but idk). There they stay until (a) a cure or treatment is available, or (b) they die naturally anyway.
Obviously this needs sensible public healthcare in place. Where medical treatment is expensive and life is cheap, this won’t work. I’m in the UK where healthcare is provided by the state and we have the luxury of considering life to be priceless.
For those who say we euthanise animals - well society in general doesn’t want to pay for their healthcare and doesn’t consider their lives to be infinitely precious. Also there is the question of how much they understand what is happening to them; maybe the terror of being hooked up to a machine would make their QOL effectively non-existent anyway.
We already have it in the Netherlands and I think it is a good thing. I know several people who chose for assisted dying when they were terminal and I think it protected them from a lot of unnecessary suffering.
There are some laws in place to prevent abuse. For example, there is a second, independent doctor assessing the situation to make sure conditions are really met and that someone is really terminal and deciding this from their own free will. The patient should be able to reconfirm that they really want to get euthanised before it happens. I think this is a good thing, but sometimes it is difficult when people with dementia clearly have stated and written down officially that they want assisted dying in certain circumstances, but they are not able to reconfirm because they lost their ability to understand.
In some cases you can have assisted dying when you suffer psychologically without any outlook of improvement (i.e. you have tried all treatments etc). However, there are waiting lists for those, which are quite long. My sister was on such a waiting list because she had anorexia. However, she died from starvation before she could be assessed. I am still a bit in doubt whether it would have been a good idea for her to get assisted dying. I still was hoping and thinking that there could be ways for her to get better.
Maybe the doctor assessing whether she would be approved for this would have thought the same, maybe not. She died anyway, so maybe I was wrong. In any case, I am not completely against euthanasia in case of psychological illness, as people can suffer from that equally as from physical ailments. However, you should be extremely careful and it should be extremely clear that there is no other solution at all anymore.
a second, independent doctor assessing the situation
This is like how olympic judges are part of a panel, and judges decide independently who receives a prize for best performance.
Already a thing here in NL.
Yes
Yes
The bioethicists have ready worked out the kinks of assisted suicide laws and I would defer to them. You don’t offer it to people who cannot make the decision, you make sure people are fit to make the decision before they become too impaired, and you have plenty of checks for elder abuse, family pressure, and so on. Ultimately right now I can choose to end my life and that knowledge has made bearing some really painful medical things much easier.
We can all do things that make us less safe. We can drive, we can eat unhealthy food, we can drink alcohol, we can smoke, we can have unprotected sex, we can go base jumping, and so on. There is a concept called Dignity of Risk, meaning that while we have a duty of care, a responsibility to protect someone, we also have to respect that person enough to let them make choices, including choices we disagree with. If we don’t have this then we treat people as less than human and in the process we are stopping them living the life they want.
If we are going to say life choices should be in your hands then I think death choices should be too.
Absolutely - and not even just terminally ill. We typically recognize when pets are past their meaningful life - once things start getting difficult or painful enough, we let them off. Meanwhile if you have bone cancer and live an eternity of agony every second, “tough shit lol” I guess.
Sometimes you just can’t fix things. Then it gets to be about harm reduction. Flogging someone whose continued existence will only bring them and everyone else pain… seems pretty horrific to me.