That makes a lot of sense…
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I know that it’s mostly a separate issue and not the main point but it seems like anyone selling unregulated lethal doses of, well, let’s just call it poison, could potentially be supplying it to would-be murderers in addition to the terminally ill who are seeking out end-of-life options. There are many different reasons why distribution of dangerous substances needs to be highly regulated.
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That’s the bit that puzzles me about the chain of thought you describe on the part of the various advocacy organizations. Obviously they’d be against this sort of immiserating system; but why are they willing to ignore the interests of those who see their positions as being worse than death?
Is it some relatively optimistic assessment to the effect that the situation can be ameliorated in a useful amount of time, so action would be hasty; or an (honestly somewhat disconcerting) willingness to force some to suffer because their ongoing suffering makes for an indictment of the status quo that is harder to ignore than their medically assisted suicides would be?
I can see why they’d be a lot less happy with cases that are unendurable because people don’t care; rather than because the medical tech simply doesn’t exist; but it has the unpleasant taste of people being treated as a means to advance the cause rather than being allowed to choose their own ends(including literally).
They aren’t ignoring their interests. They want their healthcare interests fixed first. As @anon85524460 concluded above, the current system combined with physician assisted suicide facilitated by the government is perilously close to state sponsored euthanasia. In other words, it’s as if the government has intentionally constructed a system where the least useful people are forced into circumstances where death seems preferable, and then that same system allows them to choose death. I don’t actually think our government set up this system with that intent, but it is arguably the effect. So we really need to fix that before we tackle issues like right to die and assisted suicide.
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The right to die for the terminally ill is very different from a depressed person who takes their own life.
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How long do you get to make someone wait for your advocacy efforts to pan out before you are, de-facto, ignoring their specific interests?
They aren’t ignoring the issue, caring about the issue is an advocacy group’s whole MO; but at some point a willingness to tell people that any solution to their problem is being deferred until the good fight is won starts to look an awful lot like subordinating the interests of the actual people who actually have a problem day in and day out to the abstract advancement of the cause.
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There are no easy answers to any of these questions, but I think that fixing our healthcare system needs to be the absolute top priority. The broken system is very likely what is causing many of these people to want to die, moreso than their medical conditions. Will that end up forcing some people to continue to suffer? Very likely. There’s not a perfect interim solution, and I think the position that we should allow people to choose suicide until we get the overall system fixed is a defensible position. It’s not mine, but I think it’s valid.
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Exactly. These are two very separate issues that are continually lumped as one by those who want the problem to seem as big as possible (to justify more effort in combating it.)
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Thanks for linking that documentary. Pratchett was one of my favorite writers and it was great hearing his and others’ thoughts on the subject in such a gentle way.
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On the right to die: Amy Bloom’s memoir “In Love” chronicles the quest of her husband to die peacefully & legally by choice.
On MediCare: I’m disabled, more-or-less happy with my MediCare, wish it were available to all, & support the right to die. I agree strongly that it should be a non-profit enterprise!
One big problem with the “terminally ill” requirement: it doesn’t cover dementia.
Having dealt with relatives with dementia, I’m not sure how it could be applied. They cannot make the decision for themselves, or reliably understand what it means. This leads to someone else deciding when they are too much of a burden or whatever reasoning and off you go. It’s only my opinion, but I think you need to have full command of your mental faculties to make a decision of this sort, as well as access to necessary care and support. IF the pain or disability is more than you can bear, I have no issue with it. If you are concerned with being a burden to your family, or you cannot afford the meds or therapies that make your life worth living, I feel that is an indictment of our system and a step towards a Logan’s Run type of society.
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Yes, I get that, & fully agree that the right to die must include conscious & informed consent. On the other hand, I recently helped care for an elderly friend who died of dementia at home. He was fully aware that he was suffering, that he couldn’t use the toilet on his own, could no longer control his bladder or his bowels, couldn’t walk, sit up, or eat alone, & didn’t recognize any of the people who were helping him do those things. It was agony for all of us. I don’t know what the solution is, but all the caretakers agreed that we didn’t want that for ourselves.
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I suspect that there are a variety of complications(both in terms of what you can actually get honored in a given jurisdiction; and conceptual ones that people either smarter or more empirical than I am have become aware of); but my understanding that that that’s more or less what advance directives are intended to handle: allow people to articulate their preferences for when they can no longer articulate their preferences while it is still possible to do so. Not much to be done if you don’t have them set up prior to needing them, and probably enough ambiguity and matters of degree to keep team medical ethics employed; but certainly better than having nothing to go on.
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In Canada there is something known as a waiver of final consent which allows one to leave the final decision to a caregiver or nurse practitioner to determine what the threshold of intolerable suffering in the event that one becomes incapable of making such medical decisions. Prior to this people would have to go before they lost their faculties which was obviously an undesirable outcome (which is still a problem with MAID even now).
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I wonder if it has to do with these sites that Tantacrul investigated because of a suicide of one of his fans.
The tl;dr is that these sites acted as a sales funnel to these suicide kits. If there was any scare of creepy psychopaths grooming youth, this is one. I found this through our child proclaiming to us that ending their life soon was a rational choice and a sound one, all options considered.
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Of course, the video about these assholes is age-restricted while the videos made by the assholes themselves aren’t. Get your shit together YouTube.
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