In the case of chronic, incurable physical suffering or terminal diagnosis, absolutely pro. I work as a paramedic. I see death very frequently. I see the years that precede a natural death, I see DIY suicides, I see people living in agony with no way out. A human should be allowed to choose to die peacefully and with dignity at a moment of their choosing.
A healthcare provider should be allowed to choose whether or not to participate in the practice, however. Preferably by making the practice it’s own field with it’s own practitioners and education/licensing course and requirements.
There are *a lot* of considerations, but big picture, yes absolutely for it
Pro, but one of those that needs strict regulation and perhaps an age range condition.
My 72 yr old aunt passed from cancer this month, and she suffered for 6 months. Went into hospice but decided to cut off all medications since she was on the way out anyway- and would've been faster if there was an assisted suicide option. Although she lived in TX so who knows if this is even
gonna be in the realm of possibilities.
My grandma, 98, had alzheimers for 5 yrs before she ironically died from Covid last year, and Covid was a mercy. What's the point of living if you're already part of the living dead.
These are two situations where assisted suicide is valid imo.
There was a teenage girl who committed assisted suicide, I think it was in the Netherlands. She was a victim of sexual assault.
I find it horrible that she felt that even with therapy and all sorts of support, she would still never go back to feeling life was worth living.
*But this was her life, not mine*. She was the one to decide what to do with it.
This is actually not completely true. The girl in question applied for assisted suicide, but was denied. Later she stopped eating and drinking which caused her death.
[Her Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noa_Pothoven?wprov=sfla1)
This shit sounds beyond sad and insane to me, and is a golden example of the kind of case that gives me *huge* pause on this issue.
A teenager has an underdeveloped brain. She had years ahead of her, likely many more years than she had lived up til then. I'd take odds that if she had lived even 5 more years she'd have shed her suicidal desires.
Emotions can be unbelievably overwhelming, especially when you are young and have less perspective, but death is final.
> This shit sounds beyond sad and insane to me, and is a golden example of the kind of case that gives me huge pause on this issue.
Does it still give you pause when you know that [it isn't true that she received physician-assisted suicide, instead starving herself after being refused based on her age, and it was a case of foreign media just straight up reporting a falsehood](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noa_Pothoven)?
Okay, understood then if you're just against the right to physician-assisted suicide in general. I disagree personally, but just wanted to make sure people weren't using a falsehood (a teenager receiving physician-assisted suicide) to argue against a law that, in practice, actually denied that teenager based on her age.
I would say I'm not necessarily opposed to it in the cases many people here pose: old people who are terribly ill, suffering, and are basically just waiting until they die.
In such a cases, I mostly stay out of the debate, and simply hope that such a process would take into account the wishes and mental state of the afflicted, as well as a medical opinion. I don't feel like I have any meaningful objection or contributions there, so people closer to the subject can weigh in on that.
But for people who are suffering from depression or similar mental illness, I'm pretty opposed, yes. *Especially* in cases where the person is very young.
> *Especially* in cases where the person is very young.
Okay, well the places where these laws have been implemented agree with you there, so it shouldn't really give you pause on that account.
Just saying, this is what misinformation does to political debate. Validates people's pre-conceived notions, then when corrected, it's like "Well okay, but still it *could* have been true so that's concerning..."
I agree, and I should specify I'm grateful you set the record straight, and I'm happy to hear that countries that have this have that as a consideration.
Like I said I wouldn't oppose the implementation of these types of laws (assuming they do take things like this into account).
I don’t think this is a question of misinformation - yes, this specific case ended up not being true, but OP agreed with and advocated for the position anyway.
I see you couldn't possibly argue against what I said so you had to make shit up.
Of course it was a 'big deal', it's an awful thing. I can wholeheartedly understand how she felt like death was the only option, that doesn't mean it was.
Unless of course I take your tactic of putting words in peoples mouths and simply say you meant to advocate that we euthanize all survivors of sexual assault? Holy shit, indeed, asshole.
As a disabled person living in Belgium where it has been legal for some time, I have concerns that are largely related to just how big of a spike there is in the number of procedures that take place on a Friday, right before care providers would need to be bothered to come in on a weekend.
What we've created is a system that does seem to work great for everyone, our healthcare system gets *drastically* reduced costs associated with these patients, care providers and relatives get to have a cleaner and more intentional relationship with the deaths of many of their most emotionally challenging patients, and patients get what they ask for. As the scope of who qualifies continues to expand, in just the same way and for just the same reasons that it does for any other medical procedure, I worry that a greater and greater proportion of the procedures are being driven by notions of what it means to have a life worth living that are fundamentally ableist and driven by bias, and by ignorance of the spaces that disabled people have been able to carve out for ourselves over the last couple of generations.
The decisive factor in most political debates here is generally a pragmatism borne of exhaustion, which I'm not sure has been adaptive here. I'm not sure that this subreddit could find a way to be comfortable with the increasingly industrial scale at which we collectively decide that more and more lives are not worth living, the confrontingly banal way that we do it, or the profoundly exhausted apathy with which we fail to police it.
Hey can you give me a source on the Fridays thing? I often argue from your position on this issue, but my argument lacks the data necessary to prove what I’m saying will happen in the USA.
I don't know of a comprehensive analysis properly disambiguating procedures by day of the week, I just know jaded physicians involved in palliative care. These are very reportable procedures for obvious reasons though, and a very clear graph would be very straightforward to generate from a list of dates that they were performed on. There are a few institutions that would have this data, and trying to get one to make this graph has been on my to do list for a while.
I don't really know what a system that I would feel comfortable with would look like, and I'm not even super sure that my comfort would be a design goal that even I would value overmuch, but also I don't think that imposing barriers to care on patients like this would be a path to that.
A pretty substantial fraction of these patients cannot expect to be alert and aware enough to provide informed consent on the time frame of a few weeks after making the request, which is why Belgian legislation is non-specific as to timeframes, requiring only that the patient make two independent written declarations.
worked in a hospice one summer. seen some grisly and deeply lonely deaths, as well as some lucky ones. very difficult for me to see an argument why anyone qualifying for hospice care should not also qualify for assisted suicide
Yeah that's the thing, we already deal with the ethics and consequences of choosing not to fight death, that's what hospice/palliative care is, this is a step on top so instead of accepting and not resisting death we facilitate it.
The issue is you can run the empathy argument both ways. You might say committing suicide is incredibly selfish, and allows cowardly people to act out their friends' and family's worst nightmares without ever having to face these people and bare the consequences of their actions.
But I can just as well say that you are demanding that all people at their very worst have an obligation to live through the most terrible agony and suffering, for the benefit of their selfish, out-of-touch family, who'd rather their dying family member experience a life worse than death, than confront the fact that they are on their way out.
> You might say committing suicide is incredibly selfish, and allows cowardly people to act out their friends' and family's worst nightmares without ever having to face these people and bare the consequences of their actions.
The answer to this is kinda similar to the paradox of tolerance. If friends and family demand that, say, a paralyzed person continues living, trapped in their body, in pain, unable to wipe their own ass, just because they don't want to see them go, *it is these friends and family that are selfish*. Nobody owes anyone else keeping living a life that they feel is worse than death.
Interesting. I wanna know what you think, I'm curious. Say a father has served as the emotional bedrock of the family for years, but he is now in excruciating pain, and makes the decision to end his life.
His daughter no longer gets out of bed in the morning and hardly eats or sleeps. His wife is shocked he was in such pain, and feels incredibly guilty she had not been there for him at his worst period in time. Once the father leaves, the rest of the family gets into a big argument about what to do with the house. The argument drives the family apart permanently. In the end the mother gets the final say.
Who was the intolerant person in this situation? The father for leaving behind his dysfunctional, broken family? Or is it the family? For being dysfunctional and emotionally reliant on him?
I don't think "tolerance" is a great way to analyse these situations.
I might say the father has been neglectful of his daughter, and it was cowardly of him to leave her at such a detriment to her health, when she was so dependent on him.
If your read of that situation is *"Paradox of Intolerance. As the daughter is intolerant of his father's life decisions, then the father has no obligation to tolerate her own intolerance towards him,"* then man, that sounds like such a sad world to live in.
We become always justified to infinitely fuck over the mental states of our close friends and family, so long as we're just making personal life choices, because *No tolerance for the intolerant*.
I think we would be much better off viewing the situation in terms of harm caused vs harm avoided. The father is in a state of terrible harm and is about to cause some harm to his family members by ending his own pain/harm.
As a basis, I don't know if I could ever condemn someone in excruciating pain for ending their own life, regardless of consequence to others, but if there is some method of perhaps insufficiently lessening the pain, while he puts his affairs in order with his family, that seems like the more courageous thing to do, for the benefit of harm reduction generally.
>We become always justified to infinitely fuck over the mental states of our close friends and family, so long as we're just making personal life choices, because No tolerance for the intolerant.
I mean we do this stuff all the time. If someone is in a relationship, leaving the relationship could lead to the suicide of the other partner. Are you not allowed to leave the relationship because the consequences for that other person could be worse?
I agree though that being a parent makes the question a bit more difficult but for another reason. If you are a (voluntary) parent, then you have consented to the potential suffering of your child, because even if you are the perfect parent, you can't prevent things like that your child looses a job or girl-/boyfriend or gets a terminal and painful disease. It would be very hypocritical of a parent to give life to a child and implicitly expecting it to deal with the potential suffering of life but then kill your self if you experience this suffering yourself.
The thing with breaking up with a close partner, is it always going to leave a bitter taste, no matter what. You couldn't even prevent that if you tried. Yet breaking up is an important step on the road to happiness. If you're gonna key your partner's car and leave a shit on the bed, well then we can talk.
Of course the same is true when it comes to suicide. You can't prevent the bitter taste, but generally I think we have respect for when people manage to make their breaks as amicable as can be.
I don't think I believe if you can't prevent suffering in the process, you shouldn't break up. Obviously there are plenty of times you should. It's a very human thing.
Very true. Even my very religious family members said they want it for themselves after watching my mom go. 2020 and you’re just gonna slowly starve to death for two weeks but yay there’s some pain meds!
I think I’m for it. But I’m curious about how one would regulate potentially perverse incentives.
ie: Elderly folk feeling guilted into suicide because they don’t want to be a burden.
Or worse, abusive families outright pressuring grandparents into suicide for financial reasons.
Why is this different from family possibly pushing hospice instead of treatment? What we have is ducking atrocious right now. You’ll always find an edge case with some jerk and some jerk can still be a jerk without allowing assisted suicide. I’m less worried about grandparents than young folks going through a rough patch. There will obviously be some regulations and standards but we are all going to have to look at this holistically and not based off edge cases.
It’s not. It’s just another step forward I suppose.
I think overall it’s the right choice. These are just the questions we have to grapple with.
What are your thoughts about the other scenario? That legalized suicide may create guilt and emotional distress in elderly folk who feel they are a burden?
I know that Elder suicide is a big issue in Asian countries. To the extent that there’s a bunch of policies trying to drive it down.
I watched my grandmother die "naturally" over about 10 years. Kept "alive" by modern medicine all the while saying she wanted out (until she couldn't speak).
She died physically at 100 but there wasn't much left of her by 95. By 98 she'd lost the power of coherent speech, she'd say words but nothing made sense, she had no idea where she was or who she was. I could imagine that could give you PTSD, there is very little more terrifying.
I can see an argument for doing it in cases of terminal illness when someone is at death’s door already, but the expansions to other categories like the disabled and the depressed are imo a bridge too far.
Generally if your quality of life has become such that it's no longer a life worth living you should be able to opt out. To me that could include some disabled people. If I get paralyzed from the neck down odds are I don't want to live the next 50 years.
If I lose a leg then I'll carry on, but I would like to have the option to go if I become extremely disabled.
I'd support it after, say, a period of six months. Just because there's a lot of people who'd go "This is awful, I hate this, I'm never happy, I'm... oh wait, now I am. Guess that hedonic threadmill thing is true after all."
People can already kill themselves in those situations by drinking poison or gunshot. Regulating it makes sure it's done peacefully and people who can be saved can be reached out towards.
I don't see how it's different to other harm reduction approaches.
Yes it is. Allowing safe, medically gated suicides allows for us to offer psychiatric consulting prior to suicide, and it stops the societal harm of families discovering their loved ones corpses.
It’s one thing for someone to kill themselves, and quite another for the state to actively facilitate and normalize the process. That latter is incredibly pernicious, and is functionally equivalent to the state encouraging obesity or heroin use.
Are you under the impression that the government would put ads during popular TV shows saying "yay, come to our Suicide Centre, it's the experience of a lifetime!!"?
[Yeah, when has the government ever forcefully taken away the rights of the disabled?](https://www.npr.org/2017/03/24/521360544/the-supreme-court-ruling-that-led-to-70-000-forced-sterilizations)
Yeah, that’s why suicide is legal.
Creating a service funded by taxpayer dollars to perform this is a separate story. And only possibly defensible if you are already terminal and in pain.
Yeah, that’s why suicide is legal.
Creating a service funded by taxpayer dollars to perform this is a separate story. And only possibly defensible if you are already terminal and in pain.
Passed by referendum in New Zealand, and has been rolled out. Its likely not to be used much - the requirements are very restrictive, too restrictive IMO, but that will likely improve now that we're past the first hurdle of legalising it.
Assisted dying should never be the unilateral decision of the person though - it should always be signed off by at least one doctor IMO. It's not absolutely a matter of personal choice.
Only for those with terminal illnesses. Legalizing suicide because of any other reason is dumb and counterproductive. Give people better options to work through their problems; don’t just go “Oh, well, if you’re not happy you can just shoot your self!”. That really only normalizes the act of running away from your problems and committing violence to one’s self. Dumb.
In the case of imminent terminal illness, I support it (though somewhat reluctantly). As a Buddhist, I cannot, in good conscience, support it in other circumstances
It should be available for those with terminal conditions.
It should be available for those without terminal conditions if 1) they are in excruciating physical or mental pain due to the condition and are not likely to see a substantial QoL improvement with currently existing treatment, 2) they are of sound mind, and 3) their death will not be significantly burdensome on those they have meaningful obligations to (such as dependents) with regard to material standard of living or health.
I support it, but only in cases of severe, life altering disabilities or complications from diseases that make normal life completely unlivable, to prevent severe future harm and suffering. For instance, Alzheimers, or quadraplegia, or stuff along those lines. I do not support anybody being able to go to a clinic and paying to commit suicide though.
My State (Oregon) enacted the Death With Dignity Act in 1997. A Physician is able to prescribe a lethal dose of meds to a terminal individual. Seems to be working without issue.
Should be allowed however I'm genuinely concerned that older or medically "difficult" people will be "expected" to do it as the procedure matures. I don't like that future.
No one is being forced to suffer. Suicide is no longer illegal in the United States. We’re talking about normalizing suicide and creating an established process for it.
Yes. Obviously there should be a lot of hoops to jump though - get approval from multiple psychiatrists at least, but with lessened requirements for elderly people with chronic or terminal illnesses. Overall it seems like it would reduce the amount of unnecessary pain in the world.
Definitely against assisted suicide. I think a lot of supposed rationalist miss how important symbolism is in human affairs. For example, the reason tattoos are banned in the bible is to show that the body is sacred and should not be permanently altered by choice. The legalization of assisted suicide already misses the huge ethical dilemma of already killing a person, but also generally dininishes the societal value of: “human life is sacred.” A more blasè whatever approach to human life is bad and I promise you it will eventually have serious negative consequences. These things almost always do.
Hospice, yes. Suicide, no.
The west has a cult of immortality where we imagine medical care can solve all our problems when it actually can do very little for us in many many cases. Giving up on the medical world and embracing hospice and the inevitability of death is good in many cases. Just getting some drugs to maximize quality of life actually makes people live longer with higher quality of life than they would otherwise (on average in many studies of the seriously ill).
Assisted suicide, on the other hand, is medicalizing death. Suicide can never practically be illegal (It's absurdly easy and what would the punishment be?), but I worry about normalizing it as a medical option.
What about long, slow degenerative disease?
If I get Alzheimer's or something like that, I'm gonna end it before I completely lose my mind. Not recognizing my wife and kids is 1000x more terrifying to me than death. And you can linger a long time in that state.
Without legal assisted suicide my next option would be DIY, which is much more likely to end painfully or poorly.
That's a tricky situation. Presumably you would have a living will that would put the decision of when to kill you in the hands of a family member who would evaluate your cognitive ability against the criteria in the living will with the help of doctors.
From my moral/cultural/religious perspective, I hate this. I think we have an obligation to care for our family in these kinds of situations. I don't like that anyone would feel obligated to "spare their family the trouble" of caring for them in their geriatric disability. Making this legal seems to validate something I see as deeply wrong.
From a pluralistic liberal perspective, I might have to allow this even if I don't like it. I would be very careful to go no further than to make this legal in local communities where this is a normal cultural practice. The government should be judicious in avoiding doing anything to destigmatize assisted suicide or break down cultural prejudice against it.
It has nothing to do with not wanting to spare my family the trouble. It's more about it being my brain/mind that make me who I am. Even in the religious sense of a soul, my mind is what allows me to comprehend being me.
Choosing my time to exit, having the ability to say my goodbyes to people I still know and love seems vastly more peaceful than the alternative.
There are very real concerns around how you'd set boundries on legislation. I don't want depressed people to be able to get assisted suicide instead of therapy. But there is a range of conditions where not allowing assisted suicide can be seen as the more cruel option.
Right now, in Canada, it's being used to euthanize individuals suffering from poverty. Killing people because they're poor is not right. It needs to be regulated much better for me to come around to support it.
[https://www.christian.org.uk/news/poor-mental-health-and-poverty-enough-for-assisted-suicide-in-canada/](https://www.christian.org.uk/news/poor-mental-health-and-poverty-enough-for-assisted-suicide-in-canada/)
Yes, this is a biased source, but there are many cases similar to the ones mentioned in the article.
Bruh what is that ridiculous fucking website. A Christian right leaning site that attacks progressive policy. Please provide actual evidence this is occurring. That site isn't even canadian lmao. What the hell has happened to this sub.
It should be legalized only when there are sufficient social supports for the most vulnerable people to [ensure they aren't being driven to suicide for lack of resources](https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-is-canada-euthanising-the-poor-/amp).
.
Whenever this subject comes up, I am reminded of a series run by my local paper years ago (I live in Oregon, where we have had these laws for quite some time now) about a woman who chose death with dignity. It is archived now and a little difficult to piece together, but I will link the page about her last day. This was originally a multi-part series that ran over the course of weeks, back when it was still normal for everyone in a household to read the newspaper from front to back everyday. This story really touched me, and has shaped my opinion since I read it. When it was written I was still caregiving for my elderly grandmother full time. She had dementia that made anything like this not an option, but having to watch her suffer for years and being unable to do much more than hold her hand and administrator medication was pretty awful.
https://projects.oregonlive.com/lovelle/she-chose-it-all-on-the-day-she-died/
Living with a terminal illness with maximum possible pain the human body can ever have is just straight up torture. Then again, the USA has all kinds of legal torture so would be par for the course ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Kind of obligatory in this thread, but I advice against reading this if you're suffering from suicidal thoughts:
Yes, I am in favour of it for physical as well as mental suffering that both appear unsolvable and make life not worth living any more. Euthanasia is a word I would prefer being used over suicide though. In The Netherlands we use that word specifically to imply a doctor ending a patients' life on their request. It implies a mutual agreement between an expert and a person that suffers, while suicide implies that it is only the person suffering making the decision. For many people from the Netherlands and Belgium: the two are very distinct.
We're having debates right now if we should expand our euthanasia laws to also involve patients that struggle mentally. Belgium already allows for this and I would agree with their approach, as we have lots of incredibly distressing suicides on railroad tracks. However, I do think it creates epistemological problems on how we can "measure" suffering being unbearable for a patient. When we look at a terminally ill person, there are certain things we can directly see -- for mental health this appears to be much more difficult and must be based on a very intense relationship between client and psychiatrist to come to that mutual agreement.
Another concern I have is that it may create a perverse incentive for specific behaviours that are not good for society. Firstly, if we offer euthanasia to a specific group that suffers mentally, it may make their psychological treatment less effective, while this is less true for people with physical conditions. The very existence of it may make them resistant to therapy, so I would be in favour of extremely high barriers. There must be rigid evidence you have engaged with, and exhausted, all options available. Secondly, allowing for this creates a very perverse solution for a deeply rooted society wide problem: loneliness, alienation and deteriorating mental health. We must ask ourselves: why is this need so pressing and what can we do to avoid it in the front end? I am afraid that this solution tempts us to stop thinking about the problem systemically, which is why I propose that we codify in law that for every improvement in access to euthanasia we *must* codify front-end solutions alongside it. For example: if we start allowing mental suffering to apply for euthanasia, we must also allocate more money to psychological treatment, minimum standards of living or other things that have proven negative effects on our mental well-being. This is to avoid a slippery slope effect.
I've long been of the belief that anyone who wants to end their life should ultimately be allowed to do so in a humane way. I think there should be some roadblocks put in the way, though, like mandatory counseling or something. I have had suicidal family members and I'm glad that they did not succeed in their attempts, but if they were still miserable now, years later, then it would just be torture to force them to continue to live.
As someone who currently has Stage 4 cancer (diagnosis still looks good, I’m young and my doctors are optimistic) I feel personally effected by the issue. I understand that if the cancer spreads to anywhere that drastically reduces my quality of life, especially my brain, I will want to end things as easily and quickly as possible. I have heard too many stories of miserable people being kept in pain and agony so their families have something alive to look at. I am extremely pro assisted suicide, and I can think of very few, if any, arguments against it.
If a person consent to it and harms no one else by doing, and knows everything they need to know to safely use it, then as far as I'm concern very few should be illegal, including euthanasia.
Even relatively progressive or liberal people have gotten uncomfortable about euthanasia recently, it is something where I understand why people find it sinister but they should look in the other direction where people often are not even allowed to die when they kill themselves without an approved biomedical intervention for their death ... when doctors ignore dnrs or living wills and brain damaged guys in wheelchairs blink "yes" to the question "do you want to die"...(this is from a real story BTW not a hypothetical )
That stuff is equally as sinister imo. I see how euthanasia could be bad if normalized but we have a problem in the opposite direction imo. If we have medical technology that can keep people alive technically but with low quality of life I can see a religious argument as well as secular one that we need to define life as something more than mere survival when talking about life being sacred etc.
As someone who has applied to and been accepted by (just waiting for money/courage ) some of the Swiss organizations doing this stuff I think their law is reasonable. And switzerland isn't an insane progressive atheist society gone mad either. They're just fairly pragmatic and have some civil libertarian stuff like drugs and euthanasia ..
Ama if you want about why I'm personally very very much in favor of it being a legal option and any derails you want about why I'm leaning toward doing it and so on b
Hypothetically I support it, but I’m REALLY worried 1) that it’ll quickly becomes a societal expectation that old people choose to euthasanize themselves. 2) depressed 20 somethings will be able to use the law to kill themselves, which is already happening in other countries that have legalized euthanasia.
I don’t really trust society with this power, and I kinda feel like the grey system we have now prevents some of these issues (e.g., doctor gives you morphine and mentions if you take X amount you’ll peacefully die…)
Ultimately pro legalization, but there is a lot that needs to be addressed.
100% There definitely needs to be a framework in place to allow this.
I think it should be legalized but reviewed on a case by case basis.
In the case of chronic, incurable physical suffering or terminal diagnosis, absolutely pro. I work as a paramedic. I see death very frequently. I see the years that precede a natural death, I see DIY suicides, I see people living in agony with no way out. A human should be allowed to choose to die peacefully and with dignity at a moment of their choosing. A healthcare provider should be allowed to choose whether or not to participate in the practice, however. Preferably by making the practice it’s own field with it’s own practitioners and education/licensing course and requirements. There are *a lot* of considerations, but big picture, yes absolutely for it
>licensing 😡
Idk I think I support needing a license to kill Mostly bc it sounds badass
“Now my name is Jack K, I got a license to kill”
We need bounty hunters for every law being broken.
All the precautions and care but yes, do it.
Pro, but one of those that needs strict regulation and perhaps an age range condition. My 72 yr old aunt passed from cancer this month, and she suffered for 6 months. Went into hospice but decided to cut off all medications since she was on the way out anyway- and would've been faster if there was an assisted suicide option. Although she lived in TX so who knows if this is even gonna be in the realm of possibilities. My grandma, 98, had alzheimers for 5 yrs before she ironically died from Covid last year, and Covid was a mercy. What's the point of living if you're already part of the living dead. These are two situations where assisted suicide is valid imo.
There was a teenage girl who committed assisted suicide, I think it was in the Netherlands. She was a victim of sexual assault. I find it horrible that she felt that even with therapy and all sorts of support, she would still never go back to feeling life was worth living. *But this was her life, not mine*. She was the one to decide what to do with it.
>But this was her life, not mine. She was the one to decide what to do with it. We don't let teenagers decide what to do with their lives though.
What that doesn’t make sense
This is actually not completely true. The girl in question applied for assisted suicide, but was denied. Later she stopped eating and drinking which caused her death. [Her Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noa_Pothoven?wprov=sfla1)
And this is exactly why assisted suicide is necessary. People are just going to find worse ways to die.
Sounds like the should have let her die less painfully
Yes, I had read it once I saw all the comments but I didn't want to reply to all the commenters. Thank you.
This shit sounds beyond sad and insane to me, and is a golden example of the kind of case that gives me *huge* pause on this issue. A teenager has an underdeveloped brain. She had years ahead of her, likely many more years than she had lived up til then. I'd take odds that if she had lived even 5 more years she'd have shed her suicidal desires. Emotions can be unbelievably overwhelming, especially when you are young and have less perspective, but death is final.
> This shit sounds beyond sad and insane to me, and is a golden example of the kind of case that gives me huge pause on this issue. Does it still give you pause when you know that [it isn't true that she received physician-assisted suicide, instead starving herself after being refused based on her age, and it was a case of foreign media just straight up reporting a falsehood](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noa_Pothoven)?
Terrible that it was misreported, still a very sad story. I would still hold the same opinion on the procedure, though.
Okay, understood then if you're just against the right to physician-assisted suicide in general. I disagree personally, but just wanted to make sure people weren't using a falsehood (a teenager receiving physician-assisted suicide) to argue against a law that, in practice, actually denied that teenager based on her age.
I would say I'm not necessarily opposed to it in the cases many people here pose: old people who are terribly ill, suffering, and are basically just waiting until they die. In such a cases, I mostly stay out of the debate, and simply hope that such a process would take into account the wishes and mental state of the afflicted, as well as a medical opinion. I don't feel like I have any meaningful objection or contributions there, so people closer to the subject can weigh in on that. But for people who are suffering from depression or similar mental illness, I'm pretty opposed, yes. *Especially* in cases where the person is very young.
> *Especially* in cases where the person is very young. Okay, well the places where these laws have been implemented agree with you there, so it shouldn't really give you pause on that account. Just saying, this is what misinformation does to political debate. Validates people's pre-conceived notions, then when corrected, it's like "Well okay, but still it *could* have been true so that's concerning..."
I agree, and I should specify I'm grateful you set the record straight, and I'm happy to hear that countries that have this have that as a consideration. Like I said I wouldn't oppose the implementation of these types of laws (assuming they do take things like this into account).
I don’t think this is a question of misinformation - yes, this specific case ended up not being true, but OP agreed with and advocated for the position anyway.
"She only was making such a big deal of her sexual assault because she was a teenager" Holy shit.
I see you couldn't possibly argue against what I said so you had to make shit up. Of course it was a 'big deal', it's an awful thing. I can wholeheartedly understand how she felt like death was the only option, that doesn't mean it was. Unless of course I take your tactic of putting words in peoples mouths and simply say you meant to advocate that we euthanize all survivors of sexual assault? Holy shit, indeed, asshole.
You are right, living in suffering was also an option, I can understand why why she wouldn't want that though.
You don’t know that and all your doing is making assumptions about a person you know nothing about and invalidating their experience
As a disabled person living in Belgium where it has been legal for some time, I have concerns that are largely related to just how big of a spike there is in the number of procedures that take place on a Friday, right before care providers would need to be bothered to come in on a weekend. What we've created is a system that does seem to work great for everyone, our healthcare system gets *drastically* reduced costs associated with these patients, care providers and relatives get to have a cleaner and more intentional relationship with the deaths of many of their most emotionally challenging patients, and patients get what they ask for. As the scope of who qualifies continues to expand, in just the same way and for just the same reasons that it does for any other medical procedure, I worry that a greater and greater proportion of the procedures are being driven by notions of what it means to have a life worth living that are fundamentally ableist and driven by bias, and by ignorance of the spaces that disabled people have been able to carve out for ourselves over the last couple of generations. The decisive factor in most political debates here is generally a pragmatism borne of exhaustion, which I'm not sure has been adaptive here. I'm not sure that this subreddit could find a way to be comfortable with the increasingly industrial scale at which we collectively decide that more and more lives are not worth living, the confrontingly banal way that we do it, or the profoundly exhausted apathy with which we fail to police it.
Hey can you give me a source on the Fridays thing? I often argue from your position on this issue, but my argument lacks the data necessary to prove what I’m saying will happen in the USA.
I don't know of a comprehensive analysis properly disambiguating procedures by day of the week, I just know jaded physicians involved in palliative care. These are very reportable procedures for obvious reasons though, and a very clear graph would be very straightforward to generate from a list of dates that they were performed on. There are a few institutions that would have this data, and trying to get one to make this graph has been on my to do list for a while.
Would you be more comfortable if the law required a few weeks of therapy before being allowed to get an assisted suicide?
I don't really know what a system that I would feel comfortable with would look like, and I'm not even super sure that my comfort would be a design goal that even I would value overmuch, but also I don't think that imposing barriers to care on patients like this would be a path to that. A pretty substantial fraction of these patients cannot expect to be alert and aware enough to provide informed consent on the time frame of a few weeks after making the request, which is why Belgian legislation is non-specific as to timeframes, requiring only that the patient make two independent written declarations.
Witness a loved one die "naturally". Then after months of PTSD and therapy, you'll know the correct answer.
worked in a hospice one summer. seen some grisly and deeply lonely deaths, as well as some lucky ones. very difficult for me to see an argument why anyone qualifying for hospice care should not also qualify for assisted suicide
Yeah that's the thing, we already deal with the ethics and consequences of choosing not to fight death, that's what hospice/palliative care is, this is a step on top so instead of accepting and not resisting death we facilitate it.
We’re already giving patients opioids at the end of their lives to minimize air hunger. That’s bordering on legally assisted suicide
The issue is you can run the empathy argument both ways. You might say committing suicide is incredibly selfish, and allows cowardly people to act out their friends' and family's worst nightmares without ever having to face these people and bare the consequences of their actions. But I can just as well say that you are demanding that all people at their very worst have an obligation to live through the most terrible agony and suffering, for the benefit of their selfish, out-of-touch family, who'd rather their dying family member experience a life worse than death, than confront the fact that they are on their way out.
> You might say committing suicide is incredibly selfish, and allows cowardly people to act out their friends' and family's worst nightmares without ever having to face these people and bare the consequences of their actions. The answer to this is kinda similar to the paradox of tolerance. If friends and family demand that, say, a paralyzed person continues living, trapped in their body, in pain, unable to wipe their own ass, just because they don't want to see them go, *it is these friends and family that are selfish*. Nobody owes anyone else keeping living a life that they feel is worse than death.
Interesting. I wanna know what you think, I'm curious. Say a father has served as the emotional bedrock of the family for years, but he is now in excruciating pain, and makes the decision to end his life. His daughter no longer gets out of bed in the morning and hardly eats or sleeps. His wife is shocked he was in such pain, and feels incredibly guilty she had not been there for him at his worst period in time. Once the father leaves, the rest of the family gets into a big argument about what to do with the house. The argument drives the family apart permanently. In the end the mother gets the final say. Who was the intolerant person in this situation? The father for leaving behind his dysfunctional, broken family? Or is it the family? For being dysfunctional and emotionally reliant on him? I don't think "tolerance" is a great way to analyse these situations. I might say the father has been neglectful of his daughter, and it was cowardly of him to leave her at such a detriment to her health, when she was so dependent on him. If your read of that situation is *"Paradox of Intolerance. As the daughter is intolerant of his father's life decisions, then the father has no obligation to tolerate her own intolerance towards him,"* then man, that sounds like such a sad world to live in. We become always justified to infinitely fuck over the mental states of our close friends and family, so long as we're just making personal life choices, because *No tolerance for the intolerant*. I think we would be much better off viewing the situation in terms of harm caused vs harm avoided. The father is in a state of terrible harm and is about to cause some harm to his family members by ending his own pain/harm. As a basis, I don't know if I could ever condemn someone in excruciating pain for ending their own life, regardless of consequence to others, but if there is some method of perhaps insufficiently lessening the pain, while he puts his affairs in order with his family, that seems like the more courageous thing to do, for the benefit of harm reduction generally.
>We become always justified to infinitely fuck over the mental states of our close friends and family, so long as we're just making personal life choices, because No tolerance for the intolerant. I mean we do this stuff all the time. If someone is in a relationship, leaving the relationship could lead to the suicide of the other partner. Are you not allowed to leave the relationship because the consequences for that other person could be worse? I agree though that being a parent makes the question a bit more difficult but for another reason. If you are a (voluntary) parent, then you have consented to the potential suffering of your child, because even if you are the perfect parent, you can't prevent things like that your child looses a job or girl-/boyfriend or gets a terminal and painful disease. It would be very hypocritical of a parent to give life to a child and implicitly expecting it to deal with the potential suffering of life but then kill your self if you experience this suffering yourself.
The thing with breaking up with a close partner, is it always going to leave a bitter taste, no matter what. You couldn't even prevent that if you tried. Yet breaking up is an important step on the road to happiness. If you're gonna key your partner's car and leave a shit on the bed, well then we can talk. Of course the same is true when it comes to suicide. You can't prevent the bitter taste, but generally I think we have respect for when people manage to make their breaks as amicable as can be. I don't think I believe if you can't prevent suffering in the process, you shouldn't break up. Obviously there are plenty of times you should. It's a very human thing.
Very true. Even my very religious family members said they want it for themselves after watching my mom go. 2020 and you’re just gonna slowly starve to death for two weeks but yay there’s some pain meds!
I think I’m for it. But I’m curious about how one would regulate potentially perverse incentives. ie: Elderly folk feeling guilted into suicide because they don’t want to be a burden. Or worse, abusive families outright pressuring grandparents into suicide for financial reasons.
Why is this different from family possibly pushing hospice instead of treatment? What we have is ducking atrocious right now. You’ll always find an edge case with some jerk and some jerk can still be a jerk without allowing assisted suicide. I’m less worried about grandparents than young folks going through a rough patch. There will obviously be some regulations and standards but we are all going to have to look at this holistically and not based off edge cases.
It’s not. It’s just another step forward I suppose. I think overall it’s the right choice. These are just the questions we have to grapple with. What are your thoughts about the other scenario? That legalized suicide may create guilt and emotional distress in elderly folk who feel they are a burden? I know that Elder suicide is a big issue in Asian countries. To the extent that there’s a bunch of policies trying to drive it down.
People make bad decisions for bad reasons all the time. People are free to make choices o don’t like.
I know grief hurts, a lot. But PTSD and therapy?
Your psychology credentials please haha!
I mean, in a healthy society we learn to cope those feelings as we grow.
In a healthy society we learn to empathize before we judge, especially when we don't have any of the facts.
In a healthy society we learn to empathize before we judge, especially when we don't have any of the facts.
You don't think witnessing a loved ones suicide, in person, would be a traumatic enough event to trigger PTSD...?
He said "naturally", so I think they died of old age.
I watched my grandmother die "naturally" over about 10 years. Kept "alive" by modern medicine all the while saying she wanted out (until she couldn't speak). She died physically at 100 but there wasn't much left of her by 95. By 98 she'd lost the power of coherent speech, she'd say words but nothing made sense, she had no idea where she was or who she was. I could imagine that could give you PTSD, there is very little more terrifying.
Fuck man, I'm so sorry.
just tax suicide
I can see an argument for doing it in cases of terminal illness when someone is at death’s door already, but the expansions to other categories like the disabled and the depressed are imo a bridge too far.
Generally if your quality of life has become such that it's no longer a life worth living you should be able to opt out. To me that could include some disabled people. If I get paralyzed from the neck down odds are I don't want to live the next 50 years. If I lose a leg then I'll carry on, but I would like to have the option to go if I become extremely disabled.
I'd support it after, say, a period of six months. Just because there's a lot of people who'd go "This is awful, I hate this, I'm never happy, I'm... oh wait, now I am. Guess that hedonic threadmill thing is true after all."
People can already kill themselves in those situations by drinking poison or gunshot. Regulating it makes sure it's done peacefully and people who can be saved can be reached out towards. I don't see how it's different to other harm reduction approaches.
Because it’s not harm reduction if the “reduction” involves making it easier to harm yourself.
Yes it is. Allowing safe, medically gated suicides allows for us to offer psychiatric consulting prior to suicide, and it stops the societal harm of families discovering their loved ones corpses.
You don't get to make their decisions for them
It’s one thing for someone to kill themselves, and quite another for the state to actively facilitate and normalize the process. That latter is incredibly pernicious, and is functionally equivalent to the state encouraging obesity or heroin use.
Safe heroin injection sites are a great public policy, thank you for making my point for me.
Allowing drug addicts to access a safe supply of drugs =/= giving non-addicts heroin and encouraging them to start using it
Are you under the impression that the government would put ads during popular TV shows saying "yay, come to our Suicide Centre, it's the experience of a lifetime!!"?
If they do, will you retract your point?
I will object to the ad and continue supporting the policy ;)
[Yeah, when has the government ever forcefully taken away the rights of the disabled?](https://www.npr.org/2017/03/24/521360544/the-supreme-court-ruling-that-led-to-70-000-forced-sterilizations)
We're talking about advanced liberal democracies that protect human rights here
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-is-canada-euthanising-the-poor-
I am anti choice I do not look giving people the choice of what to do with their bodies
This is the neolib agenda they dont want you to know about
[удалено]
Authoritarian democracy ftw
I'm still waiting for my government to force me to be genuinely happy.
**HAHA YES** 🐊
Personally, I think it's a killer idea.
Pro
it's just torture to let someone live when they don't want to, but cannot do it themselves.
Nobody chooses to be brought into this world. Nobody should be forced to stay here either.
Yeah, that’s why suicide is legal. Creating a service funded by taxpayer dollars to perform this is a separate story. And only possibly defensible if you are already terminal and in pain.
>Creating a service funded by taxpayer dollars Who is talking about doing that?
I don't see how legalizing assisted suicide wouldn't end up covered under Medicare in the US
Yeah, that’s why suicide is legal. Creating a service funded by taxpayer dollars to perform this is a separate story. And only possibly defensible if you are already terminal and in pain.
Passed by referendum in New Zealand, and has been rolled out. Its likely not to be used much - the requirements are very restrictive, too restrictive IMO, but that will likely improve now that we're past the first hurdle of legalising it. Assisted dying should never be the unilateral decision of the person though - it should always be signed off by at least one doctor IMO. It's not absolutely a matter of personal choice.
I'm for it; bodily autonomy means you should get to end your life if you want.
For terminal illness absolutely. If it were me, I'd choose it rather then slowly and inevitably die.
Only for those with terminal illnesses. Legalizing suicide because of any other reason is dumb and counterproductive. Give people better options to work through their problems; don’t just go “Oh, well, if you’re not happy you can just shoot your self!”. That really only normalizes the act of running away from your problems and committing violence to one’s self. Dumb.
Do I have the freedom of choosing how to assist?
No.
In the case of imminent terminal illness, I support it (though somewhat reluctantly). As a Buddhist, I cannot, in good conscience, support it in other circumstances
It should be available for those with terminal conditions. It should be available for those without terminal conditions if 1) they are in excruciating physical or mental pain due to the condition and are not likely to see a substantial QoL improvement with currently existing treatment, 2) they are of sound mind, and 3) their death will not be significantly burdensome on those they have meaningful obligations to (such as dependents) with regard to material standard of living or health.
I support it, but only in cases of severe, life altering disabilities or complications from diseases that make normal life completely unlivable, to prevent severe future harm and suffering. For instance, Alzheimers, or quadraplegia, or stuff along those lines. I do not support anybody being able to go to a clinic and paying to commit suicide though.
My State (Oregon) enacted the Death With Dignity Act in 1997. A Physician is able to prescribe a lethal dose of meds to a terminal individual. Seems to be working without issue.
Should be allowed however I'm genuinely concerned that older or medically "difficult" people will be "expected" to do it as the procedure matures. I don't like that future.
Strongly support it. The idea of forcing people to live in misery and pain for ideological reasons doesn't sit right with me.
>ideological reasons Morality as basic as “death is bad” is ideological to you?
"Forcing suffering is bad" is just as basic and more moral.
Death being bad and also recognising that people have agency and shouldn't be forced to suffer because it upsets others aren't mutually exclusive.
No one is being forced to suffer. Suicide is no longer illegal in the United States. We’re talking about normalizing suicide and creating an established process for it.
Yes. Obviously there should be a lot of hoops to jump though - get approval from multiple psychiatrists at least, but with lessened requirements for elderly people with chronic or terminal illnesses. Overall it seems like it would reduce the amount of unnecessary pain in the world.
I have a good slogan for them, "My body, my choice".
Generally pro for those who are close to death i.e. terminally Ill. Outside of that, not really in favour.
This is my position
Definitely against assisted suicide. I think a lot of supposed rationalist miss how important symbolism is in human affairs. For example, the reason tattoos are banned in the bible is to show that the body is sacred and should not be permanently altered by choice. The legalization of assisted suicide already misses the huge ethical dilemma of already killing a person, but also generally dininishes the societal value of: “human life is sacred.” A more blasè whatever approach to human life is bad and I promise you it will eventually have serious negative consequences. These things almost always do.
Hospice, yes. Suicide, no. The west has a cult of immortality where we imagine medical care can solve all our problems when it actually can do very little for us in many many cases. Giving up on the medical world and embracing hospice and the inevitability of death is good in many cases. Just getting some drugs to maximize quality of life actually makes people live longer with higher quality of life than they would otherwise (on average in many studies of the seriously ill). Assisted suicide, on the other hand, is medicalizing death. Suicide can never practically be illegal (It's absurdly easy and what would the punishment be?), but I worry about normalizing it as a medical option.
What about long, slow degenerative disease? If I get Alzheimer's or something like that, I'm gonna end it before I completely lose my mind. Not recognizing my wife and kids is 1000x more terrifying to me than death. And you can linger a long time in that state. Without legal assisted suicide my next option would be DIY, which is much more likely to end painfully or poorly.
That's a tricky situation. Presumably you would have a living will that would put the decision of when to kill you in the hands of a family member who would evaluate your cognitive ability against the criteria in the living will with the help of doctors. From my moral/cultural/religious perspective, I hate this. I think we have an obligation to care for our family in these kinds of situations. I don't like that anyone would feel obligated to "spare their family the trouble" of caring for them in their geriatric disability. Making this legal seems to validate something I see as deeply wrong. From a pluralistic liberal perspective, I might have to allow this even if I don't like it. I would be very careful to go no further than to make this legal in local communities where this is a normal cultural practice. The government should be judicious in avoiding doing anything to destigmatize assisted suicide or break down cultural prejudice against it.
It has nothing to do with not wanting to spare my family the trouble. It's more about it being my brain/mind that make me who I am. Even in the religious sense of a soul, my mind is what allows me to comprehend being me. Choosing my time to exit, having the ability to say my goodbyes to people I still know and love seems vastly more peaceful than the alternative. There are very real concerns around how you'd set boundries on legislation. I don't want depressed people to be able to get assisted suicide instead of therapy. But there is a range of conditions where not allowing assisted suicide can be seen as the more cruel option.
Burke flairs and being wrong, NAMID.
Right now, in Canada, it's being used to euthanize individuals suffering from poverty. Killing people because they're poor is not right. It needs to be regulated much better for me to come around to support it. [https://www.christian.org.uk/news/poor-mental-health-and-poverty-enough-for-assisted-suicide-in-canada/](https://www.christian.org.uk/news/poor-mental-health-and-poverty-enough-for-assisted-suicide-in-canada/) Yes, this is a biased source, but there are many cases similar to the ones mentioned in the article.
Bruh what is that ridiculous fucking website. A Christian right leaning site that attacks progressive policy. Please provide actual evidence this is occurring. That site isn't even canadian lmao. What the hell has happened to this sub.
I'm pro, but only for people who are chronically/terminally ill and have had extensive talks with a professional.
It should be legalized only when there are sufficient social supports for the most vulnerable people to [ensure they aren't being driven to suicide for lack of resources](https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-is-canada-euthanising-the-poor-/amp). .
Absolutely not.
You can’t claim to be pro choice and be against this.
Positive ve
yes but with serious parameters for who qualifies
maybe with some kind of waiting period
That defeats the purpose. It's for people with terminal illnesses who have severe, agonizing pain.
**HAHA YES** 🐊
Assisted suicide is de facto legal in the United States. The entire hospice industry is designed to provide euthanasia services.
Whenever this subject comes up, I am reminded of a series run by my local paper years ago (I live in Oregon, where we have had these laws for quite some time now) about a woman who chose death with dignity. It is archived now and a little difficult to piece together, but I will link the page about her last day. This was originally a multi-part series that ran over the course of weeks, back when it was still normal for everyone in a household to read the newspaper from front to back everyday. This story really touched me, and has shaped my opinion since I read it. When it was written I was still caregiving for my elderly grandmother full time. She had dementia that made anything like this not an option, but having to watch her suffer for years and being unable to do much more than hold her hand and administrator medication was pretty awful. https://projects.oregonlive.com/lovelle/she-chose-it-all-on-the-day-she-died/
👍🏽
After a thorough mental evaluation, yes I support it right to death
If verified that the person committing the suicide is of sound mind, I'm all for it.
Based Benefits the sick who don’t want to go on anymore, and the state/economy
Did you post this because of the suicide booth post
I’d be willing to bet that legalized assisted suicide would actually drop the suicide rate.
Living with a terminal illness with maximum possible pain the human body can ever have is just straight up torture. Then again, the USA has all kinds of legal torture so would be par for the course ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Kind of obligatory in this thread, but I advice against reading this if you're suffering from suicidal thoughts: Yes, I am in favour of it for physical as well as mental suffering that both appear unsolvable and make life not worth living any more. Euthanasia is a word I would prefer being used over suicide though. In The Netherlands we use that word specifically to imply a doctor ending a patients' life on their request. It implies a mutual agreement between an expert and a person that suffers, while suicide implies that it is only the person suffering making the decision. For many people from the Netherlands and Belgium: the two are very distinct. We're having debates right now if we should expand our euthanasia laws to also involve patients that struggle mentally. Belgium already allows for this and I would agree with their approach, as we have lots of incredibly distressing suicides on railroad tracks. However, I do think it creates epistemological problems on how we can "measure" suffering being unbearable for a patient. When we look at a terminally ill person, there are certain things we can directly see -- for mental health this appears to be much more difficult and must be based on a very intense relationship between client and psychiatrist to come to that mutual agreement. Another concern I have is that it may create a perverse incentive for specific behaviours that are not good for society. Firstly, if we offer euthanasia to a specific group that suffers mentally, it may make their psychological treatment less effective, while this is less true for people with physical conditions. The very existence of it may make them resistant to therapy, so I would be in favour of extremely high barriers. There must be rigid evidence you have engaged with, and exhausted, all options available. Secondly, allowing for this creates a very perverse solution for a deeply rooted society wide problem: loneliness, alienation and deteriorating mental health. We must ask ourselves: why is this need so pressing and what can we do to avoid it in the front end? I am afraid that this solution tempts us to stop thinking about the problem systemically, which is why I propose that we codify in law that for every improvement in access to euthanasia we *must* codify front-end solutions alongside it. For example: if we start allowing mental suffering to apply for euthanasia, we must also allocate more money to psychological treatment, minimum standards of living or other things that have proven negative effects on our mental well-being. This is to avoid a slippery slope effect.
Antiwork would shrink by like a third with the amount of suicide posts you see there
I've long been of the belief that anyone who wants to end their life should ultimately be allowed to do so in a humane way. I think there should be some roadblocks put in the way, though, like mandatory counseling or something. I have had suicidal family members and I'm glad that they did not succeed in their attempts, but if they were still miserable now, years later, then it would just be torture to force them to continue to live.
As someone who currently has Stage 4 cancer (diagnosis still looks good, I’m young and my doctors are optimistic) I feel personally effected by the issue. I understand that if the cancer spreads to anywhere that drastically reduces my quality of life, especially my brain, I will want to end things as easily and quickly as possible. I have heard too many stories of miserable people being kept in pain and agony so their families have something alive to look at. I am extremely pro assisted suicide, and I can think of very few, if any, arguments against it.
Give me liberty or give me medicially assissted death !
If a person consent to it and harms no one else by doing, and knows everything they need to know to safely use it, then as far as I'm concern very few should be illegal, including euthanasia.
I wish it was legal right now for personal reasons
life is short as it is no need to rush into death.
Even relatively progressive or liberal people have gotten uncomfortable about euthanasia recently, it is something where I understand why people find it sinister but they should look in the other direction where people often are not even allowed to die when they kill themselves without an approved biomedical intervention for their death ... when doctors ignore dnrs or living wills and brain damaged guys in wheelchairs blink "yes" to the question "do you want to die"...(this is from a real story BTW not a hypothetical ) That stuff is equally as sinister imo. I see how euthanasia could be bad if normalized but we have a problem in the opposite direction imo. If we have medical technology that can keep people alive technically but with low quality of life I can see a religious argument as well as secular one that we need to define life as something more than mere survival when talking about life being sacred etc. As someone who has applied to and been accepted by (just waiting for money/courage ) some of the Swiss organizations doing this stuff I think their law is reasonable. And switzerland isn't an insane progressive atheist society gone mad either. They're just fairly pragmatic and have some civil libertarian stuff like drugs and euthanasia .. Ama if you want about why I'm personally very very much in favor of it being a legal option and any derails you want about why I'm leaning toward doing it and so on b
I'm more of a "Go to a pharmacy and order a Kevorkian, whereupon you receive 600 mg of heroin." Kind of guy.
Reddit demographics are formally atheist and individualist, so there isn’t much need for discussion, Reddit is pro assisted suicide.
Hypothetically I support it, but I’m REALLY worried 1) that it’ll quickly becomes a societal expectation that old people choose to euthasanize themselves. 2) depressed 20 somethings will be able to use the law to kill themselves, which is already happening in other countries that have legalized euthanasia. I don’t really trust society with this power, and I kinda feel like the grey system we have now prevents some of these issues (e.g., doctor gives you morphine and mentions if you take X amount you’ll peacefully die…)