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Comment by RecycledEle | Hacker News Reader

You can always kill yourself.

Codifying medically assisted suicide into law would lead to abuses. I recall a case where family members and doctors held someone down who was fighting and forced lethal poison down the person's throat.

At the very least, we must have mandatory video recording and reporting of everything related to an assisted suicide and a mandatory life-without-parole sentence for those convicted of abusing legal euthanasia. We can not let doctors hold someone down and force poison down their throats then only get a few years in prison.

This is too much like the abortion debate where babies who survived attempted abortions were left to die instead of being cared for.

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>You can always kill yourself.

Mostly technically true. Once you're locked in, or paralyzed, it becomes quite more difficult.

But right now, most suicide methods that are available live in the less pleasant octants of the availability/suffering/uncertainty space. We used to have some fairly pleasant -- by comparison -- deaths available to us but they're getting harder to access, leaving the nasty route behind. Coal gas? Gone the way of Plath. Barbiturates? Out-moded now, know a vet? It isn't like you can nip down to the corner for some laudanum like back in the day.

> recall a case where family members and doctors held someone down who was fighting and forced lethal poison down the person's throat

Shockingly, this is not a legitimate method of euthanasia. At the point that you’ve defrauded an autopsy to that degree, you could just have a doctor shoot them in the head and write heart attack on the death certificate.

> You can always kill yourself.

This is usually painful and unpleasant, and also difficult for people with serious impairments (like ALS, for example). Perhaps euthanasia should be legal and perhaps not, but in any case the quick and painless death available via injection is very different from the death you would experience from hanging yourself (for example). There are dignified deaths and undignified deaths, and I think we should be clear about this distinction.

I call B.S. on this.

There is a word for killing someone against their will. It is murder. You may be surprised to find that murders still happen despite it being illegal pretty much everywhere.

We allow euthanaisa for pets because it is more humane than letting them suffer. For some reason that doesn't apply to people?

Anyway, I am guessing you have not witnessed someone you care about slowly die in agony. The theoretical abuse angle doesn't hold up to that reality.

if you have ALS, and are bound to your wheelchair, how do you accomplish this?

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