This seems to me like good enough safeguards, don't you think?
This seems to me like good enough safeguards, don't you think?
How do you even measure if it's working "well" in Canada? They have a process. There is no way to question the people who went through with it whether, on reflection, it was their own free will.
But of course looking at how others do it is a good starting place for further analysis and I'll go now and educate myself.
No. I think it’s too much.
Nobody else should be deciding that my mind is unsound.
And if my body being “unsound” is a reason that makes it OK to want to die, why should an “unsound” mind be different?
Keep mind: I'm not asking "Do those cases ever happen"? Of course they do. There's already been stories. The question is what are the statistics. Every policy, every procedure, every decision can have mistakes and negative outcomes. Some homeless and disabled people have been offered euthanasia. Those cases should be investigated and the policies should be updated. But nothing will be perfect.
You can say "if you can't have a perfect system then you shouldn't have it at all." and while that may be philosophically justifiable in the same way that "I'd rather let 10,000 guilty people go free than convict 1 innocent person" is, but it's important to remember that despite that we still convict innocent people.
Some trans people regret their transition. They're a tiny minority. Some people abuse welfare. They're a tiny minority. Some people are pushed towards euthanasia when they shouldn't be. They're a tiny minority.
The government has no incentive to provide better housing or disability benefits to the working class when they can instead withhold those things and watch legions of poor & desperate people die. Do you know they actually calculate how much money killing all of these marginalised people saves them? That Canadian media advertises these figures to sell the state killing program?
What was Canada's excuse for poor healthcare before MAID existed then?
This to me feels like a very dystopian way to have a relationship with it's government, and is a uniquely american perspective amongst the developed world.
The government is a proxy for society leadership. I expect human society to protect it's humans, and most of the world with functioning government does too.
The biggest threat to Canadian prosperity today is these american ideas percolating above the border and infecting the mind of Canadians who previously believed and trusted their government and no longer does.
On what basis do you call yourself a communist when you explicitly advocate "trust" in a bourgeois government on the topic of state killings of homeless & disabled people? Shouldn't that be one of the last topics you would ever trust them on, given their clear class interest in killing members of the proletariat who are unable to continue labouring for profit? It seems fine to trust them not to lie about easily verifiable facts that don't threaten them, like weather warnings, but you should trust them about literally everything else before trusting them to "fairly" and "consensually" carry out killings of proletarians.
I remember reading about one where someone drugged their mother to bring her in for euthanasia. What the naysayers didn't report was that that was by her own wishes--she knew her mind was going and set it up for when it was too far gone. I have no problem with that.
Even if you think the current safeguards are the "sweet spot," continued pressure to make it more difficult will be necessary to prevent it from being made less difficult. (And if you don't think it would be a problem for it to be made less difficult, then citing those safeguards as part of your argument would be disingenuous.)