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.
These are all excellent examples of how MAID should be used, I think the concerning thing is the widening of the eligibility criteria - especially when things like mental illness start to make you eligible.
Like... If your illness makes you suicidal... Is offering assisted suicide REALLY the best we can do? That starts to feel a lot like "eghh you're too hard for society to care about... We'll just let you die".
As horrible as this might sound, often it's failed suicide attempts that actually are the catalysts for people being able to get their lives back on track... What happens in a society where the government helps facilitate suicide and there's never any "attempts" anymore... Just successes...
Sorry for your loss. I don't know if he got to explain to you (all) the reasons behind his choice.
My fear is that I will be 70-80-90, I won't be able to serve myself even for the very basics, I will have lost my memory, and will be a total burden (all the pain - zero joy) to my close family. Why would I do this to them? Perhaps he had a motivation like this - to make sure he won't hurt your lives, your relationships, etc.
Yeah man, it does suck. I do wish I'd had more time with both my parents, they both died really early in their 50s, I don't think you can ever have "enough" time.
I wish my mother had been given the option in her early 50s, the number of people punished by authoritarian governments that deny self determinism and force people to be put through experiences literally worse than torture is mind boggling, I cannot fathom it.
I don't think anyone who has seen it even a single time can honestly make slippery slope arguments, I have to assume it's ignorance and that these people are simply "actually" nerds doing recreational theory crafting. I assume it's the same headspace as flat earthers, it doesn't effect me so why should I care about aligning my thoughts with the real world, let me invent theoretical overlords and victims and argue about this new synthetic world that exists in my imagination.
I just can't be uncharitable enough to believe a person who has seen it first hand, that a person would embrace such unfettered cruelty as to deny a person living in constant hell a drop of water.
That being said... fuck, back in 2000 I did meet a bunch of people that denied hiv existed and said even if it did it was a punishment on gay people and it would be better if it wasn't cured so they would be scared and "behave" (yes, I personally met these people, the non-existence was rare but the "shouldn't develop treatment" was not a minority view in the city I lived in at the time.)
After my mother died, for a while I volunteered with "No one dies alone.", I doubt a single person who has done so for any length of time is going to argue "slippery slope".
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.
My bio father (he was not a part of my life, which is important to note when you get to the end of this comment) lived to 89, for certain values of "lived". He had long ago exhausted his ability to support himself financially, he was blind, deaf, unable to get around town on his own, had substantial age-related mental health issues, as well as a litany of small but significant health issues. I cannot speak for him, but I'd like to think that if I came anywhere close to that existence and I had the option available, I would opt for an end on my terms that respected my dignity and that of my family. As an American, however, I expect to die like he did: poor, mostly alone, and in pain.
I appreciate you sharing your perspective. I wondered, when you described feeling "really sad" and the sense that people "might as well have been dead," I'm wondering if you're speaking about your own emotional response or trying to convey how the individuals themselves felt about their situation?
If I start to develop some kind of age-related mental deterioration that is uncurable (eg dementia, alzheimers), I'll probably find a way to exit before I become incapable of making decisions like that independently, because I'm less scared of death than I am of losing myself like that
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.
I live in the neighbourhood in Canada with a lot of elder people. I mentioned in one of my previous comments as well, and MAiD is probably one of the best things that happened in our country in the past decade. I have distant relatives who took the MAiD way out (one because of the age, the other one terminal illness). It's not very uncommon to hear once every quarter in the coffee shop in my neighbourhood people chatting about this program. Older people are generally happy having a way out, rather than suffering and bringing pain to their close ones.
Both of my parents (in their 70s) mentioned how they want to go out the same way once they're incapable of living and start suffering. I feel the same about it as well. I understand there are very small amount of cases where people shouldn't be able to take this way out, but it's a net good. I really hate how global media is trying to turn it into a big conversation and "slippery slope", because if anyone who has seen their loved one suffer... they would never want this program to end.
I look at my grandma. She's 85, in the middle stages of Alzheimers (usually find and lucid, but sometimes thinks she's in Michigan or Georgia when she's been in Oregon for 4 years), constantly soils herself, can't get up from a chair without assistance (even then it's a struggle), and can barely walk, even with a walker. She got COVID and somehow survived, but got permanent lung damage and now needs an oxygen tank.
She's not living, she's merely surviving. I don't want to be like that. If I found myself in the state she's in, I like to think that I'd admit that I've had a good run, but it's time to move on.
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
Yes, I know very little other than that he was a cancer "survivor" - he wasn't about to die of cancer imminently but I think he had some sort of long-term ongoing health issues. But he was apparently well enough to drive a car!
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 completely admit I have a limited, second-hand account of the situation. It's quite possible that the circumstances were such that this was planned in advance of the wife's passing.
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.
This is not a good argument for MAID, and I think there are countless dystopian sci-fi stories that exhibit this reasoning that I’d like to avoid (The Giver, Logan’s Run, Soylent Green, etc)
If we start looking at people who use MAID as selfless because they are “giving back to society”, and relieving the “financial burden”, what does that make people who choose to stick around? Are they selfish?
No one should be pressured or guilted into choosing an option like MAID - people are more than just balances on a spreadsheet.
Agree 100%. I am hoping to use the MAID option on myself one day. Cancer runs in the family. Of course I hope to get to at least 80 or so. There is definitely such a thing as a "good death" and a "bad death" having seen both close-up in family members. Knowing my $ is going to my children instead of some scammy health insurance providers will give me the final smile on my face, and my last thought will be "I WON"
IMO the financial aspect is the strongest argument against assisted suicide. When the government can save money by encouraging you to kill youself the incentives are just really bad.
> 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.
From other comments I learned that the period is not a week but more like 90 days and required conditions are more stringent, too. Just in case someone reads my previous comment at a later point.
This is actually not possible per the requirements set out in the legislation; I suspect the poster didn't get the full picture. It's always possible an individual doctor can ignore the system and do whatever but I doubt it when there's a legal path for this spelled out.
Grief on its own isn't sufficient for assisted dying.
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.
I'm sorry but people that just lost their life partner a week ago are really not "of sound mind" when it comes to taking such kind of decision and it's criminal in my opinion to let them.
What's next? We let teenagers choose to die after their first love breaks up with them?
I'm neither against nor for euthanasia, but I also think the situations where it's the best solution for everyone are extremely rare.
> Your eligibility assessment must take a minimum of 90 days, unless the assessments have been completed sooner and you are at immediate risk of losing your capacity to consent.
Other replies saying the process doesn't actually work like this notwithstanding, there's a pretty clear difference between someone in their 80s with ongoing cancer and a physically healthy teenager.
Many people have the worst days or weeks or years that they look back on and are grateful for the life they live later, physically disabled, paralyzed, elderly, etc. During the darkest of times is when we have to care for each other, not offer a knife so to speak. Even when many during these times would’ve wanted to die and suffer greatly. It’s part of life. This is absolutely sick in a civilized society, but leave it to that murderous thug Trudeau.
This! People feel like they cannot live alone or they cannot want that someone else be caused hardship (time or money) because of their difficulty.
I feel like I will get downvoted to oblivion just because people vehemently disagree, but THIS CANNOT be the meaning and choice behind death. It is simply immature, arrogant, and selfish. But more plainly, it is suicidal / self-relentment.
My sample size as an adult is still small, but I've seen this in pets and I've seen this in humans.
The downward slope quickens faster than any would like once it starts. The body or the mind slips away, leaving someone either trapped in a shell that doesn't work, or momentary fragments of the person who was among a sea of futile vapid existence.
Our medical technology is not there and shows little sign of being close to resolving either issue.
Rather than slowly wasting away I too would rather have the option to twist to the side off the cliff rather than the long slow painful stair tumble down the hill.
I'm well-aligned with Seneca, the Stoic philosopher who said death is an open door. If you want to die, do it. However, if you choose not to go through that door, your must live your life with purpose and conviction. There's no shame in going through that door if you no longer have the capacity to live purposefully, though.
In these cases, I'm not sure these people had the agency and capacity to continue living in a way that makes sense as human beings.
I gauge much of my value and purpose in life based on how I can serve my family and community. I don't really exist for me in a sense, and I can't exist without other people. I'm part of something a lot bigger than I am. If at any point it comes to be that I'm not serving a purpose in this great network, well, I'm not sure I'd see a point in carrying on. I may still be breathing, blood still pumping, but I'd be functionally dead as a part of a community.
Who are you to judge whether someone who has lived for over seven decades should go on living or not? If they feel their life is done, have nothing left to live for, and fear degenerating into a husk of their former selves (dementia) stuck inside a broken brain for as long as their body holds out, than why should they hang on?
It's arrogant and selfish to force people to live on for as long as doctors can keep their body alive. No euthanasia just means more messy suicides.
Immature, arrogant, and selfish is a good description of a person who demands other people stay alive despite immense suffering, just so you can feel morally superior and not have to experience loss.
You know what? Yes, I make selfish decisions about my life. So does everybody else. We do not exist to satisfy the needs of other people.
The choice behind death is that it's preferable to the alternative. Before we had medically assisted options, people would do it in more painful ways, but they'd still do it. Many cultures had the idea of "walking off into the wilderness" when your time was there.
When that time is is a personal choice. By all means, let's put some non-gatekeeping hurdles in the way (e.g. mandate a conversation or three with a therapist), but ultimately, we should all be in charge of our own life.
I'm partially with you, in that I do see tragedy in these choices. I see tragedy that we lack the cultural and economic institutions to support peope towards the end of life in ways (especially ones that don't make them feel like a burden.)
However, I don't think the solution to that tragedy to to make people suffer through. I think the solution is more and better institutions that reduce that suffering so fewer people are pushed to make the choice to end it.
> This! People feel like they cannot live alone or they cannot want that someone else be caused hardship (time or money) because of their difficulty.
> I feel like I will get downvoted to oblivion just because people vehemently disagree, but THIS CANNOT be the meaning and choice behind death. It is simply immature, arrogant, and selfish. But more plainly, it is suicidal / self-relentment.
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.
> So the hospital withheld IV hydration and provided a morphine drip and he was gone in 36 hours.
I watched loved ones die this way. It's cruel, absurd and grotesque. A doctor will look you dead in the eye and say "your loved one will be dead within a few days" and instead of killing them mercifully you are forced to watch them die of dehydration. A maddening and indefensible relic that I believe younger generations will abolish. There's obviously far more complicated end of life situations, but this particular case is extremely common.
If it helps, they don’t ever deny people fluids who want or need them. What happens towards the end is the body stops being able to process fluids due to failing organs. Pushing fluids into someone in this state makes them less comfortable. People aren’t thirsty or suffering from a lack of fluids.
As far as putting someone out of their misery, there’s a reason that they put them on high dosage opioids. If you want to keep someone out of pain while helping their heart and lungs stop peacefully, you couldn’t pick a better drug.
Death by dehydration, at least for an old sick person, is rather natural and though it sounds awful it’s not really painful for the dying person. Before IV hydration it’s how most people died.
I wouldn’t count on it. I’ve learned young people are just the same as everyone else. I hope I’m wrong but I used to think they had more empathy. Let’s see.,
it because obvious that euthanasia happens in the US all the time [...]
So the hospital withheld IV hydration and provided a morphine drip
and he was gone in 36 hours
I had a family member with late-stage terminal COPD opt out of further treatment. They were in respiratory crisis and were going to be intubated for the nth time with no real hope of recovery, and so they said "fuck it" and delined further intervention.
The hospital (a Catholic hospital, even) provided a morphine drip and they were gone within an hour.
I was never really clear on what killed them in the end, if it was the morphine or the COPD. I guess technically it was the COPD.
Anyway, as somebody who went through something similar: I'm so sorry. COPD is such a slow and crappy way to go. Have you been able to find some peace in the years since?
> The hospital (a Catholic hospital, even) provided a morphine drip and they were gone within an hour.
FWIW, Catholic ethics are actually fairly well thought out on this issue. You're not allowed to withhold basic nourishment (food, hydration, non-invasive breathing support), but you are allowed to opt out of invasive procedures such as intubation and provide pain management if the patient or the patient's guardian decides that it would significantly affect quality of life and the patient doesn't have long to live. Obviously there is discernment involved in the last bit, but Catholicism is all about discernment.
We're in a weird spot where the secular world asks us to simultaneously cause death (the euthanasia folks) while also asking us to evade it altogether (the Brian Johnson types).
Catholicism embraces natural death, which is what your family member (RIP) chose. Interventions that hasten death are fine. Just can't cause it.
"Terminal dehydration is a way to skirt the Suicide Act, because we can claim that withholding water is just like withholding treatment. Ramping up painkillers and sedatives is a way to skirt the Suicide Act, because we can claim that the medication helps the patient cope with their death, rather than inducing their death."
My dad has COPD and continues smoking. I'm going to go through this sooner than later. I've already made peace with this, I've seen the alternative in other family members and ultimately its the decline in dignity that pushes my moral compass to accept self-euthanasia as a humane option.
When my father-in-law passed, in a rural assisted living facility, we found they had stopped feeding him despite saying they were and our requests that they continue.
We were stuck in this uncomfortable position of not being able to move him somewhere else, being completely blindsided by his (bone and bladder) cancer and how quickly it progressed, and not knowing what standard of care to advocate for understanding that he was passing.
One of the things that was also frustrating is that when we would ask for more pain medication, they would refuse as it might lead him to stop breathing (I thought, ‘so what?’), yet they were making decisions that ultimately accelerated to his demise.
Looking back, I don’t know that ceasing nutrition was a bad choice, but it wasn’t their decision to make. When I talked to friends in healthcare they effectively gave me the ‘oh, you sweet summer child’ talk.
My FIL, while he could communicate, could not wait to be out of pain and I wish he had the agency to make the decision before having to go through endless pain in the delirium of opioids.
There are, of course, details I’m leaving out, but my general takeaway is that in at least some cases the euthanasia debate is not about whether the call is being made, but who is making the call.
That is not alone reason to support one side of the debate or another, but it is an important nuance that I was naive about until I witnessed it first hand.
Edit: what I described does not appear to meet the traditional definition of euthanasia, but I will leave the post in its original form and just clarify that I mean making decisions that hasten someone’s death either passively or actively.
The setup for 'Living Wills' and directives to doctors, at least in the US as recently as ~4-5 years ago, suck. I remember thinking at the time that I saw what family was filling out that they failed to express the nuance that I would like for my own directives.
Generally if there's still hope for recovery to a not-shitty life then I'd prefer to proceed towards that. Even as extreme as E.G. that Leadale anime's setup where the protag's broken from the neck down but can live in a VR gameworld (deeper immersion so they can still move, taste, etc). If there's still real hope for reaching that, it might be worth toughing it out and waiting.
However that sort of nebulous criteria that requires a human to evaluate isn't present. I can't empower the doctors with such vague goals and say 'make your best call as a HUMAN doctor with that vague goal'.
If that good route isn't an option, then I wouldn't want to stick around either... and the lack of a clear legal euthanasia option in much of the US pushes people to roundabout failures for lack of food / water intake, or just giving in to inevitable statistics when a cold or stressed body complication like a heart attack happen. Heck, if my brain's the part that's fraying apart and I want to die anyway, please harvest the working organs as my method of death so someone else can live better.
Both my grandfather and my aunt were palliative care towards their end. Their respective care providers kept asking them if they'd like to increase dosage of their medicine (can't remember what my grandfather was one, but my aunt was on morphine). Despite both of them at the time said that they didn't want to increase dosage, but the care provider kept trying to increase. My family's theory is that they were trying to speed their passing. Both cases were in Canada.
It's ethically childish that we use roundabout measures like that instead of just putting someone out of their misery overtly.
It creates a drawn out process where the family has to wait around until they pass at some unknown point instead of coming together in one moment, making peace, saying their farewell, and witnessing the finality together.
It took my girlfriend's vegetative mother a week to die as she struggled to breathe that whole time, put on just enough morphine to supposedly feel no pain and not a drop more. By the time she finally croaked, most of the family that had shown up to see her out had left because nobody has time to wait around days or weeks for death to happen. And it was emotional hell for her two daughters.
They could've just given her a nice dose of morphine, but our ethics are too infantile. Instead we do make-believe.
Killing someone with a drug intended to stop the heart / prevent respiration is unequivocally euthanasia.
Withholding treatments is not euthanasia. Nor is pain medication that hastens death. Those are things we can have an ethical discussion about.
As for IV drip.. that's another discussion. I personally would not ever do that. Water is a basic thing for humanity, and should be provided. Unless he explicitly refused the water. Then, that's his choice.
I think I ultimately reject the idea that this is not well-understood, because the largest organizations opposed to euthanasia (the Catholic church for example) has given endless thought to this, and explicitly accepts the situation you described. Opponents of euthanasia are not ignorant.
Both the lack of hydration and morphine were his choice, and he was lucid. My brother was angry that Dad decided to "give up." I wasn't, but was horrified at the ease with which the staff complied and knew exactly what to do.
My dad also spent days dying from extremely aggressive cancer, being in unimaginable amounts of pain, with all of his organs slowly shutting down, his limbs becoming swollen from pooling blood, unable to drink, unable to eat, crying about how much pain he's in and how much he wants to go home. And all the hospital could do was give him enough morphine to knock him our and we waited by his bedside for 4 days until he finally drew his last breath, probably due to lack of fluids at this point.
Tell me - where does the "morality" stand here compared to him proactively ending his own life with a drug before all of this happened, if he had such an option and decided to take it? How is what he went through morally better like some people say it is compared to euthanasia(I don't know if you think that, but it's a common argument). There's no dignity in any of this.
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.
To be fair, that is also the one issue with abortion that is legitimate. I am very pro-choice but also horrified by the reality that women sometimes are pressured to have abortion for economic reasons. Still I think that allowing abortion is a net good even when there is still economic imbalance.
As for euthanasia, I think it is similar. We need to fight for a stable society with good social safety and access to medical services for all while also giving people the rights to decide on how they want to go. (At least for older people, I think for younger people there is too much risk they would have changed their mind and should only be allowed when it is medically certain that they will die soon).
My hope is when cases of euthanasia for economic reasons happen, people will be horrified and it will put pressure into improving the system. But maybe I am naive.
That's a hard subject - while I think I get your need to have a better safety net (so folks aren't tempted even more to opt out of existence), by delaying it, such choice is also causing indescribable suffering to patients now, and trust me those are not small number of people in topics where 1 is too many. A good 'pleasant' death rather a rarity.
Such vomiting isn't due to any medical failing, it's due to the bowels being completely blocked. It's not going out the other end, eventually it comes back up. The only fix is to go in there surgically and fix the blockage--but in a case like what you're replying to obviously that wasn't an option.
100% you articulated exactly what I couldn't - thank you. It feels very wrong to be considering this in the UK when we are on the decline. Espcially since the current government have demonstrated that they don't really care about pensioners.
I see your point, but the problem in the UK is we seem to have ground to a halt because "everything is awful".
Not the same argument, but near where I live people have campaigned against new houses for 15 years, because the roads aren't good enough, and the doctors and dentists aren't good enough, but those things haven't been good enough for 15 years, and they probably aren't going to get better.
I fear there is basically no chance we are going to fix the NHS to a high standard in 20 years, if ever, at this point. In that case, we can't simply do nothing until everything is improved.
The US is a mess too, and isn't likely to get better. This is in fact the reason I firmly hope some form of legal assisted suicide is available when I get old enough to need it. Societies with no safety net, where anyone -- even the reasonably well-off, like myself -- can end up unhoused with no medical care through a stroke or two of bad luck, need this right the most.
If we had a functioning system for providing the necessities of life for everyone, suicide would obviously be less necessary.
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.
Reality is much messier than "There are people and their bodies and their wishes."
There are whole categories of people who we consider not well enough to make good choices about their bodies and lives, for a variety of reasons
Children are not emotionally mature or responsible enough to make such choices
Mentally ill people are sometimes in an altered state of mind where they are not making good decisions that are consistent with their regular state of mind
Some people are very suggestible and will more or less agree with anything that someone else is telling them to do, even if it is not in their best interest. People who have just received bad news (like a scary medical diagnosis) can easily fall into this, and just agree with whatever someone tells them
It's all well and good to want to respect people's wishes for their lives, but society does have some responsibility to ensure they aren't being pressured by outside forces into acting against their will or against their own interests
I share your view, but it gets crazy complicated when you're dealing with homicide (I'm using this word to mean it's literal definition: 'death caused by another person', not to mean a crime occurred necessarily).
Euthanasia is controversial for a lot of reasons. Some people worry that authoritarians will use it as a way to "purge" or, such as here in Canada, as a way to "reneg" on health care obligations that tax payers are paying for. Others worry that family members and care providers will abuse the law for financial gain ("legal murder" for inheritance etc.).
It's complicated because we're not talking about an elderly person with terminal cancer. We're talking about a 27 year-old high functioning adult who sought, and was granted, medical assistance in dying due to a mental illness. When you dive into that story, even if you agree that the courts made the right decision and that the 27 year-old had the right to decide her own fate, your heart can't not break thinking about the father.
Morally, I agree that every [adult] individual has the right to commit suicide by any means of their choosing (as long as they're not infringing upon the rights of others in the process). That doesn't mean that there aren't valid reasons for people to debate whether or not ehutanasia should be legal and under what circumstances.
"tyranny" also seems like a concept mostly unrelated to the topic at hand. Practically speaking, nobody can really prevent you from taking your own life.
Yep that's one side of the argument and it's valid and I sympathize with it.
The other side is when you're hearing stories of people being told that, in lieu of the procedure they're about to undergo, they can surely sign up to receive state-approved death.
"Are you sure you don't want to just die? This is gonna hurt a lot!"
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.
Anyone who's been close to a dying cancer patient knows what the last couple months are like for many: unending suffering plus tomorrow will be worse. Many people would choose not to suffer like that and I can't understand who anyone else is to tell them they must endure utter misery for nothing.
Whether the official measure can go negative or not on a practical level it clearly can. I saw my father near the end--the morphine robbed him of the ability to make long term memory. From when he was on that dose it was short term memory only, his world was frozen to before that point. And he was still in pain. How can that be anything but a negative quality of life?
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.
That’s part of it, however they are also against it from a morality and ethical point of view, with the central argument being that you can’t take an innocent person’s life, no matter how “good” you think your intentions are.
Basically they uphold the value of life above all else, including one’s desire to end it. By the same token, they are against any form of suicide.
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.
You are incorrect. You don’t have to be doing something 24 hrs a day to be spending your days doing it.
If you were a child who was raped every night by your father, you could absolutely say with honesty that you spent your nights getting raped.
What matters is - does the event significantly affect the rest of your day? Not - is the event happening non-stop. If that were the case, you could vomit every hour and still not be able to make the claim, since there are periods of rest.
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.
I volunteered (and then worked) at a Federal hospital in the 90s, up until ~2002. Oncologists were notoriously underrepresented in the oncology department as patients. Instead, then tended to do whatever they wanted and then get dosed up to the gills with Morphine until dead, a few hours later. It was a very different way to run out the clock.
Yeah, I've heard similar things many times. The people with the best understanding of what's going to happen are the least likely to want it--extremely telling to me.
Like with so many things, what terrifies me is where you draw the line. The cases you're describing—where someone currently has to choose between paying ridiculous amounts of money to continue living in pain while confined to a hospital bed versus dying in terrible pain because the doctors are forbidden from helping you along—these are the easy ones.
But we also have stories here of people deciding to die while they're still mobile and while their loved ones are begging them to not to. Those are much less clear cut to me.
Radical individualism would say that every person should have full autonomy to make any decision they want that doesn't physically damage those around them. But I'm not a radical individualist, so I can't accept that argument alone. There are cases where an individual's choice to end it all early would be a net loss for their immediate community, and there are cases where it would be a net loss for the wider community and the state. At some point that net loss must overrule the individual's autonomy. But where? How do you draw the line?
> At some point that net loss must overrule the individual's autonomy.
I'm curious why you think of this as such a concrete fact. It is hard to understand that you would consider it your right to override such a core component of human autonomy (the choice to continue living) because they owe you/society something.
If someone's suffering is so great (be it physical *or* mental) that they have reached a point where they personally would trade human life for non-existence, who are you to say "Sorry, we own you. You cannot make that choice"?
I am sorry if my comment sounds judgemental because I am genuinely interested in your opinion about who would ever be qualified to make that decision and decide "No, this person is bound to us."
"There are cases where an individual's choice to end it all early would be a net loss for their immediate community, and there are cases where it would be a net loss for the wider community and the state. At some point that net loss must overrule the individual's autonomy."
I'm presuming these are situations where a person has a terminal illness or something where it's a matter of time until they are disabled / not mobile / in great pain and so forth. What right does anyone else have to demand that a person continue living against their will in those scenarios? Why does a person have to wait for life to be unbearable before they can opt out?
My father died due to dementia. When he was of sound mind, he was very, very clear that he'd prefer to be dead than diminished that way. Unfortunately his condition crept up on him and he didn't live where assisted suicide was an option anyway. I'm convinced that caring for him actually killed his wife before her time, by contributing to her stress and so forth. (She died of a heart attack about 9 months before he did, despite being a decade+ younger.)
We don't give human beings the same dignity we give pets who are clearly dying because we have misguided ideas about longevity being more important than quality.
I can't adequately express my revulsion at the idea that "net loss to the state" ever must overrule my autonomy to the extent that I'm not even allowed to die. What entitlement.
I think there are a lot of people that are absolutists on the point. If the whole universe depends on one person's continued existence, that would still not justify forced prolongation.
If there is one thing that should be beyond social control, it is the choice over existence itself.
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?
To my mind the main obstacle is kind of orthogonal: how do you protect the people who don't want to go, being pressured or manipulated. I agree that if someone is really, independently and committedly deciding to go, you shouldn't stop them. But how do you express that test in a bureaucratic, legalistic framework?
In a friend's family, there was a big rift as one family member in direct line of inheritance was accused of (successfully!) pressuring his mother to refuse medical care. She died sooner and more unpleasantly than she likely would have otherwise, leaving more money sooner to her children. And that wasn't even with euthanasia being legal.
I have lots of sympathy for people so desperate they would rather kill themselves, but I don't know how you square that circle.
> how do you protect the people who don't want to go, being pressured or manipulated. I agree that if someone is really, independently and committedly deciding to go, you shouldn't stop them. But how do you express that test in a bureaucratic, legalistic framework?
I would look into countries where euthanasia has been already implemented. It doesn't seem like it's a widespread problem, so apparently they made it work somehow.
Does it mean it's absolutely bulletproof and no-one will ever be pressured to undergo euthanasia? No, but you can't ever achieve such certainty, and it's better to look at it from the utilitarianism view - allowing euthanasia will prevent much more suffering than it will cause.
The way most countries who have it (including Canada) have solved it is to add waiting periods, and layers of reviews. In Canada, you need two different doctors to sign off on it. If you're not actively dying, you also have a 90-day period of reflection. And you have to be of sound mind.
This seems to me like good enough safeguards, don't you think?
> To my mind the main obstacle is kind of orthogonal: how do you protect the people who don't want to go, being pressured or manipulated.
This is why it's important to have a pretty detailed living will[1]. Especially is you're already chronically ill and have a pretty good idea of how that road ends.
Well I am sure no system is perfect but the people that choose to end their life have to meet several criteria. They first need to be of sound mind when they make this decision (and this is one of the current issues being sorted out). So they talk with their doctor and express interest. They then are seen by other health care providers like psychologist who discuss it more. They are spoken to privately without the family present. It is their decision in the end and only theirs. Once they choose a time they need to still be fully alert and aware and they have to personally push the button that ends their life. And that is one of the issues, some people do not want to live if they become paralyzed or brain dead. But we can not euthanize those people even if they expressed that wish before.
I have worked in hospice and they do MAID there all the time. It was a weird feeling to see a family and their loved one head into the downstairs where they would all sit around and tell them person how much they are loved and then that person would end their life. But I know it is the right thing.
How do you prevent people from smoking? Eating processed food?
Is the fact that the process of suicide is slower/more conventional a difference?
People seeking this process go through a psychological evaluation to determine if they are under duress and of clear mind. Also there's liability to the ones applying undue pressure which can be criminal.
I think there's a point of personal responsibility. Potential abuse of the system should not be the reason to deny it to everyone. I want to have control over the way I live and die. Alzheimer's is unfortunately in both sides of my family, if it has no treatment and I start showing signs I would rather die than live. It would be torture for me to put my family through that.
The much more common case seems to be families forcing treatment, effectively just prolonging the pain. People don't exactly easily come to grips with their parents dying. Some people never do.
Sounds to me like your family friend’s mother would have died more pleasantly if euthanasia were legal.
There are plenty of ways to pressure people into death, as you have already demonstrated. That’s not going away.
Emotional burdens to encourage people to live as long as possible even if you think they’re suffering are likely a far bigger problem. People know it’s unethical not to euthanize animals that are suffering. Lacking the social apparatus to suggest euthanizing humans is almost certainly a huge moral weakness.
One reason is religion. That aside, people are afraid that this could be abused. People could choose this purelyto avoid additional cost to their relatives.
It could be used as an excuse why more costly options to avoid pain and suffering in old people might not be covered by insurance anymore.
People could be talked into it for various reasons.
Canada is a good example of a country where I think the base to make it work in a positive way is given. Their insurance covers a lot of treatments for basically everyone. The country cares about its citizens in a way that makes you believe they won't use euthanasia as a cop out to avoid paying for medical care.
If these circumstances are not given, euthanasia can easily be seen as an easy way to get rid of people who are too expensive for society or too cumbersome to take care of.
> People could choose this purelyto avoid additional cost to their relatives.
Why is this a bad thing? If there's a choice between giving $100,000 to my descendants and using it to keep me intubated in a hospital bed for an extra 6 months, I find the former preferable by far. If someone else doesn't, that's fine, but I find comments like this both annoying and creepily authoritarian in saying that the correct choice is obvious and so they're going to make the decision for me.
Yeah, I knew someone who opted to have their dementia-suffering parent live with them until the end. That was tough, but... surely better than being left alone in a hospice/etc. as you mention. Unfortunately, yeah, you'll see the person just erode and ... it's really brutal as hell, ultra sad. Eventually the person is not even capable of consenting to euthanasia (nor any other medical procedure). Definitely something to discuss with family or closest friends especially upon getting diagnosed with an illness like that.
Caring for dementia patients at home is seldom better unless the family has the resources for 24×7 care. I know from personal experience that dementia patients will wake up in the middle of the night to wander out into the street or accidentally start kitchen fires. And if the family tries to do it all themselves it takes an enormous unsustainable toll. At some point everyone is better off putting the patient in a professionally staffed facility. Of course the prices for those create other challenges.
I have worked in hospice and would say typically the people who end up there are not what I would say left alone. But they are there to die. They usually end up there because the family who was looking after them is really struggling to do so any longer for various reasons like personal care or medication management being too much and they are approaching death.
When there they get basically as much drugs to fight pain, anxiety and other symptoms as much as they need. The goal is to provide as much as possible a comfortable end to their life.
Dementia patients are not candidates for MAID program here in Canada. You need to be of sound mind at this time. Perhaps in the future one can make a living will for future illness but currently if you are confused or suffering from dementia and can not understand what it is all about you can not consent to it.
> why do people think it’s an ethics question when society is individualistic as can be
Because we disagree that society is individualistic. We are social creatures, not individualist creatures. And we need people around us. Including you needing your grandma. And she needs people like you.
turn the question around: why do people feel easy escapes are ok? We came in this world and were assisted in our upbringing and lived to old age, so why is it ok that we can feel like we can just get up and 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.
> 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
This is kind of one of those urban myths btw. Like yes it has technically happened before but if you chase down the stories it's not at all common and it's more of a situation of someone having some family or relationships in a province away and people trying to help by connecting them.
No. It was 35 years ago, but it's not an urban legend.
Back in '88, when he was just mayor of Calgary, Ralph Klein had the city "solve" their homeless problem for the Olympics by buying one-way bus tickets to Vancouver.
It is back in the news because it's started happening again in 2s and 3s.
> will euthanasia become another "solution" for those who can't afford proper care and treatment?
This is all but guaranteed to happen to some extent; after all, criminals exist who killed people, so a legalised form of that will be used at least once in the history of Canada. I guess the question is more: will this become more normal than would've been preferable, but in 20 years will just be one of those facts of life? Possibly? Certainly that possibility was the main objection to MAID.
It's charitable. Cold snaps in Prairies can pretty easily hit -35, dropping down to -55 with windchill. You'll get frostbite on exposed skin in 2 minutes at those temperatures.
Most homeless will either take stay in one of the shelters available in the cities, or sneak onto the many freight trains heading towards the cities with milder climates when it starts getting cold. They'll head back when it starts to warm up again. A bus ticket is just enables the journey to be a lot more comfortable.
"In a 16-month period in 1993-94, the province’s welfare rolls were cut almost in half. One tactic used was to offer recipients a one-way bus ticket to leave Alberta."
> 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.
Almost certainly. IIRC, in Canada there have already been cases where people got euthanasia mainly because their disability payments were insufficient.
I'm in Canada and I have a relative in hospital who say they are either returning home or doing MAID, as they were not going into a home or "assisted living." coming to terms with your own death is part of the culture here now.
Many people clearly prefer death to being dependent on services. Doctors themselves are known to eschew chemotherapy and difficult surgeries. Most men don't even see the doctors their taxes pay for "free" because the system is so bureaucratic nobody with any responsibilities can afford the time to use it, or the risks of being caught up in the system. Dignity is a big deal for people and many prefer to die with some of it than to live without it.
I think MAID itself is poorly defined and implemented, as really, the health system had no problem killing thousands of young people with loose opioid perscriptions, I don't like that MAID requires allocating execution powers to doctors and their increasingly politicized delegates. death as a service doesn't seem ethical compared to prescription and technical options.
the heart of it is that the institutions don't provide dignity and so people are choosing death. this seems lost on the leadership and its aspirational classes.
I'm sure someone will try to frame it as a Catch 22: "If we knew for sure they would choose suicide if they didn't get the help they requested, we would prioritize them over non-suicidal applicants. But the only way we would know if they would actually choose suicide is if they actually committed to voluntary euthanasia".
> 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.
Does it? Given the number of homeless deaths caused by Canadian summers, I'm not seeing the urgency of homeless people returning to colder locations.
This obviously isn't a solution to the problem of homelessness: the solution to homelessness is homes. But it is a solution to the (much smaller) problem of homeless people dying due to seasonal weather.
Incidentally, this program was never large and fell out of practice due to bad press in both the US and Canada, and thousands of homeless people have frozen to death in its absence.
if we killed all the homeless people, would our social problems be over? Sick thought. I know. But a part of me blindly believes that our problems will become worse.
>will euthanasia become another "solution" for those who can't afford proper care and treatment?
Yes, and I would argue that despite the awful connotations, this is not a bad thing.
It’s simply a fact of life that some people have more than others. Sometimes it’s not fair, but it’s still way better than any other social/economic alternative. And those who have more can afford better treatment, that is expensive.
So, assuming we can agree on this, would it not be better to offer some solution, even if not ideal? Remember, it may not be something that you would ever opt for, maybe because you have the means for better solutions, but for many this is a blessing compared to their only alternative which is to suffer. As sad as it may sound.
The standard for that is very loose. There's no requirement that the death be imminent. Iirc it basically means the condition could kill you, at some point.
This even applies if treatment would prevent death. It's whether the condition is capable of killing.
With everything medical it is complicated. If someone is 85 and gets a theoretically treatable form of cancer they're looking at months or years of grueling chemotherapy and surgeries to get at most few more years of life.
I would not blame anybody for skipping treatment or even getting euthanasia to avoid the really sucky part where the cancer is killing you painfully, especially if their life partner has already passed.
Overall it is best to avoid making too many blanket judgements about medical matters. Every case is unique and the circumstances matter. Most people are sane and rational and you should trust their judgement when it comes to their own life, weighing also the opinion of their physician.
No, the standard is not "very loose". It is clear, and strict. And you also got the "condition could kill you" part wrong. So it's all wrong.
You can read about eligibility criteria here[0], specifically what constitutes a "grievous and irremediable medical condition". Like, believe it or not, but this legislation took a very long time to write, and quite a bit of thought was put into it.
I hate to post the link for the third time in the same thread, but seriously, talking about eligibility criteria necessitates reading what they are. Preferably before talking about them.
Readit News
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.
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.
Like... If your illness makes you suicidal... Is offering assisted suicide REALLY the best we can do? That starts to feel a lot like "eghh you're too hard for society to care about... We'll just let you die".
As horrible as this might sound, often it's failed suicide attempts that actually are the catalysts for people being able to get their lives back on track... What happens in a society where the government helps facilitate suicide and there's never any "attempts" anymore... Just successes...
My fear is that I will be 70-80-90, I won't be able to serve myself even for the very basics, I will have lost my memory, and will be a total burden (all the pain - zero joy) to my close family. Why would I do this to them? Perhaps he had a motivation like this - to make sure he won't hurt your lives, your relationships, etc.
Either way, it is a very difficult choice..
I wish my mother had been given the option in her early 50s, the number of people punished by authoritarian governments that deny self determinism and force people to be put through experiences literally worse than torture is mind boggling, I cannot fathom it.
I don't think anyone who has seen it even a single time can honestly make slippery slope arguments, I have to assume it's ignorance and that these people are simply "actually" nerds doing recreational theory crafting. I assume it's the same headspace as flat earthers, it doesn't effect me so why should I care about aligning my thoughts with the real world, let me invent theoretical overlords and victims and argue about this new synthetic world that exists in my imagination.
I just can't be uncharitable enough to believe a person who has seen it first hand, that a person would embrace such unfettered cruelty as to deny a person living in constant hell a drop of water.
That being said... fuck, back in 2000 I did meet a bunch of people that denied hiv existed and said even if it did it was a punishment on gay people and it would be better if it wasn't cured so they would be scared and "behave" (yes, I personally met these people, the non-existence was rare but the "shouldn't develop treatment" was not a minority view in the city I lived in at the time.)
After my mother died, for a while I volunteered with "No one dies alone.", I doubt a single person who has done so for any length of time is going to argue "slippery slope".
I fully understand someone in their 80s knowing the end is near choosing to leave on their own term.
Edited to sound less harsh
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.
Both of my parents (in their 70s) mentioned how they want to go out the same way once they're incapable of living and start suffering. I feel the same about it as well. I understand there are very small amount of cases where people shouldn't be able to take this way out, but it's a net good. I really hate how global media is trying to turn it into a big conversation and "slippery slope", because if anyone who has seen their loved one suffer... they would never want this program to end.
I look at my grandma. She's 85, in the middle stages of Alzheimers (usually find and lucid, but sometimes thinks she's in Michigan or Georgia when she's been in Oregon for 4 years), constantly soils herself, can't get up from a chair without assistance (even then it's a struggle), and can barely walk, even with a walker. She got COVID and somehow survived, but got permanent lung damage and now needs an oxygen tank.
She's not living, she's merely surviving. I don't want to be like that. If I found myself in the state she's in, I like to think that I'd admit that I've had a good run, but it's time to move on.
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.
-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
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.
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.
If we start looking at people who use MAID as selfless because they are “giving back to society”, and relieving the “financial burden”, what does that make people who choose to stick around? Are they selfish?
No one should be pressured or guilted into choosing an option like MAID - people are more than just balances on a spreadsheet.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/1986/09/21/magazine/german-doctors-a...
For some reason this made me emotional. I think I would make the same choice if I were in this position.
* For: https://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/euthanasia/infavour/infavour_1....
* Against: https://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/euthanasia/against/against_1.sh...
- 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.
This is wild. How can they differentiate between grief and actual clear thinking desire?
Personally I don’t think they should. Only I know what’s in my head.
I think my rules would be:
1. Terminal diagnosis at any age - No questions asked.
2. Over 70 - No questions asked — just request MAID and get it.
3. Over 50 but under 70 - Have to request MAID 2 times, separated by 1 month waiting period. Waiting period resets after a year.
4. Under 50 - Have to request MAID 3 times, each separated by 1 month waiting period. Waiting period resets after 6 months.
I’d also be in favor of no questions asked at all in any situation.
Grief on its own isn't sufficient for assisted dying.
Can you imagine such a decision now?
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.
Whats suprising to me is that these parents choose to punish their kids instead of end of ending their life. selfish fucks!!
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What's next? We let teenagers choose to die after their first love breaks up with them?
I'm neither against nor for euthanasia, but I also think the situations where it's the best solution for everyone are extremely rare.
https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/health-servi...
> Your eligibility assessment must take a minimum of 90 days, unless the assessments have been completed sooner and you are at immediate risk of losing your capacity to consent.
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Many people have the worst days or weeks or years that they look back on and are grateful for the life they live later, physically disabled, paralyzed, elderly, etc. During the darkest of times is when we have to care for each other, not offer a knife so to speak. Even when many during these times would’ve wanted to die and suffer greatly. It’s part of life. This is absolutely sick in a civilized society, but leave it to that murderous thug Trudeau.
I feel like I will get downvoted to oblivion just because people vehemently disagree, but THIS CANNOT be the meaning and choice behind death. It is simply immature, arrogant, and selfish. But more plainly, it is suicidal / self-relentment.
The downward slope quickens faster than any would like once it starts. The body or the mind slips away, leaving someone either trapped in a shell that doesn't work, or momentary fragments of the person who was among a sea of futile vapid existence.
Our medical technology is not there and shows little sign of being close to resolving either issue.
Rather than slowly wasting away I too would rather have the option to twist to the side off the cliff rather than the long slow painful stair tumble down the hill.
In these cases, I'm not sure these people had the agency and capacity to continue living in a way that makes sense as human beings.
I gauge much of my value and purpose in life based on how I can serve my family and community. I don't really exist for me in a sense, and I can't exist without other people. I'm part of something a lot bigger than I am. If at any point it comes to be that I'm not serving a purpose in this great network, well, I'm not sure I'd see a point in carrying on. I may still be breathing, blood still pumping, but I'd be functionally dead as a part of a community.
It's arrogant and selfish to force people to live on for as long as doctors can keep their body alive. No euthanasia just means more messy suicides.
How is the desire to avoid burdening others selfish?
"You can't choose to kill yourself because that would be suicide" is a tautology, not an argument. What's the basis for these beliefs?
The choice behind death is that it's preferable to the alternative. Before we had medically assisted options, people would do it in more painful ways, but they'd still do it. Many cultures had the idea of "walking off into the wilderness" when your time was there.
When that time is is a personal choice. By all means, let's put some non-gatekeeping hurdles in the way (e.g. mandate a conversation or three with a therapist), but ultimately, we should all be in charge of our own life.
However, I don't think the solution to that tragedy to to make people suffer through. I think the solution is more and better institutions that reduce that suffering so fewer people are pushed to make the choice to end it.
> This! People feel like they cannot live alone or they cannot want that someone else be caused hardship (time or money) because of their difficulty.
> I feel like I will get downvoted to oblivion just because people vehemently disagree, but THIS CANNOT be the meaning and choice behind death. It is simply immature, arrogant, and selfish. But more plainly, it is suicidal / self-relentment.
I watched loved ones die this way. It's cruel, absurd and grotesque. A doctor will look you dead in the eye and say "your loved one will be dead within a few days" and instead of killing them mercifully you are forced to watch them die of dehydration. A maddening and indefensible relic that I believe younger generations will abolish. There's obviously far more complicated end of life situations, but this particular case is extremely common.
If it helps, they don’t ever deny people fluids who want or need them. What happens towards the end is the body stops being able to process fluids due to failing organs. Pushing fluids into someone in this state makes them less comfortable. People aren’t thirsty or suffering from a lack of fluids.
As far as putting someone out of their misery, there’s a reason that they put them on high dosage opioids. If you want to keep someone out of pain while helping their heart and lungs stop peacefully, you couldn’t pick a better drug.
I wouldn’t count on it. I’ve learned young people are just the same as everyone else. I hope I’m wrong but I used to think they had more empathy. Let’s see.,
The hospital (a Catholic hospital, even) provided a morphine drip and they were gone within an hour.
I was never really clear on what killed them in the end, if it was the morphine or the COPD. I guess technically it was the COPD.
Anyway, as somebody who went through something similar: I'm so sorry. COPD is such a slow and crappy way to go. Have you been able to find some peace in the years since?
FWIW, Catholic ethics are actually fairly well thought out on this issue. You're not allowed to withhold basic nourishment (food, hydration, non-invasive breathing support), but you are allowed to opt out of invasive procedures such as intubation and provide pain management if the patient or the patient's guardian decides that it would significantly affect quality of life and the patient doesn't have long to live. Obviously there is discernment involved in the last bit, but Catholicism is all about discernment.
Here's the National Catholic Bioethics Center on the topic: https://www.ncbcenter.org/resources-and-statements-cms/summa...
Catholicism embraces natural death, which is what your family member (RIP) chose. Interventions that hasten death are fine. Just can't cause it.
"Terminal dehydration is a way to skirt the Suicide Act, because we can claim that withholding water is just like withholding treatment. Ramping up painkillers and sedatives is a way to skirt the Suicide Act, because we can claim that the medication helps the patient cope with their death, rather than inducing their death."
When my father-in-law passed, in a rural assisted living facility, we found they had stopped feeding him despite saying they were and our requests that they continue.
We were stuck in this uncomfortable position of not being able to move him somewhere else, being completely blindsided by his (bone and bladder) cancer and how quickly it progressed, and not knowing what standard of care to advocate for understanding that he was passing.
One of the things that was also frustrating is that when we would ask for more pain medication, they would refuse as it might lead him to stop breathing (I thought, ‘so what?’), yet they were making decisions that ultimately accelerated to his demise.
Looking back, I don’t know that ceasing nutrition was a bad choice, but it wasn’t their decision to make. When I talked to friends in healthcare they effectively gave me the ‘oh, you sweet summer child’ talk.
My FIL, while he could communicate, could not wait to be out of pain and I wish he had the agency to make the decision before having to go through endless pain in the delirium of opioids.
There are, of course, details I’m leaving out, but my general takeaway is that in at least some cases the euthanasia debate is not about whether the call is being made, but who is making the call.
That is not alone reason to support one side of the debate or another, but it is an important nuance that I was naive about until I witnessed it first hand.
Edit: what I described does not appear to meet the traditional definition of euthanasia, but I will leave the post in its original form and just clarify that I mean making decisions that hasten someone’s death either passively or actively.
Generally if there's still hope for recovery to a not-shitty life then I'd prefer to proceed towards that. Even as extreme as E.G. that Leadale anime's setup where the protag's broken from the neck down but can live in a VR gameworld (deeper immersion so they can still move, taste, etc). If there's still real hope for reaching that, it might be worth toughing it out and waiting.
However that sort of nebulous criteria that requires a human to evaluate isn't present. I can't empower the doctors with such vague goals and say 'make your best call as a HUMAN doctor with that vague goal'.
If that good route isn't an option, then I wouldn't want to stick around either... and the lack of a clear legal euthanasia option in much of the US pushes people to roundabout failures for lack of food / water intake, or just giving in to inevitable statistics when a cold or stressed body complication like a heart attack happen. Heck, if my brain's the part that's fraying apart and I want to die anyway, please harvest the working organs as my method of death so someone else can live better.
It creates a drawn out process where the family has to wait around until they pass at some unknown point instead of coming together in one moment, making peace, saying their farewell, and witnessing the finality together.
It took my girlfriend's vegetative mother a week to die as she struggled to breathe that whole time, put on just enough morphine to supposedly feel no pain and not a drop more. By the time she finally croaked, most of the family that had shown up to see her out had left because nobody has time to wait around days or weeks for death to happen. And it was emotional hell for her two daughters.
They could've just given her a nice dose of morphine, but our ethics are too infantile. Instead we do make-believe.
Dogmas and tabus might be there for a reason. Culturally I think we need to pretend thing we don't think are true.
Killing someone with a drug intended to stop the heart / prevent respiration is unequivocally euthanasia.
Withholding treatments is not euthanasia. Nor is pain medication that hastens death. Those are things we can have an ethical discussion about.
As for IV drip.. that's another discussion. I personally would not ever do that. Water is a basic thing for humanity, and should be provided. Unless he explicitly refused the water. Then, that's his choice.
I think I ultimately reject the idea that this is not well-understood, because the largest organizations opposed to euthanasia (the Catholic church for example) has given endless thought to this, and explicitly accepts the situation you described. Opponents of euthanasia are not ignorant.
My dad also spent days dying from extremely aggressive cancer, being in unimaginable amounts of pain, with all of his organs slowly shutting down, his limbs becoming swollen from pooling blood, unable to drink, unable to eat, crying about how much pain he's in and how much he wants to go home. And all the hospital could do was give him enough morphine to knock him our and we waited by his bedside for 4 days until he finally drew his last breath, probably due to lack of fluids at this point.
Tell me - where does the "morality" stand here compared to him proactively ending his own life with a drug before all of this happened, if he had such an option and decided to take it? How is what he went through morally better like some people say it is compared to euthanasia(I don't know if you think that, but it's a common argument). There's no dignity in any of this.
This is just the trolley problem rephrased.
If we can prevent five, ten or perhaps twenty percent of people having gruesome deaths, then not doing so feels like a moral failing.
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.
To be fair, that is also the one issue with abortion that is legitimate. I am very pro-choice but also horrified by the reality that women sometimes are pressured to have abortion for economic reasons. Still I think that allowing abortion is a net good even when there is still economic imbalance.
As for euthanasia, I think it is similar. We need to fight for a stable society with good social safety and access to medical services for all while also giving people the rights to decide on how they want to go. (At least for older people, I think for younger people there is too much risk they would have changed their mind and should only be allowed when it is medically certain that they will die soon).
My hope is when cases of euthanasia for economic reasons happen, people will be horrified and it will put pressure into improving the system. But maybe I am naive.
Perfect is usually the enemy of good.
Such vomiting isn't due to any medical failing, it's due to the bowels being completely blocked. It's not going out the other end, eventually it comes back up. The only fix is to go in there surgically and fix the blockage--but in a case like what you're replying to obviously that wasn't an option.
Not the same argument, but near where I live people have campaigned against new houses for 15 years, because the roads aren't good enough, and the doctors and dentists aren't good enough, but those things haven't been good enough for 15 years, and they probably aren't going to get better.
I fear there is basically no chance we are going to fix the NHS to a high standard in 20 years, if ever, at this point. In that case, we can't simply do nothing until everything is improved.
If we had a functioning system for providing the necessities of life for everyone, suicide would obviously be less necessary.
There are whole categories of people who we consider not well enough to make good choices about their bodies and lives, for a variety of reasons
Children are not emotionally mature or responsible enough to make such choices
Mentally ill people are sometimes in an altered state of mind where they are not making good decisions that are consistent with their regular state of mind
Some people are very suggestible and will more or less agree with anything that someone else is telling them to do, even if it is not in their best interest. People who have just received bad news (like a scary medical diagnosis) can easily fall into this, and just agree with whatever someone tells them
It's all well and good to want to respect people's wishes for their lives, but society does have some responsibility to ensure they aren't being pressured by outside forces into acting against their will or against their own interests
That's not authoritarian, it is pro-social
Euthanasia is controversial for a lot of reasons. Some people worry that authoritarians will use it as a way to "purge" or, such as here in Canada, as a way to "reneg" on health care obligations that tax payers are paying for. Others worry that family members and care providers will abuse the law for financial gain ("legal murder" for inheritance etc.).
Then you have cases like this one: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/calgary-maid-father-d...
It's complicated because we're not talking about an elderly person with terminal cancer. We're talking about a 27 year-old high functioning adult who sought, and was granted, medical assistance in dying due to a mental illness. When you dive into that story, even if you agree that the courts made the right decision and that the 27 year-old had the right to decide her own fate, your heart can't not break thinking about the father.
Morally, I agree that every [adult] individual has the right to commit suicide by any means of their choosing (as long as they're not infringing upon the rights of others in the process). That doesn't mean that there aren't valid reasons for people to debate whether or not ehutanasia should be legal and under what circumstances.
The other side is when you're hearing stories of people being told that, in lieu of the procedure they're about to undergo, they can surely sign up to receive state-approved death.
"Are you sure you don't want to just die? This is gonna hurt a lot!"
Ghoulish.
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.
Basically they uphold the value of life above all else, including one’s desire to end it. By the same token, they are against any form of suicide.
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.
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.
If you were a child who was raped every night by your father, you could absolutely say with honesty that you spent your nights getting raped.
What matters is - does the event significantly affect the rest of your day? Not - is the event happening non-stop. If that were the case, you could vomit every hour and still not be able to make the claim, since there are periods of rest.
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.
But we also have stories here of people deciding to die while they're still mobile and while their loved ones are begging them to not to. Those are much less clear cut to me.
Radical individualism would say that every person should have full autonomy to make any decision they want that doesn't physically damage those around them. But I'm not a radical individualist, so I can't accept that argument alone. There are cases where an individual's choice to end it all early would be a net loss for their immediate community, and there are cases where it would be a net loss for the wider community and the state. At some point that net loss must overrule the individual's autonomy. But where? How do you draw the line?
I'm curious why you think of this as such a concrete fact. It is hard to understand that you would consider it your right to override such a core component of human autonomy (the choice to continue living) because they owe you/society something.
If someone's suffering is so great (be it physical *or* mental) that they have reached a point where they personally would trade human life for non-existence, who are you to say "Sorry, we own you. You cannot make that choice"?
I am sorry if my comment sounds judgemental because I am genuinely interested in your opinion about who would ever be qualified to make that decision and decide "No, this person is bound to us."
I'm presuming these are situations where a person has a terminal illness or something where it's a matter of time until they are disabled / not mobile / in great pain and so forth. What right does anyone else have to demand that a person continue living against their will in those scenarios? Why does a person have to wait for life to be unbearable before they can opt out?
My father died due to dementia. When he was of sound mind, he was very, very clear that he'd prefer to be dead than diminished that way. Unfortunately his condition crept up on him and he didn't live where assisted suicide was an option anyway. I'm convinced that caring for him actually killed his wife before her time, by contributing to her stress and so forth. (She died of a heart attack about 9 months before he did, despite being a decade+ younger.)
We don't give human beings the same dignity we give pets who are clearly dying because we have misguided ideas about longevity being more important than quality.
If there is one thing that should be beyond social control, it is the choice over existence itself.
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?
In a friend's family, there was a big rift as one family member in direct line of inheritance was accused of (successfully!) pressuring his mother to refuse medical care. She died sooner and more unpleasantly than she likely would have otherwise, leaving more money sooner to her children. And that wasn't even with euthanasia being legal.
I have lots of sympathy for people so desperate they would rather kill themselves, but I don't know how you square that circle.
I would look into countries where euthanasia has been already implemented. It doesn't seem like it's a widespread problem, so apparently they made it work somehow.
Does it mean it's absolutely bulletproof and no-one will ever be pressured to undergo euthanasia? No, but you can't ever achieve such certainty, and it's better to look at it from the utilitarianism view - allowing euthanasia will prevent much more suffering than it will cause.
This seems to me like good enough safeguards, don't you think?
This is why it's important to have a pretty detailed living will[1]. Especially is you're already chronically ill and have a pretty good idea of how that road ends.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advance_healthcare_directive
I'm not sure how these were resolved but it's very messy and hugely traumatic for all involved.
I have worked in hospice and they do MAID there all the time. It was a weird feeling to see a family and their loved one head into the downstairs where they would all sit around and tell them person how much they are loved and then that person would end their life. But I know it is the right thing.
Is the fact that the process of suicide is slower/more conventional a difference?
People seeking this process go through a psychological evaluation to determine if they are under duress and of clear mind. Also there's liability to the ones applying undue pressure which can be criminal.
I think there's a point of personal responsibility. Potential abuse of the system should not be the reason to deny it to everyone. I want to have control over the way I live and die. Alzheimer's is unfortunately in both sides of my family, if it has no treatment and I start showing signs I would rather die than live. It would be torture for me to put my family through that.
There are plenty of ways to pressure people into death, as you have already demonstrated. That’s not going away.
Emotional burdens to encourage people to live as long as possible even if you think they’re suffering are likely a far bigger problem. People know it’s unethical not to euthanize animals that are suffering. Lacking the social apparatus to suggest euthanizing humans is almost certainly a huge moral weakness.
How often does this actually happen?
EDIT: To be clear, I'm not saying this doesn't happen, I'm really asking.
It could be used as an excuse why more costly options to avoid pain and suffering in old people might not be covered by insurance anymore.
People could be talked into it for various reasons.
Canada is a good example of a country where I think the base to make it work in a positive way is given. Their insurance covers a lot of treatments for basically everyone. The country cares about its citizens in a way that makes you believe they won't use euthanasia as a cop out to avoid paying for medical care.
If these circumstances are not given, euthanasia can easily be seen as an easy way to get rid of people who are too expensive for society or too cumbersome to take care of.
Why is this a bad thing? If there's a choice between giving $100,000 to my descendants and using it to keep me intubated in a hospital bed for an extra 6 months, I find the former preferable by far. If someone else doesn't, that's fine, but I find comments like this both annoying and creepily authoritarian in saying that the correct choice is obvious and so they're going to make the decision for me.
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When there they get basically as much drugs to fight pain, anxiety and other symptoms as much as they need. The goal is to provide as much as possible a comfortable end to their life.
Dementia patients are not candidates for MAID program here in Canada. You need to be of sound mind at this time. Perhaps in the future one can make a living will for future illness but currently if you are confused or suffering from dementia and can not understand what it is all about you can not consent to it.
Because we disagree that society is individualistic. We are social creatures, not individualist creatures. And we need people around us. Including you needing your grandma. And she needs people like you.
turn the question around: why do people feel easy escapes are ok? We came in this world and were assisted in our upbringing and lived to old age, so why is it ok that we can feel like we can just get up and leave?
Because they are ok. Why wouldn’t they be? You don’t get bonus points after life for suffering on “hardcore”.
> We came in this world
I don’t remember anyone asking me whether I wanted to come in here or not and I sure as hell won’t let anyone dictate how I want to die.
> and were assisted in our upbringing and lived to old age, so why is it ok that we can feel like we can just get up and leave?
Because you’ll die anyway.
Because dead folks don't pay taxes.
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.
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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.
This is kind of one of those urban myths btw. Like yes it has technically happened before but if you chase down the stories it's not at all common and it's more of a situation of someone having some family or relationships in a province away and people trying to help by connecting them.
Back in '88, when he was just mayor of Calgary, Ralph Klein had the city "solve" their homeless problem for the Olympics by buying one-way bus tickets to Vancouver.
It is back in the news because it's started happening again in 2s and 3s.
https://edmontonsun.com/2013/03/29/remembering-ralph
https://globalnews.ca/news/2567494/reports-2-homeless-men-fr...
This is all but guaranteed to happen to some extent; after all, criminals exist who killed people, so a legalised form of that will be used at least once in the history of Canada. I guess the question is more: will this become more normal than would've been preferable, but in 20 years will just be one of those facts of life? Possibly? Certainly that possibility was the main objection to MAID.
Most homeless will either take stay in one of the shelters available in the cities, or sneak onto the many freight trains heading towards the cities with milder climates when it starts getting cold. They'll head back when it starts to warm up again. A bus ticket is just enables the journey to be a lot more comfortable.
The process was operated more as a "don't provide shelters for these lazy bums, send them elsewhere."
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2001/12/can-d22.html
"In a 16-month period in 1993-94, the province’s welfare rolls were cut almost in half. One tactic used was to offer recipients a one-way bus ticket to leave Alberta."
Almost certainly. IIRC, in Canada there have already been cases where people got euthanasia mainly because their disability payments were insufficient.
Many people clearly prefer death to being dependent on services. Doctors themselves are known to eschew chemotherapy and difficult surgeries. Most men don't even see the doctors their taxes pay for "free" because the system is so bureaucratic nobody with any responsibilities can afford the time to use it, or the risks of being caught up in the system. Dignity is a big deal for people and many prefer to die with some of it than to live without it.
I think MAID itself is poorly defined and implemented, as really, the health system had no problem killing thousands of young people with loose opioid perscriptions, I don't like that MAID requires allocating execution powers to doctors and their increasingly politicized delegates. death as a service doesn't seem ethical compared to prescription and technical options.
the heart of it is that the institutions don't provide dignity and so people are choosing death. this seems lost on the leadership and its aspirational classes.
...
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-Can't afford therapy for curable or mitigable disease
-Let it worsen
-Death is the only charitable option as a cure is now impossible and life is miserable
Does that mean that the tax payer will have to spend billions on every human?
Does it? Given the number of homeless deaths caused by Canadian summers, I'm not seeing the urgency of homeless people returning to colder locations.
This obviously isn't a solution to the problem of homelessness: the solution to homelessness is homes. But it is a solution to the (much smaller) problem of homeless people dying due to seasonal weather.
Incidentally, this program was never large and fell out of practice due to bad press in both the US and Canada, and thousands of homeless people have frozen to death in its absence.
This, as far as I'm aware, still happens in the US nowadays[1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=048BUjNWZa8
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The population of homeless people would end up probably where it was when you killed them all. Though I do wonder how long that would take
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Yes, and I would argue that despite the awful connotations, this is not a bad thing.
It’s simply a fact of life that some people have more than others. Sometimes it’s not fair, but it’s still way better than any other social/economic alternative. And those who have more can afford better treatment, that is expensive.
So, assuming we can agree on this, would it not be better to offer some solution, even if not ideal? Remember, it may not be something that you would ever opt for, maybe because you have the means for better solutions, but for many this is a blessing compared to their only alternative which is to suffer. As sad as it may sound.
It would be a bad thing.
> The vast majority – around 96% - had a death deemed "reasonably foreseeable", due to severe medical conditions such as cancer.
This even applies if treatment would prevent death. It's whether the condition is capable of killing.
I would not blame anybody for skipping treatment or even getting euthanasia to avoid the really sucky part where the cancer is killing you painfully, especially if their life partner has already passed.
Overall it is best to avoid making too many blanket judgements about medical matters. Every case is unique and the circumstances matter. Most people are sane and rational and you should trust their judgement when it comes to their own life, weighing also the opinion of their physician.
You can read about eligibility criteria here[0], specifically what constitutes a "grievous and irremediable medical condition". Like, believe it or not, but this legislation took a very long time to write, and quite a bit of thought was put into it.
I hate to post the link for the third time in the same thread, but seriously, talking about eligibility criteria necessitates reading what they are. Preferably before talking about them.
[0] https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/health-servi...
> The median age of this group was more than 77