Should there be the universal right-to-die?

[Frostnipped Todger]

My stepmother has advanced Motor Neurone Disease and can't eat, walk, or breathe without constant pain. She's literally waiting to drown in her own saliva because she is a UK citizen and they don't allow euthanasia. If I kept a dog in the same condition, I'd go to jail.
As with all things, a modicum of common sense is required. If someone is depressed, that's not a good enough reason. If someone has a terminal illness with no hope of a reprieve, I say that it should be an option.

 

[Kujo Jotaro]

As someone who has seen countless people die of old age and any number of diseases that kill the elderly (dementia, Parkinson's, CHF, etc...) I would say it should be allowed for the elderly and terminally ill under the condition that it's written out prior in very clear directions as to when it is appropriate to euthanize them. No one should have to make the decision about whether or not they're loved one should be euthanized no matter how horrible of a state that person is in. There needs to be written directions from said patient(like a DNR even if it is just a standard document), and approval by physicians, thing is I'm not sure physicians would ok euthanize at all. In my experience physicians do not treat dying patients, these patients are switched over to hospice care because physicians are not comfortable with even easing a patients inevitable death. This might be different elsewhere but my local hospitals won't even allow patients to be admitted to hospice before leaving , they're in the practice of healing people not "giving up on patients".

I understand where physician's come from on this point though, a commitment to life/health and preserving it is fundamental to proper practice of medicine. Allowing yourself to accept defeat even on the most hopeless of cases might slip into you accepting defeat on cases with reasonable but still unlikely odds. Once you cross that line where do you stop? This in many ways is similar to the abortion debate where lines are seemingly drawn arbitrarily, and questions of morality are determined by "science". The fundamental difference between this question and the question of abortion is that the life being terminated is one of a human being who at one point most likely had a semblance of consciousness that could express itself and be recognized by other consciousnesses. That's why I think if this was ever to be instituted it would be key that the individual express in very clearly written form when it is appropriate for their life to be ended, especially before they're in the full grips of whatever afflicts them.

 

[Zero Day Defense]

Yes, but only if you can prove that you gave yourself life.

No. Stop tearing down the moral underpinnings of society for muh convenience and because muh exceptions. Stop backsliding into barbarism.

Even the barbarians weren't this crazy.

 

[Taylor Swift's Ghostwrite]

I think as technology advances and we can keep people alive who would have died without it, we should be giving more people the option to peace out instead.

 

[queerape]

Canada is in the process of expanding their right to die law. Euthanasia is legal in Canada, but only if you are still able to consent to it at the moment of your death. So unlike a lot of other countries that allow it, you cannot currently give an advance directive in Canada. This of course is an issue if say, you are dying of Alzheimer's or brain metastatic cancer, and your disease may rob you of capacity before you want to go. The proposal in Canada is to allow advance directives for those who have a pathology that may rob them of capacity in an unpredictable manner or before they can get their affairs in order, get access to euthanasia and be ready to go.

Canada is also considering at some point in the future seeing if it is possible to extend medically assisted dying to those with untreatable psychiatric illness, which has been done in the Netherlands. They have put an 18 month moratorium on it to allow the House of Commons and Senate to think about it, and to allow physicians and the medical community to deliberate. It would require one to define when a mental illness is considered medically terminal. Of course we use heroic measures on those who are mentally ill and attempt suicide, but that is predicated on the assumption the condition they are suffering from is considered treatable to the point where they can be brought to the point to not wanting to or needing to commit suicide.

It may well be that some people are untreatable- they have tried nearly every modality of treatment for years and years, and have had no success. Why should we force someone with depression that has failed to respond to every single treatment there is to suffer for the entireity of a natural lifespan, just sort of existing in constant pain that no one can do anything about? Or someone with schizophrenia who cannot stop hearing voices and has lived their whole life in and out of psychiatric wards to no avail. There has even been cases of untreatable eating disorders where the treatments of force feeding themselves are causing more mental harm to the person than letting the person stop eating and drinking and letting the conditions run its natural course with palliative care only (an argument used in NJ to allow a woman with severe remitting anorexia to end her life by VSED). But how do we know at what point someone's mental illness is beyond treatment, when and how can we diagnose it as a terminal condition, and allow an assisted death? That's the question that has to be answered first.

 

[gangweedfan]

As long as tax money isnt used to pay for it feel free to kill yourself.

 

[Red Mask]

Yes. However, this has to be done very carefully as this can be an easy out for people who want an old/sick person gone(as mentioned before) and the choice can only be made BY the person suffering(advance directive also previously mentioned).

 

[SITHRAK!]

Should there be the universal right-to-die?​

YES.
Medical professional here. Orofacial prosthetist, epitheticist. I rebuild faces for a living.
Have seen people psychologically broken by not being able to afford a simple denture reline.
Have seen adult children drive $90k cars away from their parents living in poverty.
Have seen faces eaten away by cancer. Have tried to rebuild lives mauled by dogs.
Have seen heads stitched up like baseballs and skulls shattered like eggs.
Have created obturators for people who cannot eat, drink or speak without them.
Have dealt with Ehlers-Danlos, Cri du Chat, Neural tube defects, Roberts Syndrome and more.
I'm a eugenicist. And I've been made that way not only by my college medical ethics course, but also by contact with my patients.

 

[Cyclonus]

I mean logically incels should be allowed to kill themselves based on what we tell them. Women owe them nothing. The world owes them nothing. But they owe the world nothing either, including their existence. Why should we force them to live a life they find full of unbearable loneliness?

 

[Rich Evans Apologist]

I invite people curious on the topic to actually read into countries and state (or did more than Oregon allow it?) where it goes into practice. The number of people who kill themselves 'just cause' due to the availability is incredibly small, and the gatekeeping is strict and thorough.

Its applications are overwhelmingly for the conditions described by others here - terminal, painful illnesses and non-lives from which there is no recovery, which are decidedly very fucking common if you even remotely speak to someone who actually works in health care. This shit isn't a once-in-a-million scenario; it happens to a lot of people when they've only got 2-3 years left. I always find it funny when the moralspeak is used as a cover for the fact that people selfishly can't let go of their 80+ year old parents who are clearly only suffering and have nothing more to chase, who blow their life savings to prolong that unwanted existence for a few months all because consoomer society is so fucking afraid of acknowledging death.

For monkeybrains who no read good, here's an example of perhaps this policy's most liberal implementation, and how the gatekeeping does function to weed out people who are young and riddled with mental illness.

 

[Subtle]

Before or after reading this thread?
Yes.

 

[Not Really Here]

I invite people curious on the topic to actually read into countries and state (or did more than Oregon allow it?) where it goes into practice. The number of people who kill themselves 'just cause' due to the availability is incredibly small, and the gatekeeping is strict and thorough.

Its applications are overwhelmingly for the conditions described by others here - terminal, painful illnesses and non-lives from which there is no recovery, which are decidedly very fucking common if you even remotely speak to someone who actually works in health care. This shit isn't a once-in-a-million scenario; it happens to a lot of people when they've only got 2-3 years left. I always find it funny when the moralspeak is used as a cover for the fact that people selfishly can't let go of their 80+ year old parents who are clearly only suffering and have nothing more to chase, who blow their life savings to prolong that unwanted existence for a few months all because consoomer society is so fucking afraid of acknowledging death.

For monkeybrains who no read good, here's an example of perhaps this policy's most liberal implementation, and how the gatekeeping does function to weed out people who are young and riddled with mental illness.

About that reading thing-

A doctor accused of failing to verify consent before performing euthanasia on a dementia patient has been cleared of any wrongdoing by a Dutch court.
The 74-year-old patient, who died in 2016, had expressed a wish to be euthanised but also indicated that she wanted to determine the right time.

This article left out that the woman killed had to be restrained by her family while the "doctor" gave her a lethal injection.
Source

In January a young Dutch woman drank poison supplied by a doctor and lay down to die. Euthanasia and doctor-assisted suicide are legal in the Netherlands, so hers was a death sanctioned by the state. But Aurelia Brouwers was not terminally ill - she was allowed to end her life on account of her psychiatric illness.

Aurelia Brouwers argued she was competent to make the decision. But could a death wish have been a symptom of her psychiatric illness?

"I think you never can be 100% sure of that," says Kit Vanmechelen. "But you must have done everything to help them diminish the symptoms of their pathology. In personality disorders a death wish isn't uncommon.

Source

Although he supported the 2002 euthanasia law at the time, Boer now regrets that it didn’t stipulate that the patient must be competent at the time of termination, and that if possible the patient should administer the fatal dose themselves. Boer is also concerned about the psychological effect on doctors of killing someone with a substantial life expectancy: “When you euthanise a final-stage cancer patient, you know that even if your decision is problematic, that person would have died anyway. But when that person might have lived decades, what is always in your mind is that they might have found a new balance in their life.”

A category of euthanasia request that Dutch doctors commonly reject is that of a mentally ill person whose desire to die could be interpreted as a symptom of a treatable psychiatric disease – Eelco de Gooijer, in other words. Eelco was turned down by two doctors in Tilburg; one of them balked at doing the deed because she was pregnant. In desperation, Eelco turned to the Levenseindekliniek. With its ideological commitment to euthanasia and cadre of specialist doctors, it has done much to help widen the scope of the practice, and one of its teams ended Eelco’s misery on 23 November 2016. A second team from the same clinic killed another psychologically disturbed youngster, Aurelia Brouwers, early last year.

Source
If you want to anhero yourself I don't care have fun with it, it's far more disturbing when the government sanctions killing people while at the same time banning execution for murderers and rapists as being too extreme.
With the state of "laws" currently being not what was written down but what a court later decides is reasonable the question isn't what any particular law looks like in the moment.

 

[(((Obar Lazcano Kamz)))]

yes and it should be decided by your government without your consent.

 

[Rich Evans Apologist]

This article left out that the woman killed had to be restrained by her family while the "doctor" gave her a lethal injection.

Yeah, an Alzheimer's patient in their 70s will definitely be able to remember to ask for and set the time proper for their death.
Good thing she didn't write in her certified will that she wanted to be euthanized if her condition worsened significantly. This case can then be seen as a litmus test of whether a living will qualifies as consent for the purposes of the dutch law, or if it hinges literally on verbal permission. It is also abundantly clear that the family was on board with this, probably because they weren't selfish pricks that wanted to prolong her suffering so they could delay feeling bad.

Source

This article supports my argument that the process is incredibly thorough and involves jumping through a lot of hoops to get there. Of note:
"The clinic oversaw 65 of the 83 deaths approved on psychiatric grounds in the Netherlands last year, though only about 10% of psychiatric applications are approved, and the process can take years."
83 deaths in a year wowzers the netherlands is gonna be a graveyard.
(granted the AP article suggests that there are 6000 cases of euthanasia more broadly, which is a more believable and significant number)
"In RTL's film, Aurelia Brouwers talks about attempts to end her own life.
"I think I tried about 20 times. I was critical a few times, but I often got to hear that my heart and lungs were so healthy. The doctors said, 'It's a miracle, she made it.'""
I think she might have been a little serious about dying, what with that 20 attempts thing.

Source

Euthanasia of the young and old are often conflated. This article and the one above reflect that there's still a lot of controversy for people who are suffering, especially from mental illness, but are young. This controversy and these questions are then used as a cudgel in the far-more-common end-of-life situation instances.
Rosy optimism that "things will get better" seems abundantly misplaced if you look at suicide statistics and life expectancy decreases, but so too is a cold belief that all people who indicate they want to die will continue to do so.

I find the stipulation that the patient should administer the dosage to themselves to be misguided, but that the patient should be able to back out even at the last second - and to have to confirm their willingness - is already largely what happens. Making it codified rather than de facto would be good - as the stories of the youths point out, they essentially take long, extended holidays before the date to spend with the finer points of life, during which they are encouraged to opt out of the treatment if their minds have changed at all. This is after forcing them to jump through all of the various hoops to even get put on this path - if someone really wants to die that badly and is never deterred, I don't know what you're supposed to say to them. The woman in the economist video backs out at the last second and opts to continue on.

With the state of "laws" currently being not what was written down but what a court later decides is reasonable the question isn't what any particular law looks like in the moment.

Not related to this topic in specific, but this is why laws should be written with much more iron-clad wording. Look at almost any legislation cited in a lot of these instances, and you find they're hardly exhaustive of possible scenarios and situations, and rely wholly on interpretation. Courts have since the notion of judicial review practiced this process of clarification, which can always be overwritten by the legislature.

If you want to anhero yourself I don't care have fun with it, it's far more disturbing when the government sanctions killing people while at the same time banning execution for murderers and rapists as being too extreme.

Depends on the logic applied - if you can prove without a doubt that someone is guilty of rape or murder, absolutely without a shred of potential error, then capital punishment should be on the table. Europeans see it as pointless because it is ineffective as a deterrent - and it is; American insistence that the death penalty lowers rates of violent crime is retarded and unsupported emotional thinking. I'm not sure on what other grounds Europeans really oppose the practice beyond the notion of 'barbarism,' which gets them Rottinghams.
But if you just want to eject someone from existence and not be burdened by them, by all means. I certainly wish this argument was applied to 100% guilty and convicted pedophile sex offenders, at the very least.

 

[Not Really Here]

Yeah, an Alzheimer's patient in their 70s will definitely be able to remember to ask for and set the time proper for their death.
Good thing she didn't write in her certified will that she wanted to be euthanized if her condition worsened significantly. This case can then be seen as a litmus test of whether a living will qualifies as consent for the purposes of the dutch law, or if it hinges literally on verbal permission. It is also abundantly clear that the family was on board with this, probably because they weren't selfish pricks that wanted to prolong her suffering so they could delay feeling bad.

This article supports my argument that the process is incredibly thorough and involves jumping through a lot of hoops to get there. Of note:
"The clinic oversaw 65 of the 83 deaths approved on psychiatric grounds in the Netherlands last year, though only about 10% of psychiatric applications are approved, and the process can take years."
83 deaths in a year wowzers the netherlands is gonna be a graveyard.
"In RTL's film, Aurelia Brouwers talks about attempts to end her own life.
"I think I tried about 20 times. I was critical a few times, but I often got to hear that my heart and lungs were so healthy. The doctors said, 'It's a miracle, she made it.'""
I think she might have been a little serious about dying, what with that 20 attempts thing.

Yeah, it's well known that suicide takes dozens of attempts and a series of attempts are never a cry for help.
I note you dismissed the fact that 2 other clinics refused.

Euthanasia of the young and old are often conflated. This article and the one above reflect that there's still a lot of controversy for people who are suffering, especially from mental illness, but are young. This controversy and these questions are then used as a cudgel in the far-more-common end-of-life situation instances.
Rosy optimism that "things will get better" seems abundantly misplaced if you look at suicide statistics and life expectancy decreases, but so too is a cold belief that all people who indicate they want to die will continue to do so.

I find the stipulation that the patient should administer the dosage to themselves to be misguided, but that the patient should be able to back out even at the last second - and to have to confirm their willingness - is already largely what happens. Making it codified rather than de facto would be good - as the stories of the youths point out, they essentially take long, extended holidays before the date to spend with the finer points of life, during which they are encouraged to opt out of the treatment if their minds have changed at all. This is after forcing them to jump through all of the various hoops to even get put on this path - if someone really wants to die that badly and is never deterred, I don't know what you're supposed to say to them. The woman in the economist video backs out at the last second and opts to continue on.

"largely what already happens" But not always, meaning people are killed against their express wishes with state approval.

Not related to this topic in specific, but this is why laws should be written with much more iron-clad wording. Look at almost any legislation cited in a lot of these instances, and you find they're hardly exhaustive of possible scenarios and situations, and rely wholly on interpretation. Courts have since the notion of judicial review practiced this process of clarification, which can always be overwritten by the legislature.

The fact that "shall not be abridged" is applied as "whenever the government feels like it" means that no law, no matter how long and "exhaustive of possible scenarios and situations" will be applied as voted on. This isn't a theory, this is history.

Depends on the logic applied - if you can prove without a doubt that someone is guilty of rape or murder, absolutely without a shred of potential error, then capital punishment should be on the table. [/QUOTE]
And yet that standard doesn't apply when a doctor kills you while your family is holding you down and you are screaming no. Strange that.

Europeans see it as pointless because it is ineffective as a deterrent - and it is; American insistence that the death penalty lowers rates of violent crime is retarded and unsupported emotional thinking. .

I've literally never heard the argument that the death penalty lowers rates of violent crime other than making it impossible for a murderer to murder again.
Where exactly are you hearing this argument from.

 

[Rich Evans Apologist]

Yeah, it's well known that suicide takes dozens of attempts and a series of attempts are never a cry for help.
I note you dismissed the fact that 2 other clinics refused.

It's directly mentioned that she has contact with friends and family and a whole slew of medical personnel, so... what more help was she crying for? Were you gonna read her a bible verse and tell her that it'll all get better on the other side of the hill or something?

That two other clinics refused is an example of the process being thorough. She went through two refusals and then went to this specialized last-ditch body, which is itself already controversial and approves a small minority of applications. She did not waltz in to a clinic and get her lethal injection in a single go - little harder than getting hormones in the US.

"largely what already happens" But not always, meaning people are killed against their express wishes with state approval.

Yes, cases in which someone suffers from extreme dementia / alzheimer's, or is a half-dead nonverbal vegetable with no chance of recovery are thorny little cases in which this standard is hard to apply. Unless you believe in psychics, I suppose.

The fact that "shall not be abridged" is applied as "whenever the government feels like it" means that no law, no matter how long and "exhaustive of possible scenarios and situations" will be applied as voted on. This isn't a theory, this is history.

I forgot that the US constitution is the global landmark, so I'll narrow this one down:
Marbury v. Madison happened in 1803. Plessy v. Ferguson was 1896.
Courts have always interpreted unclear and ambiguous bills, laws, and statutes. It's not new; it's just that you're not the zeitgeist anymore.

And yet that standard doesn't apply when a doctor kills you while your family is holding you down and you are screaming no. Strange that.

The articles don't mention screaming, but I'll assume she was thrashing around wildly. You are aware what Alzheimer's does to a brain, right? So even if someone, when lucid, writes in their 100% verified true & honest living will that "if my condition seriously worsens, euthanize me," we are to disregard both that whim and the reality of Alzheimer's to assume they are fully lucid... so they can live a few months longer?

What, are you afraid your kids are going to strap you down once you get Alzheimer's? Just don't write in your living will that you want to be put down if you become seriously worse, and you can burden them well into your 90s.

I've literally never heard the argument that the death penalty lowers rates of violent crime other than making it impossible for a murderer to murder again.
Where exactly are you hearing this argument from.

You've never heard someone say that we should have the death penalty for sex crimes or mass shooters or whatever in order to deter others from doing those crimes?
You can find it all over facebook and twitter whenever there's an arrest / conviction / etc related to the topics.
No serious political bodies make this argument, sure, but I was talking about European perceptions of the US's interest in capital punishment.

 

[Darksy DePhil]

There have been cases where family wanted rid of troublesome old and demented relatives.

I see nothing wrong in that case. Why should some family have to put up with a really old parent with extreme anger issues or some other unstable mental condition which makes life for everyone around them hell?
Doesn't have to be with euthanasia, though.

 

[No. 7 cat]

I see nothing wrong in that case. Why should some family have to put up with a really old parent with extreme anger issues or some other unstable mental condition which makes life for everyone around them hell?
Doesn't have to be with euthanasia, though.

This older person should still have a right to their life. We all get cranky when older.

 

[ConfederateIrishman]

You would have to be absolutely retarded to trust modern society in handling this 'right' with the proper responsibility it deserves.

I could also rant how the concept of 'rights' has only led to everything by default not being allowed unless it is explicitly given as a 'right', instead of the other way around where you had a comparatively much smaller list of things you explicitly can not do, but that is a completely different subject.

tl;dr: Removing yet another Taboo will be bad; Oh, and it will happen, so have fun with that.

 

[Syaoran Li]

Yes. I do think people should have that right.