Scheduled to Die: The Rise of Canada’s Assisted Suicide Program
thefp.com
thefp.com
> In May, Victoria took a hard look at their budget. They couldn’t go on like this for long. “Mom,” Joan recalled Victoria telling her, “I don’t think we can survive. We have to apply for MAiD.”
> She had known that her 23-year-old son, Kiano Vafaeian, was depressed—he was diabetic and had lost his vision in one eye, and he didn’t have a job or girlfriend or much of a future... That was when Marsilla learned that Kiano had applied and, in late July, been approved for “medical assistance in dying,” aka MAiD, aka assisted suicide.
> Indeed, in some Canadian provinces nearly 5 percent of deaths are MAiD deaths. In 2021, the province of Quebec reported that 4.7 percent of deaths in the province were due to MAiD; in British Columbia, the number was 4.8 percent.
> Next March, the government is scheduled to expand the pool of eligible suicide-seekers to include the mentally ill and “mature minors.”
> In October 2020, the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer issued a report stating that MAiD would cut healthcare costs by over $66 million.
> In 2017, Aaron Trachtenberg, a research fellow and a doctor at the University of Manitoba, and Braden Manns, a health economist and nephrologist at the University of Calgary, published a paper predicting that MAiD could slash healthcare costs by as much as $100 million yearly.
> He added: “When we have people who are genuinely suffering, and we don’t provide them options for dignified living, but we provide them with what we label as a painless death,
People who were forced to starve, to subsist, to suffer empty, meaningless lives of toil and/or misery, now have an alternative to the continuation of their suffering. This does not mean the alternative is good, but neither is its absence.
One would hope that seeing how many people would rather choose to die in their own terms, as opposed to continuing to toil to enrich their landlords while they have to choose between food and heating, would steer us towards building a better society, one where people have not only freedom, but autonomy over their own lives.
And if it doesn't, well, then I suppose I'm glad we have an alternative to the society we're building.
They virtally always had, though. Suicide is legal. Even when it isn't, it's always been an option, and people have always used it. Short of that, even hardliners like the Catholic church are explicitly fine with terminal sedation (medical treatment that is intended to relieve pain, but is expected to hasten death as a side effect) and refusing life-prolonging treatment when that is understood as only postponing the inevitable.
The culture war polarisation makes it sound like the alternative is keeping you alive in agony against your will and confiscation of your family's assets if you commit illegal suicide.
Nobody is proposing that! Everyone wants to respect people's autonomy. It's just that we feel denying you official approval for your suicide doesn't interfere much with your autonomy, and things like the feeling that you're a burden to your loved ones or wasting hospital time that could be better spent on others - can interfere a lot more.
That life is worth living is no small assumption. It's a huge one, and one of those which it is questionable if can ever be justified on anything resembling "objective" grounds. Please, don't even try.
It is nonetheless the assumption that is the basis for everything we do, from getting up in the morning to voting to obeying traffic rules to calling an ambulance if we see someone collapsing to the ground. Do we really have a meaningful alternative that involves not affirming it?
What you brush off as "official approval" can be the difference between a person's family members getting to say goodbye to their loved one before they die peacefully on their own terms, or them getting home one day to find their brains scattered all over the garage. It's about whether you get to make this painfully difficult decision about your life on the open, with the support of those around you, or whether you are forced to hide it from them, out of shame or to avoid legal repercussions. It's about whether your loved ones are able remember you as you were in life, or as the trauma, guilt and shame that followed your death. It matters a lot.
Life is worth living, yes. On the abstract, and on a personal level, I wholeheartedly agree. But I do not get to impart that judgement on other people's concrete lived experiences, to decide that their life is worth living on their behalf. Just like I alone decide whether mine is.
If you want to make the decision in the open with the support of those around you, involving them in your decision, I think you have to accept that they must be allowed to say "no, please don't do it", too. If you want their support, but don't give them that option, then it's downright cruel.
And assisted suicide laws impose that obligation, not on relatives, but on doctors. They're not just stepping aside for someone else's decision, they are demanded to accept it, support it and actively assist in pursuing the objective of death (unlike in terminal sedation and cessation of treatment, where death is not the goal). They have to do this even for people who are not terminally ill, who we know from statistics in many cases would have abandoned their wish to die and lived long lives.
I've known doctors from very different backgrounds (including non religious people, just so that's clear) who have been very disturbed by the prospect of being expected to do such things.
I think the options of terminal sedation and refusing life-prolonging treatment should be the extent of what we demand from doctors. That's no small deal, it is important that no one's life is prolonged by medicine against their will at the cost of suffering. But doctor's and the health system's obligations should stop there.
Of course those around them are allowed to say "please don't do it" -- but the person who's making the decision might still choose to do it. This is true, independently of whether assisted suicide is on the table. Regardless, getting to have an open conversation about it will be a better starting point for healing, for everyone involved. You can't say "please don't do it" to a suicide note, or ask it further questions so that you can better understand why they made that decision.
You have a profound misunderstanding of how most assisted suicide laws around the world work. Doctors are not demanded to do anything, and certainly are not held to any obligation to end the life of anyone who asks them to. They evaluate whether the request has validity based on medical criteria, and deny it or accept it on that basis. Doctors who object for religious or moral reasons are usually exempt from participating in it altogether. They definitely don't have to do it for people who aren't terminally ill -- although in some legislations, they might be allowed to.
I'm also unsure what you believe terminal sedation and cessation of treatment are. Death is definitely the expected result. Or rather, death is the means to achieve the desired goal, which is ending the patient's suffering -- just like with assisted suicide.
You speak of statistics where people have abandoned their wish to die and lived long lives. Did they live good lives? Can you, personally, promise to everyone in the world seeking assisted suicide, that if they do not follow through, they will live good lives? That their continued suffering will eventually end, or that it will be worth enduring?
I think it's the least you can do, given that you've talked to a dentist once or whatever, and that apparently gives you the moral high ground to make that decision, on behalf of all doctors and of all people who seek assisted suicide alike.
I got into this debate through reading and engaging with four doctors, over many years. One of them, the one I knew best, is a professor of medical ethics now. I borrowed Rawls' "A theory of justice" from him. Managed to return it too. Don't know how this is relevant, but since you speculated about "talking to a dentist" I guess it is?
Can't say I know what laws are on the table at every point, but I think I got a reasonable overview.
The right to conscientious objection is certainly important, but I really can't entrust it to people who don't understand the difference between "accepting an outcome" and "seeking an outcome as a means to an end". You won't let us keep it for long.
> Or rather, death is the means to achieve the desired goal
That's exactly what it is not. The sedatives relieve pain, they shorten the patient's life as a side effect. An easy way to see is, imagine if the painkillers killed the pain, but the patient miraculously didn't die. Would you be happy? Of course. Both of you, generally.
If the patient was genuinely suicidal and wanted to die, they might not be. Not even if they recovered and went on live a long life.
So no, I can't promise them that they'll find out why life is worth living. But I can promise them a nonzero chance that they someday will. And if that chance isn't enough to make them stop actively seeking to end it, I honestly think they're not thinking straight.
Let's set aside that neither the patient and the doctor would be happy about this at all, since the patient would still be in pain after the painkillers wear off, and the doctor would have failed to achieve the actual purpose of the procedure, which is to kill the patient. Sure, they're both happy about their shared failure because, I don't know, baby Jesus is smiling at them from the heavens or something, whatever.
So you're saying that, by applying terminal sedation, whose only possible outcome both in theory and in practice is the death of the person, the actual objective is to relieve the pain without causing the death of the person? The obvious conclusion of taking this absurd argument seriously is that every single doctor who applies terminal sedation is committing medical malpractice, because apparently they're all too stupid to not kill the person, as this procedure, according to you, does not actually intend to.
Please think about the bullshit you spew for a second before you press send. It's embarrassing.
> So no, I can't promise them that they'll find out why life is worth living. But I can promise them a nonzero chance that they someday will. And if that chance isn't enough to make them stop actively seeking to end it, I honestly think they're not thinking straight.
Wow. So everyone who doesn't agree with your blatantly pro-continued-suffering agenda is "not thinking straight", and therefore you get to force them to continue suffering, actively taking their agency from them, because... maybe magic? Hey, who knows, your suffering might miraculously vanish tomorrow, so suck it up, buttercup. Life is good, baby! Life is good! Except, well, for you it isn't, but why would I let reality get in the way of my pro-forced-misery ideology? And maybe, most likely, almost surely, this miracle will never happen. But what do I care? You're the one suffering, and I'm just grandstanding about borrowing books from fancy doctors on the internet. All's good on my end, anyway.
Truly spoken like an entitled know-it-all who has never suffered for a single second of their life. Embarrassing and shameful. All of those debates with so many doctors over so many years, and you still haven't figured out that the topic requires empathy for other human beings.
> The right to conscientious objection is certainly important, but I really can't entrust it to people who don't understand the difference between "accepting an outcome" and "seeking an outcome as a means to an end". You won't let us keep it for long.
Don't have the fucking nerve to tell me that I won't let you keep your rights for long. You're the one openly advocating against other people's right to end their suffering, their rights over their own minds and bodies, with no real basis except magical thinking and abysmal misunderstandings of law and medicine. Have some fucking respect.
I also struggled with depression and suicidality in my twenties. My life also got better, and I am glad I did not succeed at killing myself. I do not advocate for assisted suicide as a solution for most problems -- just for those health situations where no real solutions exist.
My mother, however, is approaching her sixties. She's been depressed, like, really, majorly, manically, clinically depressed, for as long as I can remember. She's tried to kill herself many times, twice in the last year alone. She's tried every medication under the sun, some which have temporarily made things better, many which have permanently made things worse.
All she's heard from her loved ones, over the last thirty years, is that she has to keep trying. Always, forever, keep trying, through an endless trough of misery with no end in sight. Do yoga, sign up for courses, move away, move back, try CBT, try CBD, try SSRIs, try benzodiazepines, try anti-psychotics.
Try and then try again, forevermore getting nowhere, until you finally get to die in a way that your loved ones find socially acceptable. Because otherwise us, your loved ones, we'll keep rescuing you -- hell, legally speaking, we're forced to rescue you, again and again, unless you eventually get desperate enough to die that you don't even call to say goodbye.
I also hope that assisted suicide can be a revulsive for our profoundly sick society. Maybe if instead of letting people freeze, starve, be lonely and sick and sad, "fade out" in a way that looks like a "natural death" or an "accident", maybe if we counted them, if we kept a tally of the people who have gone to their doctors begging for death because their existence was untenable or unworthy of living, maybe that would force us to acknowledge them, to listen to their stories, to transform our society so that there's a place in it for them.
Or maybe it would just be another number to become desensitized to.
Hope you don't find yourself in that demographic at some point of your life.
It felt like we hadn't just slipped down the slope, we basically rocketed into the ground. I will never support this movement.
Yet you are not allowed to kill yourself? I don't think that morally defensible
My issue is when the medical system, which has a pretty crap track record when it comes to dealing with people who's suffering is curable, starts offering suicide to people as an out. These institutions can't put people on the right pills and we're supposed to trust them to suggest (or not) that people end their lives? Not to mention the perverse financial incentive it creates to give people who need expensive care crap care and generally drag feet hoping they choose the out.
Wheat bloats my stomach and clogs my intestines almost gas tight and sometimes the pain can be extreme because it feels like your intestines are being torn apart.
This makes you feel like your own body is conspiring against you because society has decided to put wheat everywhere and everyone else is fine and the doctors tell you it's not the wheat. From this perspective the "sane" choice against generic unexplainable suffering because of randomly occuring physical pain would be to get a different body but that isn't possible so suicide it is.
Except, my solution is peppermint tea and avoiding wheat at all costs. I don't care how many people tell me that I don't have celiac disease or that I should be able to eat wheat. I can't, I know my body better than the doctor or you or the industrial complex that puts wheat everywhere.
You can blame policies and programs, but in reality the issue has always been the value of human life.
If human life isn't valuable then ending it is easy.
Forcing people to die in pain, misery, and utterly debased is a misplacement of values in my opinion.
And this is often than not a symptom of capitalist valuation. The value of a life is too often viewed as economic [1].
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/354671644_VAluing_L...
I think this is because we often see pain and misery as "bad things" that must be avoided at all cost. This tends to lead to the assumption that people who have pain and misery in their lives don't have "good lives" and that the only real option then is to end it.
Pain and misery have purpose and meaning. It can cause people to look beyond themselves. Some very beautiful things have come from people who were in deep pain.
Permanent never ending deep pain and you're old and just waiting to die, that's different.
Or Alzheimers.
> we often see pain and misery as "bad things" that must be avoided at all cost ... only real option then is to end it.
I never heard anyone say anything remotely like that. I believe you're mistaken?
Did you hear someone say that or you're hypothesizing
With that said, the doctors in the article seem crazy, and this: “MAiD is the new society safety net”
It requires, if he is a doctor, that he gives approval to your choice, and in compassion's name try to relieve you from the burdens of guilt and doubt you might have from your choice.
It doesn't just mean accepting that you say "my life is not worth living", it requires them to say, "Yes, your life is not worth living".
Opponents said this was a can of worms, and it seems harder and harder to deny from what's happening in Canada.
(And to repeat, terminal sedation, treatment that hastens death as an unfortunate side effect of trying to relieve pain, as well as refusal of life-prolonging care, is defended even by hardline opponents to euthanasia laws).
An old person had late stage skeleton cancer, extreme pain, drugs didn't help. He wanted to die. The health care system kept him alive against his will for as long as they could
In that case I suppose the reason was instead covering one's own back.
I'm not trying to opine on the Canadian health care system, as I've never experienced it nor given it much thought, but arguendo, if a part of the calculus for wellness is "is it cheaper to kill them?" that would be a deal-breaker.
(Again, not saying that's what is happening, but I am always skeptical of the payor's ability to dictate the treatment for reasons you can infer)
There's such a sliding scale of what is good and right here, and I think reasonable people can draw their lines at different places. Plot these as points on a line, and I think everyone will draw a line somewhere:
* suicide should be allowed
* medically assisted deaths are different from suicide and should be allowed
* people assisting in death should be prosecuted
* if it is hard for law enforcement to distinguish assisted suicide from murder, prosecutions are allowed
* it is okay for your doctor to prescribe death
* it is okay for the state to encourage death as the most cost efficient means of care
* it is okay for the state to withhold care if it is too costly to administer
* it is okay for the state to kill anyone they deem burdensome
Also, suicide hasn't been illegal in Canada for 50 years!
I can't think of anything more shameful than encouraging a non-terminal person to kill themselves.
Similarly, I meant welfare. I think it goes much beyond just healthcare. Unemployment insurance, state help to access the job market, disability help, etc.
So if someone chooses to die, don't always look at that as a problem that could have been fixed with enough resources. Sometimes it's not fixable and we all need to compassionately accept that.
There are different forms of acceptance. Yes, accept that some cases are not fixable. On the other hand, we should also be looking at what led to it being not fixable. There is a huge difference between seeking assisted suicide due to deteriorating physical and mental health from medical causes and seeking assisted suicide due to a lack of medical, psychological, and financial support from the outset.
Your point doesn't refute what I said, or answer a point I made -- I never said it was always a problem. At best I said it very much was now.
First child: $10.00 Second child: $10.00 Third child: $2.50
These were the parking fees for 24 hours (there were no complications necessitating longer stays) in the two different cities she gave birth (the third child was born in a much more rural area with cheaper parking). I cannot stress enough that it cost us $0.00 beyond these amounts.
These costs include the use of a midwife in all three instances, with around 12 visits in advance of birth, then 2 midwives or 1 midwife and 2 nurses for the actual delivery, then 4-6 visits with the midwife post-birth, several of which were in our home.
I would say that’s a positive experience.
Any country that does free childbirth and ambulance rides and appointments with doctors and specialists, I would suggest has an excellent healthcare system, even if not perfect.
Births to illegal immigrants accounts for about 5% of child births in the US. These are not covered by Medicaid, but are covered by some state health systems. To my knowledge, Canada does not extend healthcare to illegal immigrants either. https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/illegal-immigrants-have...
Whether it's a slippery slope or not, I think it is progressive not to gatekeep medically assisted suicide too much. Modern medicine should offer a choice for each individual - to live or to die, not a prescription to live through suffering and pain at an immense economic and societal cost. Death is a normal, natural part of life that will come for all of us. The amount of suffering before death should be each person's choice.
It is validly one of the 15 logical fallacies used to illustrate parts of arguments.
But when I think those things, I realize that’s a perm solution to “short” term albeit painful problems. I can do this. I got this.
Then when it gets real bad, I remember Pascal’s wager and if there really are people I can “see” again - like my first wife who died at 41, when I was 31… that little thought experiment/bit of faith saves me.
It makes me sad, truly, to see that a bulk of the stories are related to finance. Finance for services that a caring nation would/should provide.
Sigh.
My city is small but still a “city” at abt 15000 people. We are volly but a few paid. We run abt 700 calls a year.
I’m all the standard training - emr too.
I think when things got thick with my first wife’s cancer, I was 26 and new at fire and making ok money in sw.. so I “used” fire to have “random” encounters that forced me to stop thinking abt cancer. About death. Which is odd. Cause I’m usually one of the regulars at the medicals, traumas, untimelys, etc…
So I got used to that “fire time = me time” feeling. SW didn’t matter and let’s be honest, sw is thick or dense but it’s not hard.
Not hard like what we see or sticks to us at fire.
So yeah. Juggling? I just… “made do” I reckon. Used it as an escape. And when fire is slow, as sometimes it is, I use training as an escape.
When she died when I was 31, fire was there for me. Software - gave me the corporate required bereavement days then it was back to the office because back then wfh was not as common as it should have been.
Maybe I haven’t really juggled well. I think also with adhd that I have - “exercising” both my brain and body in these two ways has helped.
That's about in line with the Netherlands, to put things in perspective.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
Presuming 35% of people who die, do so in need of palliative care [1] -- it is only a further one in seven who seek assisted suicide? In this light, I'd expect the number of deaths to be higher than 5%. Also, isn't it silly to report cause of death as suicide, when it was cancer or some other condition that would soon take their life regardless?
62% cancer patients, 80% coming from palliative care.
section 4.5 discusses the new controversial new provision for 2021 which allowed patients to recieve MAiD even if their deaths are not "reasonably forseeable", which accounted for 2.2% of MAiD recipients, or 219 people.
I suppose this doesn’t negate your comment but it does offer that there needs to be some adjustment for population aging and health overall, to give proper context.
What's happening here, to put it in the same terms, is that "your family members should be allowed to choose to be administered a lethal injection, like the ones that are given to criminals in the USA, as a medical procedure, if and only if a doctor determines that this is a reasonable way to put an end to their physical or mental suffering".
Turns out it's not really that shocking and horrifying unless you choose to be dishonest about it.
(I realize by positioning “determines that this is a reasonable way to put an end to their physical or mental suffering” as the greatest and only consideration, you have a prior commitment to ending the lives of others when you like the sound of it. I will still try, though.)
I'm not sure what your fixation with how criminals die is about -- there is no "nice" way to die, just more painful and less painful ones, more prolonged and less prolonged ones. Euthanasia gives us a choice that, speaking purely of the physical experience, is on the often-preferred end of the spectrum.
The doctor should consider it to be an acceptable measure under a limited set of circumstances, and should consider it not to be acceptable in almost all other circumstances. In all cases, the decision is only to be taken by the person whose life is going to end. All the doctor can do is authorize or deny that decision, never to make it on their behalf.
Family should often be consulted by the doctor in order to make that decision in an informed manner, but family doesn't get a vote. Your family does not own you or your body.
I don't have any prior commitment to "ending the lives of others", and to say so is to willfully misinterpret what I have said to an absurd extreme. My only commitment is to others, and myself, being able to decide how to end our own lives, and no one else's lives but our own, in a dignified manner, when our very existence entails suffering.
It does not matter whether I "like the sound of it" or not. I am not currently seeking euthanasia, and I am not a doctor for someone who is, so rest assured that nobody is asking for my opinion. What matters is if the person whose life is going to end does, given that they are of sound mind to make such a judgement.
I'm glad you will still try. We should always try to make others' lives better, to provide better lives instead of easier deaths. But sometimes we won't be able to.
You are definitely entrenched within an intentionally limited set of inputs similar to what the MAID process has devolved to in some circumstances, sorry. In your current position, you would not be in a position to fully and most beneficially evaluate the decision to end life, whether as an individual, family member, physician or policymaker.
And fortunately, given how these processes are set up, nobody will ask you, either. You win some, you lose some.
Indeed, and in 1910 progressives were saying similar things about sterilising the feeble minded. This is why the education system is so important. If you control the education system you get to decide what a professional should think. If there are professionals who disagree there’s always disbarment.
While a dystopian society could consider choosing to kill people based on their externalities (such as, for example, as we currently do by putting criminals in death row) advocates of assisted suicide put the wishes of the person undergoing the procedure first and foremost. Euthanasia should never be something that is done to you without your explicit, self-driven, sound-of-mind consent.
And indeed, morality judgements are always influenced by the context of their time. Eugenics was a somewhat popular idea around that time, but it's important to note that this does not mean that early 20th century people were less moral than we are.
Families required the labor of all of their members to survive, and an unproductive member of the family that required extensive care carried a very clear cost in opportunity and quality of life to the family, often one that permanently impacted the life of the mother. It was seen as a moral good to somehow use science to figure out a way to "spare" families, and especially women, from what was seen as an arbitrary misfortune, an "act of god".
One of the reasons why eugenics is not nearly as popular today is that society takes on a more collective approach to supporting and caring for disabled people. While there's still a long, long way to go, there are schools for children with special needs, there are disability payments, there are ways through which society organizes to help those who care for others, alternatives to what was often a very tough choice for mothers, between abandonment, murder or misery.
Eugenics didn't change. Morality didn't change. Society changed, and in doing so, it shifted the balance, and it is no longer seen as the moral choice to engineer humanity so that Jerry doesn't exist, because the alternative to that no longer is to make his mother's life untenable. By having better options, we are enabled to make better choices.
If a terminally ill elderly person makes the same choice, we label it as "voluntary stopping eating or drinking", and consider it totally normal.
Which is to say, even with no assisted suicide program in place, frequent decisions about who we're allowing to kill themselves is happening.
The ideal situation is not 0% of people dying from MAid, it's 100%.
We are all going to die. The choice is not dying vs not dying, it's dying after a horrible and interminable agony while in the hands of hostile nurses vs dying fast and without suffering.
I'm making preparations to leave the country real. It is essential for my health and waiting a month just to see a GP isn't the kind of place I want to reside. This is in the middle of a huge public healthcare crisis, for context [1]
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canadian-health-care-system...
I'm in favor of the right to access a painless assisted death, but society should be able to make a better offer to anyone who is not terminally ill.
When there’s a clear line-of-sight financial incentive in killing the citizenry, the policies will only further loosen qualifications and even incentives over time. This is how you go from a poster child of an advanced stage ALS patient to normalizing the government assisted death of a depressed diabetic. Will it become more frequent (rising from 5% of deaths)? Almost certainly. The knobs here are the qualifications and requirements, decided by financial incentive vs sense of decency. Where that line of collision will be is in age restrictions (minors) and qualifying health conditions.
It’s also interesting to think about how this intersects with capital punishment. If the government can off a non-criminal in a profitable way, then something in the math we hear about capital punishment being more expensive than lifetime incarceration is grossly incorrect.
Due process is the expensive part.
I hope Canada’s experiment in extreme social libertarianism works out well for them.
My grandmother was nearing her end a few decades ago- very fast moving lung cancer- long before these options were legally available. She was terrified of being unable to breath, dying from that. Her doctor looked her in the eye and said "I promise you, you won't die that way if you don't want to". And she didn't.
Medical assisted suicide for terminal patients has always existed, in the shadows. Now it's just legitimized and being done openly.
I have some concerns over depressed people dying when they might be able to get treatment to help them. I'm sure there are cases of this happening. But I also think most of those people were going to commit suicide on their own anyway. Now it's being done safely, in the sense that a failed suicide can make things even worse.
I'd like to see more being done to ensure these people truly have no other options, but I also know that I'm not qualified to pass judgement. I have faith that the doctors and medical system are doing what they think is best, and that they know more than I do.
That's very good. My grandmother tried to kill herself with sleeping pills because she was desperate and no legal option for help existed back then. She was not successful and the end wasn't nice. It's nothing anyone should go through.
> In October 2020, the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer issued a report stating that MAiD would cut healthcare costs by over $66 million. In 2017, Aaron Trachtenberg, a research fellow and a doctor at the University of Manitoba, and Braden Manns, a health economist and nephrologist at the University of Calgary, published a paper predicting that MAiD could slash healthcare costs by as much as $100 million yearly.
> “I do worry MAiD is an easy solution to bed shortages and the terrible lack of resources patients are facing,” Dr. Ramona Coelho, a family physician in a suburb of Toronto, told me. She added that “the perverse disincentive that exists for administrators and governments with providing MAiD rather than care and resources to live can present a real danger to the lives of vulnerable or marginalized persons.”
There have also been reports of medical staff pressuring patients to sign up for MAiD to save the government money.
https://nypost.com/2022/11/08/canadian-man-assisted-suicide-...
> “They asked if I want an assisted death. I don’t. I was told that I would be charged $1,800 per day [for hospital care]. I have $2 million worth of bills. Nurses here told me that I should end my life. That shocked me.”
In the US, "medical error" is the third leading cause of death. Nurses and doctors are regularly fired or sued for serious wrongdoing. There's good ones and bad ones, competent ones and incompetent ones. Every profession is a mixed bag. I am sure it is no different in Canada.
You can never, ever, trust a system. You can trust individuals.
[0] https://www.cihi.ca/en/news/covid-19-expected-to-push-canada...
If handing out lethal injections is considered to be no big deal, I don’t see how the Canadian healthcare system could avoid these pressures. You can’t make just one deal with the devil.
Sane people don't kill people to save money.
Who me? You have no idea...
> Pick up a history book and lay your eyes upon the horrors that have been enacted by "good people".
I am a keen student of history, that's part of the reason I seldom leave the house. I know what people are like.
It seems to me that we are recovering from some disaster that deranged us in the prehistoric past. My favorite theory was the Younger Dryas comet impact, but I've gone off that recently. But it doesn't matter. Maybe our hominid past was itself sufficiently traumatic, and the condition we are recovering from is the human condition.
> Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. We have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. We have never seen a totally sane human being.
~Robert Anton Wilson
The horrors of the past do not justify the horrors of the present, they motivate the ongoing process of becoming a sane and mature sentient species.
Of course, that isn't true in the abstract. Some number of people die in the US annually for lack of government spending on healthcare, and presumably we could spend less and kill more people, or vice versa.
Government healthcare systems are kind of fundamentally a tradeoff between spending and saving lives.
It gets less philosophical the longer you live.
Like Civil Forfeiture, the medical system should never see a single cent "saved" via suicide. Because otherwise, yes, we're saying we think they'd optimize for it.
It's such an absurd dystopian science-fiction concept that I have to assume it's false, and that every report of assisted suicide for someone other a terminally ill person is in some part fabricated.
If these stories are not fabricated, and the government really is voluntarily euthanizing depressed people, then were I a citizen I'd be seriously thinking about [redacted] the Canadian government.
https://unherd.com/thepost/leaked-slides-reveal-dark-side-of...
> But her organisation’s internal training seminars tell an entirely different story. In a seminar tellingly titled “Accessing Alternatives to MAiD: What is the role of the MAiD Assessor when resources are inadequate?”, Althea Gibb-Carsley, a recently retired MAiD professional in Vancouver, documents several real-life cases of patients who have sought to die because of a lack of housing or of other resources.
> What euthanasia providers don’t say out loud is that a patient who is turned down by one assessor can simply “doctor shop” for another one until a willing assessor is found. In another CAMAP seminar, Dr Ellen Wiebe describes a case of a man who was rejected by a MAiD assessor for the procedure because, as Raikin writes, “he did not have a serious illness or the ‘capacity to make informed decisions about his own personal health.'” But a pro-euthanasia group connected him with Dr Wiebe, a prominent MAiD supporter who was previously accused by a Vancouver Jewish nursing home of sneaking in to euthanise one of its patients (to which she admitted; the provincial medical regulator cleared her of wrongdoing). As she recounts, she performed an assessment online, found him eligible, found another assessor who agreed with her, and drove him from the airport to her clinic, where she “provided for him” or, in other words, ended his life.
> One 55-year-old woman who sought to die “identifies poverty as the driver of her MAiD request – food insufficiency and inability to access appropriate treatments”. The slide (above) points out that “what she really needs” is “an extra $600 or so /month”. Another patient, a 57-year-old man and published author, identified lack of housing and lack of access to medical care among the reasons for his request to die. He had been told that obtaining social housing would take between three and six years; he planned to “stretch credit to the edges then […] set final date” for his death.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/why-is-canada-euthanisin...
> Many in the healthcare sector came to the same conclusion. Even before Bill C-7 was enacted, reports of abuse were rife. A man with a neurodegenerative disease testified to Parliament that nurses and a medical ethicist at a hospital tried to coerce him into killing himself by threatening to bankrupt him with extra costs or by kicking him out of the hospital, and by withholding water from him for 20 days. Virtually every disability rights group in the country opposed the new law. To no effect: for once, the government found it convenient to ignore these otherwise impeccably progressive groups.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/paralympian-claims-cana...
> Paralympian claims Canada offered to euthanise her when she asked for a stairlift
These are just a few quick searches that corroborate what is discussed in the article.
No, people won't sign up for euthanasia just to get a roof over their head, no, they would never do that.
Where exactly does that happen? The biggest complaint (rightly) about the US health system is the middle class is one accident, or health crisis away from bankruptcy.
I am not aware of anyone that is "suffering immensely because they are poor". There are plenty of avenues to get care even if you can not afford it in the US.
Your comment is dishonest and misleading.
The demographics who routinely go without annually physicals and other basic care are not poor people. They are gainfully employed individuals or childless couples on high deductible plans. These people can't hope to hit their deductible within a year from normal preventative care alone so they pay full price for services like annual physicals. Those that are young and generally healthy frequently opt to skip such visits and keep the money because paying someone in white coat hundreds for the privilege of being told they are generally healthy but could stand to use a few pounds is an absolute crap value for money no matter how you look at it. If this seems like a perverse incentive to avoid preventative care that's because it is. HDHP plans are terrible for everyone who's annual healthcare spend is low because they create this incentive.
Ironically, with the myriad of state programs people suffering from financial hardship are actually better provided for in many cases. If they want an annual physical they're out a copay, possibly a discounted one.
Ok, so because they cannot afford the checkup, they should instead kill themselves because they are poor?
None of those systems are perfect. There are some eligible people who don't enroll. There are certainly people who find the amount of money that they would need to spend to be un-affordable.
I don't have a problem with pointing that out. Or even suggesting better ways. There's a point though when the desire for whatever system a person thinks is better is so compelling that they start describing the current system as some sort of free market nature red in tooth and claw libertarian paradise that I cannot reconcile with reality.
Why is health care any different from Food, Shelter, Transportation, or any other thing we require but have to pay for in the market?
Should government take over all grocery stores and provide you with "free" food as well?
The idea that it is barbaric to charge for healthcare does not pass even a first pass logic test. To believe that you must reject the very idea of capitalism and market based economics, and if that is your position well history has a lot of lessons for you...
>I've talked to many many many many americans who are reluctant to even go to a dr for a simple checkup because they cannot afford it.
There are many reasons to forego that, I suspect the cost is not the only reasons. How many of them have even looked into what the price would be to go? I bet very few have taken even the first steps to find out. Cost is an easy scape goat
>In most first world countries you can go to the dr any time for free.
It is far far far far from free, taxpayer funded is not free. Most of those nations also look to the US protect the world, See the latest in UKR, while the US is spending billions there I do not see the EU, Candada or any other nation matching our defense contribution, either to UKR or NATO, or anywhere else. personally I would support moving to more of a medicare for all if (and only if) we go in to full isolationism and let the EU defend themselves
that is with out getting into all the problems with EU, UK, or Canada Health systems (wait time, rationing, etc). Lots of rich people come to the US from those nations for care for a reason
First off you have confused medical insurance system with medical care.
healthcare in the US is the best. How we pay for that healthcare, namely employer led "comprehensive" insurance plan is TERRIBLE
So lets solve for that, and the solution to that is NOT government taking over the entire thing
>>I can walk into food stores, easily compare prices , and find substitutes.
I would absolutely love is the healthcare industry moved away from the employer led "comprehensive" insurance plans to a more free market solution
It's not. Most or all first world countries have some form of social net that attempts to ensure people don't go hungry. Homeless shelters exist and many of us in Europe agree that governments should do even more to provide a better safety net and help people get back on their feet.
> The idea that it is barbaric to charge for healthcare does not pass even a first pass logic test.
I don't think anyone implied that it's barbaric to charge for healthcare. What's barbaric is people being denied preventative care because they're unemployed or don't have hundreds of dollars to go to the doctor.
> It is far far far far from free, taxpayer funded is not free.
Of course the visit is free. Universal healthcare as a service costs money to fund, but you're not charged to use the service.
> Most of those nations also look to the US protect the world
You should look up the map of US military bases and think critically about what the US is getting in return - the ability to respond to threats originating almost anywhere in the world, for one.
> personally I would support moving to more of a medicare for all if (and only if) we go in to full isolationism and let the EU defend themselves
Good news - you don't need to spend more as you're already outspending every country that has universal healthcare by around a factor of 2. Unsurprisingly, the supposed "free market" healthcare system isn't very efficient in practice.
> that is with out getting into all the problems with EU, UK, or Canada Health systems (wait time, rationing, etc). Lots of rich people come to the US from those nations for care for a reason
These healthcare systems aren't perfect by any stretch of the imagination but at least they're fair. Pointing your finger at queues and wait times is easy when you conveniently ignore basic needs of a large proportion of the population.
As an outsider looking in, the tone-deaf "fuck you, I've got mine" attitude is what I find barbaric about the US healthcare system. It reinforces the fact that the value of human life is exclusively measured in US dollars. Either you're wealthy enough to pay or you deserve to go without healthcare (and possibly die) as a matter of personal failure rather than a systemic one.
As does the US which has several programs for both healthcare and food for the poor. That is not a counter to my statement, where by the government completely takes over the industry and provides the service.
There is a Huge difference between a social net, and government provided.
>>I don't think anyone implied that it's barbaric to charge for healthcare.
That is exactly what was implied
> What's barbaric is people being denied preventative care because they're unemployed or don't have hundreds of dollars to go to the doctor.
Again this does not happen in the US
>> Unsurprisingly, the supposed "free market" healthcare system isn't very efficient in practice.
the US does not have a free market, I can not believe anyone can even claim we do with a strait face. healthcare is the most heavily regulated market there is, regulation is the antithesis of a free market. Any one attempting to make things cheaper, provide care in a way that would lower costs is quickly regulated out of the market.
Government and government alone is the cause of the huge costs in health care. To proclaim government can solve the problem they created is laughable
The Canadian healthcare system is broken (I say this as a progressive-left Canadian).
The answer to people wanting to kill themselves because they can't easily get treatment for their depression, or other life issues, is to offer more support.
That's something Canada isn't doing.
I support MAiD, but it seems like there are a large number of people using it who would be better served by other social programs.
Why doesn't this make you want to see the whole thing shut down, given that "using it" literally means being killed?
To put it more plainly.
If I'm against abortion should tax money be used to pay for it? If I'm against abortion what if I use tax money to blare "Abortion is bad" from loud speakers across the country 24/7 ?
There are certainly far ends of this - I'll put you in jail if you attempt to kill your self - that are more clear but even there talk to someone who has a firm belief in property rights and I think they'll be able to make a cogent argument that's more then a rationalization.
In the West, the right believes that there is a natural moral order to reality, which generally does not include abortion or suicide. For the most part, this position is rooted in the Christian belief that all humans are made in God's image, so killing innocent humans is to spit in God's face.
It is typically useful to ask yourself the following questions about any version of society:
- Can you keep your stuff?
- Can you do what you want with your stuff?
- Who has the weapons?
- Who won't be punished for making you do something?
Right wingers tend to go on and on about "freedom", but through examination of these four questions it becomes clear that they don't mean it. They don't want you to keep your stuff if you acquired your stuff through theft, so they support a legal system that can prosecute "thieves", meaning that they decide what's "your stuff", and you can't keep it if they decide it's not yours. They don't want you to become trans, abort babies, start anti-national propaganda outlets, etc. so you're not allowed to do whatever you want with your stuff. They only want people who aren't criminals to have weapons, meaning that there are some people who shouldn't have the option to revolt if they want to. They are mostly unwilling to punish police officers even for major transgressions, so they want the martial caste to be immune to consequence.
It is clear that all of the talk about "property rights", "liberty", and "freedom" is social posturing in order to appear more morally unimpeachable than their perceived opponents. Most people have semi-authoritarian views about the society in which they wish to live, and right-wingers are no different. Some of these ideals are noble in nature, but the actual implementation of these ideals in reality still requires authority prosecuting violations of rules regarding possession, trade, etc.
Therefore, there's no real need to be surprised when "property rights" don't extend to your own body per "right wing" politics; "property rights" isn't actually a meaningful principle among most right wingers, it's merely an ideal that they wish to use as the basis for certain portions of the authoritarian society in which they wish to live.
(Another example is loud music; if you own a stereo (your property) and your lot (your land) and you play loud music (your speech), most freedom-loving conservatives will do whatever they can to get the damn music off.)
Distinguish between not wanting people to do something, and not wanting people to be allowed to do something. Isn't a more common position "I wish anti-national propaganda outlets would go away, but I don't think the government should make them go away, since an intact First Amendment is way more important"?
Conservatives do not really hold you own your body, conservatives tend to believe in various types of religion which puts your body subservient to a higher power or god. Thus is immoral to kill yourself. It is not a property rights argument, it is an ethical argument.,
then you have the libertarian right, which do use property rights and self ownership and many support assisted suicided, the ones that do not oppose governmental assisted largely because what is being perceived to be playing out out in real time (rightly or not) from Canada whereby the state has an incentive to direct people to suicided and maybe even force / Coerce them to "voluntary" dying either as a goal of the program, or just agents of the state abusing their positions. In either case state level suicided is seen as huge opening for abuse where even if you think people have the right to end their own life, trusting government with that power is not something they want to support.
I think it's great that people can end their own life (and I'm not qualifying it by saying it's only for elderly people in pain). Even though I think it's right, my 'disbelief' comes from me thinking "Surely legalising this would be political suicide, and it would never get through any parliament ever!".
Look I honestly think it should be a thing, people should have the right to access to this for terminal illnesses and all that which it makes absolute sense for - but implementing it in the middle of a huge public healthcare crisis [1] is the worst timing ever. I waited a month just to see a GP for a simple prescription refill. And before you tell me I'm complaining about something that's free, I returned to Canada with a 16k medical bill because I didn't declare I left the province, as it turns out something called medical service premiums are a thing in some provinces. All to come back to waiting a month for a GP? I'm paying this shit off, and leaving forever. A lot of other smart people have too.
Hey check out this guy in this news report, he has like BACK PAIN ISSUES and is being encouraged to do this shit. Oh sorry unfit for work eh? Well sorry that's too bad cocks gun [2]
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canadian-health-care-system...
My fear is it becoming so normalized that anyone going through a bout of depression will be influenced by people online and the healthcare system to go forward with this. Truly breaks my heart.
I've always been a supporter of medically assisted dying but you have to be so incredibly careful in implementing it. I don't think this is a great example of a fantastic implementation when you have people who are already on the edge of treatable mental illness crisis situations who simply aren't getting the best treatment they could be getting, publicly considering suicide with their friends. Like it just isn't what I would call the kind of society I'd like to live in, just hearing that is beyond stressful bullshit. I've already lost enough people to that. It just makes the general mental health climate feel soured. There's TV commercials promoting it and shit, and it just sends off huge NO bells in my mind. [1] I mean sure if you have cancer and everything didn't work and it's just excrutiating pain? Dementia and you are on the verge of aspiration pneumonia because you forgot how to eat? There's tons of conditions I have it in mind for but mental health problems is not the business...
Anyways I am on my way to the tropics again for sunshine and happiness haha
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/christine-gauthier-assisted...
For example there was one person that was trying to get In-Home nursing, which my understanding was an option but the "doctor" kept pushing suicide as the better choice, this person clearly did not want to die, but it was being pushed as the first option for them.
The perverse incentives of state run healthcare combined with a suicide option opens up all manner of abuse, and unintended results.
Why is it more acceptable to list all possibilities to prolong a life in pain but not to reduce the time to suffer?
This article, like many others I have come across in recent months, describes medical assistance in dying (MAiD) as if it’s metastasizing into Canada’s leading cause of death - the ultimate escape from any form of suffering whatsoever. The reality is that prior to MAiD, many people were assisted in their death, under the radar, by a compassionate palliative care doctor or nurse, who would show the patient how to turn the knob up on their fentanyl drip. Those less fortunate would commit suicide in more brutal ways, something with which we are all doubtless far too familiar. The terminally ill were forced to suffer a terrible end of life, all in the name of persisting life at all costs - including human dignity.
The question we all should be asking is this: is it right for someone to have the freedom to choose the time and manner of their own death? People do it already through suicide, but it’s not a nice ending. Suicide generates a good deal of family shame to go along with the suffering of self-administered death.
Nobody likes death, but it is inevitable. The question Canada asked - and answered - is that a compassionate death should be an option for those who wish it for themselves when they have no reasonable prospect of turning around a terrible situation from which there is no reasonable prospect of recovery.
Should a degree of critical thinking not be engaged when reading things put out by people with liberal points of view?
1. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/assisted-dying-bill-ottawa-...
Secondly, if the state fails to provide a regulatory framework for assisted dying, people tend to take matters into their own hands. Recall that the Canadian system for assisted death was established as a result of a sequence of court decisions dating back to 1993 [2]. Unlike the United States, the Supreme Court of Canada is viewed as largely apolitical.
Someone can only be eligible for assisted death if they have a "grievous and irremediable medical condition," they've asked for it without external pressure, AND they give their consent AFTER being told of other options such as palliative care that might otherwise serve to alleviate their suffering.
The concept of a "grievous and irremediable medical condition" is also defined carefully in the law. To qualify, they must "have a serious and incurable illness, disease or disability; they are in an advanced state of irreversible decline in capability; and that illness, disease or disability or that state of decline causes them enduring physical or psychological suffering that is intolerable to them and that cannot be relieved under conditions that they consider acceptable."
Mental illness is specifically excluded: "For the purposes of paragraph (2)(a), a mental illness is not considered to be an illness, disease or disability." The government was set to allow mental illness as an eligible category in March 2023, but that has been delayed for further study.
[1] https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/c-46/page-33.html#h...
[2] https://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/14637/inde...
> Unlike the United States, the Supreme Court of Canada is viewed as largely apolitical.
no offense, but ideology is always perceived as simple reality by those inside of it. there are plenty of canadians who do not feel this way (eg https://www.amazon.ca/dp/1082424315 )
This seems completely opposite, unless you mean doctors are being forced to not throw up barriers to access to MAiD to be the same as being forced to participate in MAiD, which seems totally backwards.
A doctor should not be able to impede or delay somebody's legal right to medical care just because they have a personal objection to it.
> The question we all should be asking is this: is it right for someone to have the freedom to choose the time and manner of their own death?
That's not the question though, and the fact that it's being framed that way, in a way that almost no reasonable and compassionate person could disagree with, is part of the harm here. The question is really more like "who chooses this, and why, and what did they ask for first, and did they get it?" This is not a simplified abstract philosophical issue.
My views on this come from being part of a group adjacent to and with a lot of overlap with communities of disabled people. Disabled people are diverse and have a lot of different experiences but the main way they are perceiving this is "they won't give me the support I need to live but they will give me the means to end my life."
The issue here is not compassionate death for terminal patients, which again almost everyone opposing this does support in the abstract. The issue is in the actual implementation, which in its current form is frighteningly close to eugenics. Disabled people are particularly sensitive to things resembling eugenics, and they picked up on this early.
The opposition to it from those groups has been principled and consistent for years now. They predicted this as the likely practical outcome and were dismissed as callous doomsayers. Now what they predicted has come true. It is time to drop the compassionate-care-for-the-terminal angle and face what is actually in front of us with this policy. Those people still do have the right to end their lives with dignity but it cannot come at the expense of other groups, which with this it does.
The problem with MAiD the way Canada implemented it is that there are incentives for the system to off you. In that scenario you mention with the doctor he didn't get paid to show you the switch, and he risks being charged if his healthy patients start dying. Now it's risk free, he could clear his schedule for the holidays and face no recriminations.
> is it right for someone to have the freedom to choose the time and manner of their own death
That's not the question that ended up being asked, it's can a doctor recommend that your depressed child be killed before they've put any effort into therapy.
Or, can a hospital administrator reward the nurses' pod with the most patient suicides with a bonus?
> is that a compassionate death should be an option [...] no reasonable prospect of turning around a terrible situation [...] no reasonable prospect of recovery
Yeah, that's not how it works. They're supposed to ask that sort of stuff, and you aren't supposed to want to die for lack of some food, but in fact it's not helping the people you think and not saving those you'd wish.
Can you cite this happening?
> Or, can a hospital administrator reward the nurses' pod with the most patient suicides with a bonus?
Can you cite this happening?
> Yeah, that's not how it works. They're supposed to ask that sort of stuff, and you aren't supposed to want to die for lack of some food, but in fact it's not helping the people you think and not saving those you'd wish.
Can you cite statistics on a population? There are multiple MAiD online communities. Surely someone has surveyed them?
Can you cite a rule preventing this? We'd like to keep it from happening.
> There are multiple MAiD online communities.
The Veterans community is pretty pissed off about that Paralympian athlete who was offered suicide instead of a wheelchair ramp. They don't feel this is working correctly.
You made the claim that it's happening, not that we need a rule to prevent a hypothetical. This is a goalpost-moving behavior.
> The Veterans community is pretty pissed off about that Paralympian athlete who was offered suicide instead of a wheelchair ramp. They don't feel this is working correctly.
This isn't the same as a population-based study to prove that these are not edge case exceptions that receive appropriate outcry and thereby support. I'm more interested in whether or not this is happening broadly. I want to know if this is happening to people who wouldn't get broad support, like homeless felons, on a population-wide level.
No, I said 'could'. There's apparently no useful rule preventing it.
> This isn't the same as a population-based study to prove that these are not edge case exceptions that receive appropriate outcry and thereby support.
It doesn't need to be, it's an existence proof of bad policy. Even one case like this is too much.
There are abuses of every law from time to time - and sometimes with concerning regularity. I don't see any evidence being put forward in the present article that the alleged potential abuses of the MAiD legislation are widespread.
I think that's the wrong standard for this - "visible evidence of failure", or "fully convincing rational". The burden of proof should be that we stop it unless we can show continual strong evidence of proportionality.
The point isn't that this is horrible now, it's that it doesn't seem to have the type of guidelines we'd posited that would keep it from getting horrible.
> it's far more important and relevant to establish [...] occurring with regularity
I don't know how many disabled veterans they've offed, but even offering it to the one shows a stunning lack of ability to judge need and a heinous disregard for that person's life.
Having a doctor recommend you kill yourself is likely to be somewhat devastating and have its own consequences even if you don't follow through.
> You could make criticisms of nearly any law if the bar for criticism is just that it's possible to push edge case X or Y.
It's not just possible, it's economically incentivized. Both at the individual and systemic level.
Perhaps in other countries where citizens view government with a level of justifiable suspicion, assisted death is not something that can be on the table yet. But in Canada, citizens trust that while not all policies are perfect, nor their implementation, there is a strong desire to get things right over time.
If your country, society, economy, life quality, health, is not good that you choose to die, that is obviously a sign that something is wrong and it should revolt everyone, assisted or not
By criminalizing the act of helping a terminally ill person to die, we are forcing that person to choose between "a life of severe and intolerable suffering," or forcing her to "take her own life prematurely, often by violent or dangerous means." The court ruled that forcing this choice deprived Canadians of their right to "life, liberty and security of the person."
The Supreme Court of Canada's judgement is worth reading [1]:
"It is a crime in Canada to assist another person in ending her own life. As a result, people who are grievously and irremediably ill cannot seek a physician’s assistance in dying and may be condemned to a life of severe and intolerable suffering. A person facing this prospect has two options: she can take her own life prematurely, often by violent or dangerous means, or she can suffer until she dies from natural causes. The choice is cruel."
[1] https://www.canlii.org/en/ca/scc/doc/2015/2015scc5/2015scc5....
It's so tragic that society has failed many people, and now instead of the extra help they need, they're just given the option to be killed outright.
Personal anecdote: I intend to end my life with suicide. The circumstances would likely be when I get a terminal disease. Dragging out end-of-life is very traumatic for those around you. I have personal experience here.
I could also see myself deciding to die over economic reasons: If I'm forced out of tech at ~45-55 (because ageism is very real), then I'll probably plan to die whenever I run out of money. If I can't make rent, and I can't work, and there's no help, suicide is an option to stop the pain. I'd rather be dead than homeless (because of how society treats them).
I already have my plans, going to build an 'exit pod'. Nitrogen asphyxiation with CO2 scrubbers, and some kind of tech to determine I really am dead and contact EMS (arduino+ekg or O2 SAT and a phone) with a message about the situation. Trying to decrease trauma to others because of my death.
The cruelty with which we treat normal people, even in the best situation on earth that ever has been, is absolutely shocking and disgusting.
It's hard to accept that human life has no intrinsic value: Once we're no longer useful to our 'betters', we are culled. If you cannot produce economic value, those in power think you are better off dead.
God help me if you decide that because you are giving me care, you also get to decide when and how I die. I want to decide that and if I choose to go at an appointed time with my family nearby and in a comfortable setting, then I will go a happy man.
Will everyone make a decision I agree with? Are many lives worth living even when they don't feel like it? Will families and loved ones not want to let go? Are some people not mentally well enough at the time to make such a decision? Yes to all. It's complicated and difficult, but it is only more complicated and more difficult when the state tries to create rules about what is morally right and not.
If someone is living in suffering, it is better to give them the option to end their life if they want, than to insist that they keep on living just because they “could” continue to live for many years more.
This seems like carte blanche to slowly take away all complex social care programs, and just have the resulting suffering people kill themselves.
This is you indirectly imposing your choice onto other people (e.g. you vote for a government which does the imposition on your behalf.)
I'm all for social programs (or whatever the equivalent of "few hundred dollars per month is"). But why not let the individual decide on whether to die or not?
No one should be confronted with the choice of whether to take their own life to make things simpler for others - living for your own sake, no matter how much of a burden you may be on others, is a basic right that assisted suicide programs can easily start infringing if not implemented very carefully.
Underneath all of this society is messaging that it has too many people, particularly a growing body of people not contributing in a substantial way to the well-being of that society. Some people are worth more dead than alive to government actuaries.
Problem with statements like that is defining "suffering" such that inappropriate situation like a depressed teenager isn't allowed to happen.
When you consider that dying of Covid was considered to be a fine sacrifice to make to keep the economy flowing, you realize there isn't really even a principled objection to dying under your own terms.
What you call "the economy" is actually people living normal lives, trying their best to make joy in a finite lifetime. It is exactly quality of life. Covid shutdowns exactly prioritized quantity over quality.
If as a society we cannot permit the risk dying of Covid or indeed any other risk in life, we may as well stick people in a pod a la battery cells in The Matrix so that they live maximally safe lives.
Anecdata: A long time ago I was a depressed teenager who would likely have passed any 'mature minor' test. If such a program was available at the time I would likely not be here today; it turns out that the intervening years have very much been worth living.
I don't agree with the bar being set as low as it seemingly will be in Canada's case.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xsVORMDqU0 This is a great video on the topic from Canadians, it's 90mins but has good info and different perspectives
Is life really that unimportant these days?
What matters is the rate of these problems, which you'll notice this article never lists. This seems to be a common trend among articles critical of this program.
It's possible there is no good data on how well the program is performing, but then you should be honest enough to admit that.
Personally, I think that in any wealthy country, even one person feeling that their life isn't worth continuing for purely economic reasons should be considered a failure of the entire government. I of course know we are nowhere near such an attitude being mainstream, but that is where my point is coming from.
I am very much afraid of right-wing governments feeling more and more empowered to say "if they don't like their living conditions, they can just ask for assisted suicide" as the ultimate alternbcative to any social investment.
Wait, isn't the right wing very much against assisted suicide in all forms?
Who said they have no interest in life? There are already clear examples of people choosing this who do want to continue living, but don't see a way to meet their own needs with the resources given to them.
Later down thread you switch to a "there is no interest in funding them" argument. Which is straight up wicked sorry. That's just saying regardless of whether you find life living, we don't find your life worth living, so expect you to end it.
I don't have any particular generalized moral objection to suicide per se. I believe people should be able to meet the end of their life on their own terms with dignity and agency. But I also know that we live in an unequal world, and that people will be, are now presented with this option when they would not otherwise choose it, when we don't find their lives worth living.
This is different than "forced to continue to live a life they have no interest in".
>Later down thread you switch to a "there is no interest in funding them" argument.
I didn't switch to anything. It was a premise of a specific argument in response to a specific claim.
>That's just saying regardless of whether you find life living, we don't find your life worth living, so expect you to end it.
This just has no relation whatsoever to anything I said.
>I don't have any particular generalized moral objection to suicide per se. I believe people should be able to meet the end of their life on their own terms with dignity and agency.
Great, we agree on that point. My further point is that those currently suffering should not bear the burden of our inability to collectively decide to fund further improvements to their quality of life.
The assisted part is someone pushing a man on fire off of a building. It might seem odd looked at rationally (What the heck, the man might have jumped on his own.) but I still feel comfortable saying there's something wrong here. I can't believe the only or best response is to shove him off. If by some horrible confluence of events then I would be putting all future efforts towards figuring out a better way to deal humanely with the same situation in the future not putting a set of long sticks on the rooftop so that future pushers would have a smaller chance of getting burned.
Articles about Canada's assisted dying program have been repeatedly posted here, and all of them seem to be quite clearly pushing a non-neutral agenda on the issue. The thing that most clearly stands out in this example is the heavy focus on anecdote and the underhanded use of context-free numbers meant to sound shocking, and you can see the effort working in the comments.
I'm pretty surprised, because I'd've imagined assisted dying programs would be one of the most embraced things by the "soft libertarian" sort of crowd attracted by this site. It would be nice to see articles that actually explored what was happening a bit more; there was a good example in The Guardian a couple of years ago that seemed like an interesting exploration of the issue, rather than a cart-before-the horse article like this https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/jan/18/death-on-demand...
> Those whose lives are diminished or weakened deserve special respect. Sick or handicapped persons should be helped to lead lives as normal as possible.
> Whatever its motives and means, direct euthanasia consists in putting an end to the lives of handicapped, sick, or dying persons. It is morally unacceptable.
> Thus an act or omission which, of itself or by intention, causes death in order to eliminate suffering constitutes a murder gravely contrary to the dignity of the human person and to the respect due to the living God, his Creator. The error of judgment into which one can fall in good faith does not change the nature of this murderous act, which must always be forbidden and excluded.
> Discontinuing medical procedures that are burdensome, dangerous, extraordinary, or disproportionate to the expected outcome can be legitimate; it is the refusal of “over-zealous” treatment. Here one does not will to cause death; one’s inability to impede it is merely accepted. The decisions should be made by the patient if he is competent and able or, if not, by those legally entitled to act for the patient, whose reasonable will and legitimate interests must always be respected.
> Even if death is thought imminent, the ordinary care owed to a sick person cannot be legitimately interrupted. The use of painkillers to alleviate the sufferings of the dying, even at the risk of shortening their days, can be morally in conformity with human dignity if death is not willed as either an end or a means, but only foreseen and tolerated as inevitable. Palliative care is a special form of disinterested charity. As such it should be encouraged.
> Everyone is responsible for his life before God who has given it to him. It is God who remains the sovereign Master of life. We are obliged to accept life gratefully and preserve it for his honor and the salvation of our souls. We are stewards, not owners, of the life God has entrusted to us. It is not ours to dispose of.
> Suicide contradicts the natural inclination of the human being to preserve and perpetuate his life. It is gravely contrary to the just love of self. It likewise offends love of neighbor because it unjustly breaks the ties of solidarity with family, nation, and other human societies to which we continue to have obligations. Suicide is contrary to love for the living God.
> If suicide is committed with the intention of setting an example, especially to the young, it also takes on the gravity of scandal. Voluntary co-operation in suicide is contrary to the moral law.
> Grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide.
> We should not despair of the eternal salvation of persons who have taken their own lives. By ways known to him alone, God can provide the opportunity for salutary repentance. The Church prays for persons who have taken their own lives.
Taken from the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Paragraphs 2276-2283
I think that given enough time this MAID thing will be commercialized and grossly abused.
I don’t think there will be negatives. There are only positives that can come with this.
- lots of people can’t take it anymore living in this cruel world without good job and economic prospects, or looking at the bleak environmental future
- less people on Earth will make the Earth have a chance of recovering
- labor will be more valued, less competition
- less demand for housing, making housing cheaper
- less demand for education, goods and services, making it lower in price
- less strain on the economy by people who can’t contribute
- we can donate the organs to healthy people who need it more
- we can use bodies for science