Euthanasia

Canada boasts one of the world’s highest assisted-death rates, supposedly enabling the terminally ill to die with dignity. But this suicide program increasingly resembles a dystopian replacement for care services, exchanging social welfare for euthanasia. Jacobin on X

Please note when reading the report that Jacobin is a secular socialist. 

Indeed, last year, Jeremy Appel argued that MAiD was “beginning to look like a dystopian end run around the cost of providing social welfare.” Initially supportive, he changed his mind on MAiD as he considered that the decisions people make are not strictly speaking individual but are instead collectively shaped and sometimes “the product of social circumstances, which are outside of their control.” When we don’t care for one another, what do we end up with?

The slippery slope has always been the danger, and somehow the advocates have consistently ignored this. They have played on the anecdote, the particular type of instance where a decent person who has medically impossible difficulties has decided in clear mind and with noble, Western-Intellectual-Historically-Defensible motives, that death shall be the answer, and for once, even arch-liberals decide that they are going to be left-libertarians for a day (as with drugs and abortion) and pearl clutch that anyone should deny a person this boon.

The problem is that this is only one type of anecdote that applies.  Yes, it tugs at the heartstrings - so do the others, of loved ones who do not have to be consulted when wife and mother in one of her triennial bouts of depression related to her migraines decides that she has had enough and lets the government off her while no one is looking.

Oh yes, that absolutely happens now in Canada, as it has happened in the Netherlands for over two decades and is now a commonplace, an elephant in the room that goes unmentioned among the polite people. I worked with people who were medical and social-service professionals, and yet even among that group the thinking had seldom gone beyond the imagining of one or two scenarios, often based on a single relative or neighbor they had known about. The was sometimes, additionally, some patients they had treated in their careers, but even then the details were sketchy.  I tended to be vaguely in favor of euthanasia then, but realised when reading some National Review articles that I had not actually thought very hard about it, so I may be projecting. (The NR articles were heavy on what this said about our culture and where the acceptance of euthanasia suggested our culture was going, which to me seemed to bypass the questions of "Is this moral?  Is it right?  Is it defensible in some situations?")

It often only amounts to a person trying to get across the idea that they really, really hate to see someone suffer. Well, so do we all. But that leads to questions rather than answers them, doesn't it?

I worry about the follow-on effects for individuals.  As it becomes more acceptable to "let" people choose death when they are (unspoken) increasingly expensive and inconvenient, it becomes more likely for people who feel expensive and inconvenient - and they may well be so - to feel they have some obligation to let everyone else off the hook. "Oh, don't bother about me, I'll be fine.  Don't trouble yourself Sammy. I'd hate to be a burden," is the phrase common now. I very much understand that.  I have a horror of being a burden myself and can see putting up with a lot of privation for that purpose. But...

We know stories about good deaths and stories about bad deaths.  We seldom organise them into clear thinking unless forced to, and Advance Directives can sometimes do this. As with many of lifes's difficulties and tragedies, we don't think about such things objectively beforehand, and are unable to think about them objectively when emergencies come upon us with all their emotions.