> Mary knows that she could control her pain if she could take vitamin pills, eat a special diet, and go to physiotherapy. She can’t afford it. “Mary identifies poverty as the driver of her MAID request,” Gibb-Carsley writes on a slide accompanying her talk, emphasizing the. “She does not want to die, but she’s suffering terribly and she’s been maxing out her credit cards. She has no other options.”
It seems excessively cruel to me to try and force people to live in misery big enough to make the want to kill themselves instead of alleviating the misery. Like, the article seems to frame the argument that MAID can be used to lobby for better welfare as a ridiculous idea, but that's really it: if the only thing keeping people in your society from killing themselves that it's hard and scary, what the fuck is your society doing to these people.
Eliminate MAID and these people will still suffer… because MAID isn’t the problem. They need better care and support in the first place.
This is a perverse sort of argument. I'm in favor of social services (UBI or otherwise) sufficient to prevent homelessness. There are a lot problematic things situations in this society. But these aren't going away tomorrow - in our world homeless will be with us for a while and you shouldn't add to the problem of homelessness the problem of social services making it easy to just end your life if you're threatened with homelessness.
1. Are people in poverty or with mental illness more likely to choose MAID on their own.
or
2. Are there people actively trying to encourage vulnerable populations to choose MAID?