13,241 people received MAID in Canada in 2022 from a population of 38 Million. This is not a small number of people who are desperate enough to pursue the service. I’m not sure how the rules in New Jersey compare to Canada but they must be quite strict since Canada only has 3X the population of that state.
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I can see why you’d say so, but I don’t really agree. What we do with pets is make medical (and obviously other) decisions on behalf of animals that aren’t competent to make certain kinds of decisions.
This is directly comparable to proxy decision-making for family members who, by reason of disease, constitution, or age, can’t make their own decisions.
Of course, the problem doesn’t have such neat edges with humans (e.g. defining who is competent, absent debilitating disease, can be fraught, as can figuring be out who can/should become a proxy), but IMO, the basic issue is the same: acting for of those who are not able to meaningfully consent.
Assisted death ups the stakes, but I don’t see that it changes the nature of the problem.
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I think there would need to be a pretty detailed flow chart to determine the conditions for a living will to be triggered.
Me, personally, if I don’t know where I am but seem to enjoy my TV shows and retelling the same stories and shuffling around a home, then ok. If I am drooling in the corner being fed through a tube, then no thank you.
I think part of it will be when it comes to acknowledging body autonomy includes the right to die, there will be certain cases that some people won’t like, and that is ok. For example, one may not agree with every example of abortion out there, but still acknowledge the right of someone to have one.
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It’s definitely concerning. Canadaland did a podcast with a person making exactly that claim:
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The analogy in this headline is so incredibly flawed and frankly offensive. If humans had the same rights as pets in regard to euthanasia, then it would be that the decision for euthanasia is always left up to someone else, not the person who is dying. That the article then goes on to discuss this in terms of a personal right to die is practically a non-sequitur.
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Maybe. But New Jersey also has a high percentage of Catholics, and more of a social safety net than most US states. Probably not more than Canada, but still. Plus, it’s still new here. It was tied up in lawsuits until two years ago, I think? I’m not sure exactly, but it got tied up on legal challenges for awhile.
I also want to be clear. I’m not trying to argue with anyone. Again, I think this is a really tough subject and I don’t think there’s a definite, clear right answer.
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It also follows that if it ends up being cheaper or easier to die than to obtain support and treatment for disability or mental illness, then that economic incentive will start pushing people in that direction. In Canada the population rate of people getting MAID is much higher than in other places where assisted-dying laws are also in place.
This is discussed in the video below at about 08:30. In summary in 2022 13,000 Canadians applied for MAID, while by comparison in California only 500 people applied for assisted dying in the same period in a comparably-sized population.
But this isn’t how typical assisted-dying laws are framed. Usually the person who is dying has to state their explicit desire to not receive life-extending medical care in the event of conditions that they state, or when diagnosed with a terminal illness make a stated choice to die at a time of their own choosing rather than wait for the illness to kill them.
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Fine, but that’s not what the quoted part of the post I replied to was about.
As you can probably tell I have a serious problem with conflating euthanasia for pets with assisted dying for humans, which is also what the part of the post you replied to was about.
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My mom asked me one time if I would be able to make the decision to end her life if she was unable to.
Absolutely not but I told her if she wrote down all if her wishes and under what conditions she would want to end things I’ll takes that piece of paper to whoever needed to see it and make sure they followed her wishes.
We have our wishes written down and our daughter has all the necessary legal papers to make those decisions for us if for some reason we can’t.
My wishes are completely different than my wife’s wishes.
The point is we should not allow anyone to decide the fate of any one else unless we’re absolutely positive it’s what they wanted not what we want.
Write it down now.
Also, we just euthanized a well loved pet, it was a difficult decision but it weighs heavy on you once you make the decision. I would not want that decision left up to anyone for a person that they would have to live with.
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YES. This is what has distressed me so much about MAiD — not in regard to terminal illness, but in regard to disability. It’s only ethical for the government to support people to die if they also support them to live. Otherwise, it’s no choice at all.
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The problem of inadequate care of the disabled predates MAID and thus MAID can’t be blamed for it.
As for the comparison to New Jersey: Several states have similar laws but it’s nothing like the same. The US laws are for lethal prescriptions–it’s a bitter liquid the patient must be able to fairly quickly down on their own. Many are not able to do this. While this is an option in Canada it’s normally done by IV. I think there’s a realm for a middle ground here–an automated machine that’s pre-loaded with a high dose of the drugs (since there would be no doctor to evaluate the effects) that the patient triggers.
As for the points in the NIH article:
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Offends. The law rarely protects us from being offended. And where it does it’s usually either public behavior, sexual behavior, or both.
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Slippery slope. Possible, but it hasn’t happened anywhere despite some places having the option for decades.
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Pain isn’t the only problem. Yeah, my father wasn’t in pain at the end–but the morphine to do it caused anterograde amnesia. That’s a life? And there are lots of other things that can go wrong that the doctors can’t help with.
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Do no harm makes no sense. There’s little a doctor can do for you that doesn’t involve doing harm. Medical practice comes down to choosing the path with the most good/least harm to the patient.
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