I can't even imagine how hard it must be to have an incurable, debilitating illness and be obliged to endure it without any easy way out.
Which is mostly a good thing, as it leaves some room for relenting.
> People should be able to go as they wish, it's bodily autonomy.
There's a difference between being able to go as you wish, and being able to go as an impulse you can't take back.
Your right to "go how you wish" ends when it impacts others. For example, if you jump off a building there's a good chance you could kill a person you land on.
Then there's emotional trama. If you feed yourself to the lions at the zoo, you've harmed the onlookers and likely given people/children PTSD.
Also, jurisdictions are increasingly allowing assisted death in non-terminal cases. For example, Canada is poised to expand its assisted death program to individuals with mental illness. That is effectively carte blanche for anyone to access assisted dying.
But not by just getting drunk one evening and deciding to end it all! I have to repeat the question: you really don't think there's a moral distinction to be made here?
Yes, I'm sure we'll see growth in self-inflicted, fatal gunshot wounds, administered while surrounded by their loved ones.
There is no such thing as a good gun death.
The issue with guns and quick access to death is suicide can often be impulsive. Something hits wrong, a traumatic event happens, or just a temporary depression. All of those can lead to death by suicide that wouldn't have otherwise happen.
There needs to be nuance. I fully support someone's right to die by suicide, but I also support a waiting period with plenty of "opt out" opportunities.
It also does not have to be cruel or painful. We have a painless methods for someone to die.
Even if we take "you can impulsively shoot yourself at a moment's notice" as a good thing (I don't think it is), none of that is correct:
1. Any gun will do, and france (and more generally europe) has extensive allowance for hunting and sports shooting, both of which can easily be used to try to kill yourself.
2. Try being an important word here, fucking up a gun suicide attempt is a common occurrence and can leave you extensively maimed and debilitated (e.g. gun pointed too high, recoil moves the gun and blows up your entire face leaving you alive, gun pointed too low, bullet hits the palate or misses the skull entirely and hits the spine, ...)
3. Whether successful or not, finding a gun-suicide is one of the worst discoveries you can make, to say nothing of the cleanup (mostly in case of success).
While a gun is not the worst suicide method by a mile (train, car, or cop involve and endanger other people), it's still a shitty one.
That "side effect" is is not because of impulse buying and getting guns on short notice. In fact, there's a mandatory waiting period in 1/5th of US states (10 days in California) specifically to prevent that situation, which seems like a _very_ good idea to me. It's about a) getting them without learning a large amount of material (not everyone memorizes things as easily as engineers), and b) without approval buy someone who might actually object.
To get a gun in France, you need a hunting/sports license. The hunting license requires a 1-day theoretical and practical exam, as well as a medical exam that is specifically meant to verify if the physical and mental health is compatible with the stated purpose of the purchase. Whereas in the US, you need at most a trivial knowledge test (firearms safety certificate, with questions like in which direction to point the gun. possible answers: safest possible direction, up, down, north (!) [1]) to buy a firearm (hunter's safety education is only required to purchase a hunting license, not a gun).
And regarding your third point, sure, but the solution to that is to provide a better, legal, safe and professionally supervised pathway. Anything else makes as much sense as writing a law that bans cancer.
[1] https://oag.ca.gov/sites/all/files/agweb/pdfs/firearms/forms...
Cool story but that’s got nothing to do with my comment.
> That "side effect" is is not because of impulse buying
The impulse I’m talking about is once you have a gun in your home. Going out to buy a gun to shoot yourself seems unlikely as there’s plenty if faster ways to commit suicide along the way unless you live next door to a gun shop.
> And regarding your third point, sure, but the solution to that is to provide a better, legal, safe and professionally supervised pathway.
A better, legal, safe, and professionally supervised pathway… to shooting yourself tanks to the second amendment?
You do realise I was replying to a specific comment yeah?
And I meant a better pathway through the medical system, not involving firearms. Using guns for that seems all around awful, and it is sad if people do see that as their most realistic option.
The majority of those who severely defend the 2nd amendment are conservative and thusly - it won't be handled.
It's as you state, morally bad, to take ones own life. That's the perception/belief setting idea for conservatives and the actual thing you're going against. Reality/facts actually have a very difficult time changing people's beliefs as we've seen with COVID, drugs, etc.
What does this mean? Just trying to understand the assumption being made about me.
Yet for some reason most folks would be fine with former and strongly reject the latter, maybe due to religious dogmas around suicide.
Anyway this way out of topic, most folks going through this in ie Switzerland would be barely able to hold the gun properly. Its much more about dying with dignity (which gun has 0) and ending it all with power over one's fate, instead of misery dragging out for months and years, of which elderly homes are choke full.
I would encourage anyone who is interested to review medical literature on the subject. Even a shotgun wound to the head is survivable if the weapon is not suitably oriented. In the least fortunate cases, both of the eyes, nose, and/or jaw may be removed, along with the rest of the face, without resulting in death.
It is not without reason that qualifying individuals are willing to pay aid societies in Switzerland thousands of US dollars for assistance in ending their lives. The required lethal dose of barbiturates is incredibly difficult to obtain legally.
Perhaps in the near future, firearm suicides will be considered along the same lines as back-alley abortions, a barbaric practice made necessary by our denial of a basic human right.
There's a reason professional medical assistance is needed. Human bodies are pretty resilient and as an amateur you often have no experience in the matter. Professional do.
The professional medical bit would mostly be to ensure proper oversight, proper handling of the remains, and allow the service to be provided to people physically incapable of doing so on their own.
The sooner the better. You don't want the body to stay undetected for any period of time.
Or the simple fact many people don't know that most just deceased people release some poop and pee.
Neutral gas asphyxiation (“exit bags”).
It’s possible to screw up but fairly limited, I think the only real risk is getting found too soon. That aside it’s reportedly a really calm way to go.
> I have a hard time coming up with examples, as after all the body has to be disposed off eventually.
Oh yes unless you throw yourself in a volcano that’s always going to be an issue. It’s mostly the other bits which the method has an impact on.
Well I guess an other option is a diving suicide, but that requires a lot of planning and certifications so seems unlikely to be worth.
> But human rights advocates say the country’s regulations lack necessary safeguards, devalue the lives of disabled people and are prompting doctors and health workers to suggest the procedure to those who might not otherwise consider it.
In order to cut healthcare costs, assisted suicide is thrust upon people as an option. What's worse: having people with a debilitating illness suffer through it, or having everyone with a debilitating illness at a certain age get pressured by medical personnel into putting themselves on death row "for the common good"?
A person must have the right to chose the terms of their own existence.
A person shouldn't be pressured into that choice due to costs.
> A person must have the right to chose the terms of their own existence.
In the sense that a person doesn't have the right to choose to die, and shouldn't have the right to make that decision on behalf of someone else
But the harder you make it to do so, the more likely whatever method they end up choosing will harm someone else.
A peaceful end with safe, regulated medications in an isolated enviroment is preferable to people jumping off buildings or in front of trains or in front of cars.
It's one thing to be able to do something, it's another thing to inform the person of the ability to do something and put pressure on them like this (a real conversion in Canada between a patient and hospital administrator):
> “Roger, this is not my show,” the ethicist responded. “My piece of this was to talk to you, (to see) if you had an interest in assisted dying.”
And also jumping off buildings or in front of cars is a relatively uncommon way of committing suicide
Anecdotal tales of incompetence do not justify the removal of a person's basic right of self.
When Nazi’s put people in gas chambers they used these kinds of semantic arguments to brainwash people into committing atrocities. No one knows what happens after or when we die. We found out after years in the US, after executions by injection which was considered humane was actually excruciatingly painful but the prisoners couldn’t scream because they were effectively paralyzed. The whole idea of this raises red flags to me.
I don't see how that's possible. Sure, the egregious cases by healthcare professionals can be prevented, but I don't see how you can prevent the soft pressure from friends and family, or even just self imposed guilt on the part of the patient.
People who are sick often have to deal with depression. Feelings of being helpless and worthless are only going to be made worse knowing they are effectively choosing to be a burden by not allowing themselves to be killed. I would imagine a great many people who are not ready to die would do so out of a sense of shame or guilt and that seems really terrible to me.
Palliative care and avoiding treatment that unnecessarily prolongs life can go a long way to easing the difficulty of dying from illness and I think are more humane than asking, explicitly or implicitly, for the disabled or dying to decide when they should die during what is certainly already a very difficult time.
I don't think this functions as a principle. It only seems like it applies very narrowly to the situation of ending one's life.
People don't have a right to choose where, how, or to whom they're born. They don't get to select which aptitudes they have or where they struggle. There's very little they can do to change a great many things about their lives, but this doesn't strike us as a "violation of their rights" as much as "a fact of the human condition."
I think you need an argument as to why the specific situation of choosing how and when to end one's life ought to be different.
Death does come. When and how is (usually) not chosen by the person who dies. This seems like it's as much a part of the human condition as the randomness around being born.
Obviously, you can't dictate what things happen to you, only how you respond to them.
> In one recording obtained by the AP, the hospital’s director of ethics told Foley that for him to remain in the hospital, it would cost “north of $1,500 a day.” Foley replied that mentioning fees felt like coercion and asked what plan there was for his long-term care.
> “Roger, this is not my show,” the ethicist responded. “My piece of this was to talk to you, (to see) if you had an interest in assisted dying.”
> Foley said he had never previously mentioned euthanasia. The hospital says there is no prohibition on staff raising the issue.
Wow. This does feel hazardous to me.
I used to be very much in favour of legalised euthanasia but I'm a lot less certain after reading about what it's actually looking like in practice in Canada - where the results seem horrifying.
I live in a state (W.Australia) with legal assisted death and I have no specific opinion on what is actually happening in Canada (a peer Commonwealth country) .. but I can see that much of what there is to read on the matter is strongly bent toward the worst possible presentation.
Eg: When I read horrified accounts of social workers recommending death to (otherwise) healthy disabled people I too am shocked .. and then I read elsewhere that this is the isolated practice of individuals whose behaviour is being hauled over the coals at tribunal hearings into "this is how not to do this".
It's a charged issue and no system can ever be perfect. The question for Canada is how much effort is going into oversight and keeping things ethical.
https://toronto.citynews.ca/2022/10/13/medical-assistance-de...
> “I don’t want to die but I don’t want to be homeless more than I don’t want to die,” shared Farsoud.
One doctor has already signed off on his euthanasia and he only needs one more.
I don't know how common this kind of story is but it shouldn't be ignored - and it's the exact kind of thing that all those scary right wing monsters warned would happen if we didn't listen to them.
The fact that one doctor has confirmed he meets one (of several) criteria (which is physical suffering due to a disability that is intolerable and cannot be relieved) is a factoid.
At this point he has not been approved, and in the state I live in, on the face of the article, would not be approved, at the very least not without the intervention of counseling and effective welfare assistance.
You're correct, this is the exact kind of story scary right wing monsters amplify and use to suggest that any day now we'll be stacking the corpes of the homeless in carts and rolling them off to the landfill.
I'm guessing their endgame here is improve support for the homeless?
Yeah, .. right.
I don't think this issue has been politicized yet (at least in the US). Has it been politicized in Canada or something?
My perhaps incorrect view from afar (Australia) is that a great many events in Canada get politicized in the US press with the cooperation of some Canadians with less mainstream views.
Canadian Health Care is often smeared (like the UK NHS) as it would otherwise serve to shaow that better than "Obamacare" is feasible, etc.
Ahh yes, it's only a couple of bad apples and not the system in place that's enabling their behavior
Sometimes the slope really is slippery.