I don't know why people are so for it. The process is "cruel and unusual" when it's done to criminals but the same process is fine when you request it.
My understanding is that the death penalty process is kind of a hack job and can't be done properly because no medical personnel will participate in it due to the Hippocratic oath. This is not a concern in consensual euthanasia.
There's also an issue with the death penalty process seemingly requiring suffering, as evidenced by the lack of use of inert gas which appears to be painless considering accidents with poorly-ventilated spaces where people unknowingly pass out (and sadly those who go help them suffer the same fate). Even in states where the "gas chamber" is a thing, cyanide is used instead of just inert gas despite it making the post-execution cleanup process safer (so would make sense even if you did not care one bit about the suffering of the condemned).
Even if the death penalty was perfectly humane, there are so many other considerations that this comparison is clearly in bad faith. The GP doesn't understand why the state murdering people is a different consideration entirely from doctor assisted suicide?
Absolutely, I'm not defending the death penalty in any way. But even if you do support it, my response tries to bring up how bad and intentionally cruel the current implementation is.
The OP wants to know why the same process using the same drugs is described as full of suffering in terms of symptoms for criminals, but blissful when used for assisted suicide.
(And I'm not in favour of the state killing criminals or terminally ill people).
But it's not "the state killing terminally ill people". It's terminally ill and suffering people asking for help to end their lives and their suffering.
The situation is completely unlike the death penalty, where it's about punishment.
> The process is "cruel and unusual" when it's done to criminals but the same process is fine when you request it.
You seem to be saying that as this is inconsistent. I'm curious why do you think that is? Whether someone agrees to have something done to them or not is a crucial factor in whether doing said thing is OK.
Is it unreasonable for you to imagine any of the following scenarios?
* A person believes that choosing to die is different than having that forced upon you
* A person disapproves of assisted suicide and capital punishment?
* A person approves of assisted suicide and capital punishment?
* The process is quite different for criminals vs voluntary medical participants?
etc etc?
Seems to me you're twisting things pretty hard to find a false equivalence.
I'm not convinced that the process is that different, medically.
Then perhaps you could accept one of the others as true or think of others?
But it demonstrably is. Unless you think medicine is just injecting stuff?
How the health professional accompanies the subject is a major aspect of medicine. So some uncaring prison personnel carrying out an execution vs a caring health professional, a terrifying process vs acceptance/calm/accompanying is wildly different, re: "the medical process".
A careful surgical procedure on a toenail is wildly different to someone torturing you by taking your toenail.
It's a different chemical cocktail, but more importantly consenting to it makes a bit of a difference in terms of how it registers morally.
>The process is "cruel and unusual" when it's done to criminals but the same process is fine when you request it.
Yes, of course. This is a concept called "consent", and it drastically changes the context and morality of various situations.
Because I am practically alone in having avoided addiction, felonies, poverty, becoming handicapped, and/or morbid disabling obesity over the course of my life I have become the "responsible adult" in my family.
Over the last six years it has been my responsibility to oversee the end-of-life care for three people: my paternal grandfather and grandmother, and maternal grandmother.
My grandfather died at home of congestive heart failure. He spent a week on hospice in a medical bed in the living room staring at the ceiling, barely conscious due to the morphine and pain, pissing and shitting himself, as he slowly suffocated to death.
My paternal grandmother lingered for two weeks in the hospital due to an embolism after falling and breaking her hip. Again, two weeks bedridden staring at the ceiling barely conscious due to the morphine and pain, with a machine breathing for her, until diffusion/perfusion stopped enough that no mechanical or pharmaceutical intervention could oxygenate her blood enough and she died.
My maternal grandmother was the worst. Having fought off COPD for the last 20 years it finally became too much. After a year of coughing fits that led to torn muscles and spine/rib fractures leading to her being in a near-constant state of opioid-induced stupor the oxygen and albuterol stopped working and she very slowly and painfully drowned to death. She had been aware of her impending death for about two years and constantly expressed her desire to die on her own terms, but she had made the mistake of moving into an assisted living facility. So she spent the last few years of her life in a recliner hooked up to oxygen as the albuterol treatments got more and more frequent until the point that she would have to wake up every couple of hours 24 hours a day to do them, with coughing fits between them to the point that she would paralyze herself due to neck or back pain and spend six weeks on pain killers, unable to urinate or defecate or dress or eat without assistance, as it became harder and harder to breathe until she mercifully slipped into unconsciousness and died.
We already have medical aid in dying, it's called "giving a little more morphine every time the patient starts gurgling in order to 'soothe their pain'".
In a just world the patient has the choice to accelerate the process.
All men must die.
I will not die suffocating to death as I stare at a blank ceiling, blasted out of my brains on drugs, while a TV blares in the background to cover up the sobs of my family.
In my late sixties I am going to start going to the doctor complaining of back pain, stockpile enough Percocet to kill me, and when the time comes (with good fortune many many decades later) I am going to settle my accounts, write a note with some directions, have a party, and say goodbye.
That's why I'm "for" MAID.
I've always found what cats do admirable. I have never had to bury a cat. Once their time comes, they simply wander off, never to be seen again. It just feels like the right way to go.
I'm sorry that was your experience. You are correct that all must die. Unfortunately, most don't reckon with that fact until it is too late. Simply offering assisted suicide as an option doesn't solve that problem. It creates a much worse social problem and perverse incentives.
Refusing respiratory therapy or medication is not assisted suicide. Nobody has to die in an ICU or hooked up to tubes if that is not their choice and they prepare properly. And as you note, hospice painkillers given to alleviate suffering also not assisted suicide even if it has a double effect in accelerating inevitable death.
If you want to prepare an alternate plan to blast your brain out on drugs to the point of death that's your prerogative. That doesn't mean we should create a system where we doctors are in the business of deliberately killing their patients on demand (or worse, as it leads to, pushing this "service" on their patients).
The question of choice/agency is probably at the heart of the difference. One, the state is taking someone's life against their will. The other is allowing someone to exercise their own agency to end their own life.
Well, the death penalty is certainly a different discussion since the government is deciding to take your life. I don't support it, personally.
Assisted suicide, in my view, is more like an escape hatch for people who don't want to participate any longer regardless of how much "potential" they may have. Making it available for terminally ill patients is good, but it misses the mark for people who struggle with more "invisible" illnesses like ones in their own mind or lifelong ones like a physical deformity.
> The process is "cruel and unusual" when it's done to criminals but the same process is fine when you request it.
Because consent matters.
Many things work this way, they're wonderful or useful or helpful when you request/consent to it, but are despicably evil when done against your will.
Children are incapable of consent. In the same way, people who are having big mental burdens are not capable of consenting to this. It’s a system as ripe for abuse as allowing children to consent to sex.
I’ve had my dark moments, but I learned to deal and I’m sooo glad I didn’t end it.
You know, you always hear about people who survive a suicide attempt often find out after they’ve jumped that they really didn’t want to die! It’s an irreversible choice, and something about realizing that changes people.
>You know, you always hear about people who survive a suicide attempt often find out after they’ve jumped that they really didn’t want to die
You don't just walk into a building and say "I would like to die please" and then get assistance on the spot.
The two people I know who chose assisted death both had to go through various evaluations (over a period of several months) to determine that they thoroughly understood the decision they were making and that they had the mental capacity to make the decision.
The comparison to a child 'consenting' to sex is completely nonsensical.
Of course that’s not how it works. People will doctor shop. If one doctor rejects them, they go to the next and learn the right things to say to get the doctor to say yes. It’s just ripe for abuse.
What they really need is help, not death.
Someone who is determined enough to go through several years of doctor shopping to kill themselves will find a way to kill themselves whether there are assisted death programs or not.
I agree that those (hypothetical) people need help. Though, to be honest, I'm not really convinced this is a real issue. Some of these programs have been around for multiple decades, and I've not seen any evidence that there is a pattern of abuse. Let alone the programs being apparently "ripe for abuse".
Disallowing assisted death programs is not help, though. It is a punishment to people who deserve a death of dignity instead of months or years of unbearable suffering.
If abuse of the medical system is a concern of yours, I feel like a much more prominent cause ( millions more preventable deaths) worth fighting is over-prescription of opiates. That's just my opinion, though. (And, for all I know, you're already fighting that fight too. If so, godspeed)
You are sharing an important perspective. 1 in 20 people die from assisted suicide in Canada today. You can't tell me the process is sound every time. That's a huge number.
It's false dignity, and false compassion. Dignity does not come from control over one's life, and it does not come from the absence of suffering. Dignity comes from being made in the image and likeness of God. If anyone reading does not agree, well, that's fine, but I feel compelled to say it that someone might read it.
How many people will we lose to despair that could have been helped? I say this both as a Catholic and someone that has suffered and recovered from mental illness.
MAiD is not available for people whose only condition is a mental illness [1]. I'm saying this not for you but for anyone who may read this, particularly non-Canadians. It's not about "despair".
[1] https://www.camh.ca/en/camh-news-and-stories/maid-and-mental...
Yes that is the official stance. I do not believe that is being followed on the ground and is in any case a temporary condition. In 2027 it will be officially available with only a mental health issue.
I had a lot to say to this comment. I think your comment is gross. But it will just end up in a debate about god, so I'm editing it out.
However:
>How many people will we lose to despair that could have been helped?
Assisted death is not something reserved for mental illness, and it's dishonest to frame your comment like it is. Terminal, painful diseases are the leading reason for assisted death. In fact, many assisted death programs do not consider mental illness alone to meet the criteria of acceptance.
The whole point of these programs is that there is no other help possible. Except, maybe, enough drugs to make the person basically dead anyways. Which, in my opinion, is not "help".
I'm leaving my other comment despite your edits, as I believe it represents an answer to an important question.
Nothing in my comments is dependent on assisted suicide being available or not for any purpose or another. I am arguing against it in all cases to be clear.
>I am arguing against it in all cases to be clear.
Yes, reading your other comment, I now understand that you truly believe that suffering is a good thing and that, if you had it your way, my father would have had to be bedridden, in extreme agony, for several more months than he had already suffered. A cruelty beyond imagination.
We will never, ever agree on this, so I wish you a good day.
This is an age-old question. All I can do is share the Catholic perspective on this which you may or may not like or agree with.
God allows suffering to bring about a greater good, His plan. He endows us also with free will, which sometimes means we make choices that cause suffering for ourselves or others. Free will doesn't mean all or even most suffering in a given life is because of our choices. Sometimes it is though.
Satan's playbook is all about denying these things, denying the cross, denying redemption. Satan is the one whispering that life isn't worth it, that it would be easier to end it, come down from the cross.
For a even better discussion of these things, I always recommend Life is Worth Living which is an old program hosted by Bishop Fulton Sheen. It is as relevant today as it was when he recorded it. Many of the episodes are on YouTube.
EDIT: many seem to be taking this as an anti-painkiller stance which it is not. Reducing pain until natural death is a great kindness.
I think that’s an entirely reasonable stance to take if I can reframe my anguish as in the case where I’ve been dumped and am feeling sad. But if my heart is dying and my life can only be prolonged through great and endless suffering, I think choosing death is entirely reasonable, and demanding that someone live a few more miserable weeks is cruel. And I don’t think those parables about Satan considered the difference between those two situations. What lesson is there to absorb to become a better person?
If tomorrow I invented a machine that could keep us all alive indefinitely but also required us to be immobile and in great pain, who would choose that outcome?
Not against reducing pain for terminal patients - I made an edit above because it seems I was unclear on this point.
Many of us don't believe in god, Catholic or otherwise, and so we shouldn't have this point of view enforced upon us.
Me borrowing your car is also very different, morally speaking, depending on whether you agreed to it or not.
I think it should be an option for the terminally ill but nobody else.
There are people who are suicidal who don’t feel they deserve help and feel that assisted suicide is an option for them. We should not give them that option. Instead, we should spend that effort as a society helping them deal / get better.
I don't think this option is given to people who feel suicidal, so that's a moot point.
Also, people who find suicidal often will find a way, legal or illegal. This is about terminally ill people, and about not making things harder for them, or getting their loved ones in legal trouble.