Because we had so many suicidal and parasuicidal people over the years at my hospital, these discussions came up a lot. The changes in the Netherlands and Canada came after I semi-retired. I have seen honest and dishonest advocates for assisted suicide, and certainly have listened to many people use the tactic of making a pronouncement that they dare you to contradict (particularly if they are a powerful person) and then saying "But I don't want to talk about it.*" Some were motivated by being unable to even imagine how terrible certain situations must be, and grateful that there seemed to be some painless way out of it. Tender-hearted people. Other were pretty callous, that they wouldn't want that life and so figured no one else would either. (People feel differently when they get there, when they actually are 80 years old or in a wheelchair or living alone with no relatives nearby. Humans adjust.)
I think just looking at the graph for a minute is important, just so we are all dealing with the reality of what is occurring. Today.
Other suicides barely decreased, so this is not medically assisting people who were going to commit suicide, this is almost entirely a new crop.
Farther down in the thread Stone says
The whole point of all the stuff we did to try to contain Covid WAS TO PROTECT VULNERABLE PEOPLE WITH FEW YEARS LEFT. That was the entire point. COVID was never an existential threat to fit young healthy people. The people COVID threatened were, as a class, highly MAID eligible!
And
Note that although in 2021 MAID represented just 3.2% of deaths, MAID cases represented over 8% of all cancer cases and almost 7% of all neurological cases, including memory disorders. I'm curious what the consent standards for euthanizing somebody with a memory disorder is.
Let me assure you that is doctor-dependent and agency dependent. And some of those will decide you don;t have a very good lif - hell, they wouldn't want it, so you must not either.
Michel Houellebecq also had a recent essay in Harpers on assisted suicide. I believe there is a single acknowledged argument for suicide - every argument for allowing assisted suicide is ultimately an argument for allowing suicide per se - "if your life sucks you should have the freedom to end it." I believe I see the force of that argument, that suffering is bad, and it's nobody else's damned business what people do. However, I think that few people actually support this argument out to its end, and the political support comes from deception that these are people in great pain (uh, morphine and its derivatives), or great psychological pain (that is nearly always temporary), or are hopeless (the number of years of expected life for those who elect this increases every year. Also, people who believe for themselves it is no big deal are very aggressive and dismissive that you should feel the same way, you fools, you fools.
There is also the tendency or people in every country to defend it to others, so Canadians and Dutch will insist that things are just wonderful where they are and only jealous haters disagree. (I think Scandinavians are particularly susceptible to this.)
And of course, just as was predicted and is always denied, it is being applied to disabled children and to old people who are sucking up monetary resources from the rest of the family ("Jared wants to go to college, Gram" is never said, but always known). I heard people making this argument as far back as 1986. From that thread
I do expect everybody reasonable to look at the scale and slope of that line and demand some actual accountability for the personnel involved here, a real accounting, and ideally stricter standards more similar to what other jurisdictions use.
Exactly. Show that you aren't evading the issue and you have a better intellectual case - though you know as well as I do that you have just sacrificed the political persuasion you were hoping for if you admit this. Your choice.
Richard Hanania apparently doesn't evade the issue. He does believe that - let me try and state this neutrally - some lives are more worth living than others, and our laws and policy funding should recognise this. Lyman Stone grudgingly respects the lack of hypocrisy, anyway.
*My usual cartoon for this attitude, again.
We were careful to try to stay healthy on our trip there last summer.
ReplyDeleteSeriously, that graph is scary. MAID service, for cleaning out the "trash."
ReplyDeleteThe number trend exactly parallels abortion. If unborn Americans count as Americans, abortion is the leading cause of death among Americans. It outstrips both cancer and heart disease; some years, it's outdone both.
ReplyDeleteThe hard truth is that humanity is very ready to kill the weak to make things more pleasant for those with power. 'Intentionally caused death of another human' is already the leading cause of death without assisted suicide; soon it will smoke to the sun.
Well put.
ReplyDeleteI have had had two friends elect to be put down. They did this with their family around them. Both were terminal and suffering. In both cases the family was pleased by this end.
ReplyDeleteMy father on the other hand took a very long time to die of liver cancer and suffered greatly, as did all those around him. When the nurse stuffed a catheter into him, he gave up, but that is what it took. I thanked her for her service in finishing the rather epic end game, he did not want to play out.
I like the Canadian way myself.
@ Pen Gun - I won my bet that you would argue from anecdotes and agree entirely with whatever the Canadians did. It wasn't much in monetary value, but it was satisfying.
ReplyDeleteIt is an entirely civilized thing to do. So difficult for Americans.
ReplyDeleteYou’re not doing much for assisted suicide, but you’re sure killing my appetite for civilization.
ReplyDeleteI spoke from experience and simply told you what happened. That you and our dear proprietor would do what you can to make that less valuable, is entirely expected.
ReplyDeleteWho did you bet with AVI?
Have you watched people you loved die? I have, quite a few of them now, and its their suffering I like to have cut short.
ReplyDeleteMy friend Wolf died from COPD and this was before we allowed euthanasia in Canada. All he could do as his lungs disintegrated, was to have a "do not resuscitate" flag put on his case so the ambulance people who brought him back again and again, eventually let him die. He died of not being able to breathe. Suffocated in fact.
"Have you watched people you loved die? I have, quite a few of them now, and its their suffering I like to have cut short."
ReplyDeleteYou have no right to ask me a question like that, and are not entitled to an answer. But yes, I sat by the bed of the man I loved best in the world and watched him die, slowly, horribly, suffering such pain that he lost all fear of death itself.
Of course I understand the desire to end such suffering. I could have ended that suffering in a few seconds with my own hands. It is not that no one could want to do such a thing; the problem is that there are so many reasons to want such things.
When we turn loose of this moral principle, the first excuse licenses every excuse. Young mothers soon kill more people than cancer; nurses, as the original post points out, soon outkill the highway.
Moral laws don't exist to restrain people from doing things that no one would ever want. No law is needed to bar unwanted things. They exist to keep us from doing things we might heartily want. They exist to keep us from naming ourselves blessed, helpful, kind, 'civilized' while we stack the bodies of the weak and unwanted to the sky.