I disagree with this:
> 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
> 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.