Absolutely everyone dies. I would argue that part of a respectable quality of life should include a respectable quality of death. There is so little dignity in death as it is.

But when death is immediately inevitable, and hastening it is comforting to the one experiencing it's immediate inevitability, it is not "selfishness" as one comment maintained, but perhaps "fright" over that level of compassion. It might feel like you're begrudging someone of a life, but you just might be begrudging them a death that they've already come to terms with.

That thought process makes it acceptable to keep a brain dead patient "alive" for decades. Is it common for them to come back after all that time of being clinically dead, and then enjoy life until the next time they die?

The argument I'm seeing in the threads about minor ailments such as hearing impairment are just silly because nobody is proposing such a thing. The article talks about his long term state of mind. There's a weird kind of alarmism that always jumps to really specific details, at the expense of the whole, that supposedly show a gap in the logic, but actually are the gap in that logic.

I would phrase this somewhat differently to express the same sentiment: I object to a system in which my dog is practically guaranteed a better end than I am.

Exactly this. When we do it for our beloved pets, it is compassionate. When we do it for someone who specifically asked for it, under entirely similar conditions? Where is the difference?

People are getting hung up on their own issues around mortality, death, and autonomy around euthanasia and projecting onto others.

Safeguards are mandatory but so is free will.

The difference is that your dog isn't a member of a vulnerable population that the government and society has a political, social and economic incentive to kill.

Living in the US I can easily imagine our lawmakers and business people reading about this and staring longingly out the window at the homeless camps, wondering how to implement this here. Particularly in Seattle and San Francisco (which are already low-key at "war" with the homeless).

Your dog doesn’t have the capacity to enjoy life by simply reading a book or watching grandchildren play.

A dog has the capacity to absolutely enjoy life by laying down and napping in front of their favourite dirty tennis ball.

This is not something I would like. I want to be able to choose, for myself, when the enjoyment I get out of life is outweighed by the suffering of illness or other afflictions.

Me too but what we have here in Canada is the situation where healthcare is denied and delayed. 1500 died in Ontario while waiting for surgeries in 2021 for example. Keep this course until euthanasia becomes preferable option?

Yeah, this is the problem. Euthanasia should be an option when treatment has failed, but the treatment should be tried first. This isn't a problem with euthanasia, it's a problem with the medical system. UHC systems remain popular so long as most people are happy--but most people don't need the expensive, ongoing care and thus it can become pretty poor for the patients that actually need it.

Euthanasia can be favorable from both the individual and from society's perspective. I see no problem with that. We keep expanding life expectancy without asking ourselves if it's a good or desirable thing. I certainly wasn't asked and would like the option to opt out.

I also don't want lack a ressources be put forward as a justification to limit desired euthanasia making forced living even more unbearable..

It's your opinion that reading a book and watching grandchildren is enough to make your life enjoyable, which is fine. That doesn't mean it is enough to make my life enjoyable, especially considering whatever difficulties I may be wrestling with, whether medical, emotional, financial, etc.

And no, more government resources may not always be able to mitigate my suffering. IMO it is horrible that we require a person to take their own life by violence (which is always allowed and cannot be prevented) rather than helping them take it in an easier way.

A personal story: my mother was 74 and developed a respiratory infection overnight. I was with her Friday night watching TV, but Saturday morning she didn't answer the phone. We went to her house and she was too weak to get out of bed and couldn't go to the bathroom. She said she just wanted to stay in bed but my sister talked her into letting us call 911. When they came, they said her oxygen level was 55, and that it would not be unusual for a person to die with that level.

She was put on oxygen at the hospital and they took an X-ray to confirm pneumonia. They wanted to do a bunch of tests but she refused. They said without the tests, she would probably die. She was okay with that.

Why would a 74-y/o who watched TV with her son the night before want to die? I'll tell you why: she had been in the medical system for the last 40 years with rheumatoid arthritis. She was on a walker because her last hip surgery didn't go well: they told her she would be driving within 2 weeks after the surgery, but instead, she was on a walker the rest of her life because her bones were unable to heal. The hospital said she'd have to drag an oxygen tank around the rest of her life. She could barely get around on a walker, so dragging around a tank would have been impossible. This is just the tip of the iceberg of her daily challenges.

I'm sure someone has "solutions" to all of her problems. But just because that would be acceptable to you and make your life worth living doesn't mean it is acceptable to others. Whether a life is worth living is a personal decision: the state or a bunch of "do gooders" cannot make this decision for a person.

I'm a firm believer that people should have the right to outline the circumstances ahead of time where they would prefer to die so that in the event they become unable to make this decision, they can die a dignified death. And if they are not incapacitated, people should have the right to make this decision for any reason, just like they can take their life by violence for any reason. I am not opposed to requiring a few counseling sessions to make sure they have considered all their options, but the outcome of counseling should not be used to decide for that person whether they should be allowed to commit suicide in a humane way. A person should always have that right, whether others agree with their decision or not.

This. It's quite possible for the quality of life to go away even though there's nothing on the horizon that will kill or even one catastrophic problem. It can be like your mother--a series of things that add up to being alive but not having any quality of life.

I knew someone that chose suicide by dehydration after a fall. They perfectly well knew they had broken their hip and that the healing time for a broken hip (if it even did heal) was longer than their other medical issues would likely give them. Thus they were sentenced to remain lying in bed for the rest of their life. It was only in hindsight that her caretaker realized what had happened--at the time he didn't notice that she was drinking no more than needed to take her pills.

Thank you for posting this, it can't have been easy to spell it out but the naysayers are going to have to come to terms with reality as it is experienced by those that actually have lived through this instead of just armchair theorizing about why it does not apply to them.

I have seen people clinging to their lives no matter how insufferable those lives seemed to me

This is going to sound like criticism but I'm legitimately interested in understanding how you think and how you arrived at your opinions.

> I have seen people clinging to their lives no matter how insufferable those lives seemed to me

Sure there is no end of stories about people who want to live despite major setbacks. But what does that have to do with a person who doesn't? Is the person who doesn't wrong? Do you think they just have a bad attitude?

If we had two people with identical maladies, it seems to me that you are arguing that we should force Person B (who doesn't want to live) to continue living and suffering, because Person A does want to live. Please correct me if that isn't your view.

If instead we forced Person A (who wants to live) to die because Person B doesn't want to live. Would you see that as wrong/immoral?

Why must we force at all? What would be so wrong about letting the individuals (who are the ones experiencing the suffering) to decide?

I've lost people I care deeply for to suicide, so I know the pain that it can leave people with. However, it seems remarkably selfish to force others to live in misery against their will, simply because I want them to continue to live.

I am not arguing for forcing anyone to keep going against their will. I am arguing against the system that fails to provide care and treatment that people deserve while simultaneously nagging them towards euthanasia. Let’s consider the case when delaying or refusing some sort of surgery results in patient developing chronic pain. A few years later the patient is addicted to painkillers and suicidal. Now we perform euthanasia and forget about the original issue of failing healthcare system?

> "I object to a system in which my dog is practically guaranteed a better end than I am."

I would upvote this statement a million times if I could.

The whole point of the article is that Canada's system needs safeguards. Other countries have them. This is not a black and white pro- or anti- assisted suicide article. Killing someone for having depression and deafness is not the same as for having terminal cancer and constant pain and being bedridden.

This is really not a decision for the individual patients to have freedom in. I know multiple young people who have been suicidal and attempted it. Most survived but more could be dead if they were able to simply ask the doctor for it and it was all easy and painless.

> The whole point of the article is that Canada's system needs safeguards.

If this were truly the point of the article, it would have spent less time trying to make emotional pleas and implying that assisted suicide for non-terminal patients is somehow immoral and/or a direct road to eugenics. Canada’s system does have safeguards, and whether or not they are good enough is not actually answered by a couple anecdotes and some comparisons to other countries.

> Killing someone for having depression and deafness is not the same as for having terminal cancer and constant pain and being bedridden. This is really not a decision for the individual patients to have freedom in.

There are conditions that don’t bother me at all that others would suffer with immensely, and there are many people living happy lives with conditions that I would absolutely want to kill myself over. It is incredibly paternalistic to believe that you (or I) can decide whether or not someone else’s suffering is ‘enough’.

> I know multiple young people who have been suicidal and attempted it. Most survived but more could be dead if they were able to simply ask the doctor for it and it was all easy and painless.

I am genuinely sorry to hear that you have had those experiences and I can tell that they have had an impact on you. However, it is not possible for someone to just walk into a doctor’s office in Canada and get wheeled into the morgue an hour later, and as far as I am aware no one is suggesting that it should be so.

I would encourage you to shift perspectives here and start thinking about how creating a safe, legal, and painless way to end one’s life could reduce the sorts of impulsive suicides it sounds like you’ve seen. For some, just knowing that the option is available makes hard times in life feel much more bearable. For others, the guarantee of an easy and painless assisted death makes the idea of trying to kill themselves on their own a risky and unpalatable alternative.

The more that suicidal people believe that going to see a professional is a better idea than taking things into their own hands, the more people will be able to have their quality of life improved by interventions other than death. And for those who are beyond improvement with today’s resources and technology, at least they too will be able to stop needlessly suffering.

I come from a country which just legalized euthanasia and part of the safeguards we have is to try to be very sure that nobody takes it because they're suicidal due to depression. That might not be truly fair since some people might really be suffering that badly from it, as you say. But I came into this discussion with the prejudice that depression was an important reason to deny suicide assistance and the article gives an example of somebody who apparently died because of it.

You seem to be more open minded and consider depression might be an acceptable reason for doctors to kill their patients on request, if the patient really really wants it?

That seems to be the position of the Supreme Court of Canada, who ruled in 2015 that it would be cruel for the government to prevent Gloria Taylor (and others like her) to seek assistance ending her suffering (Carter v Canada). As part of their unanimous decision, they stated:

> It is a crime in Canada to assist another person in ending her own life. As a result, people who are grievously and irremediably ill cannot seek a physician's assistance in dying and may be condemned to a life of severe and intolerable suffering. A person facing this prospect has two options: she can take her own life prematurely, often by violent or dangerous means, or she can suffer until she dies from natural causes. The choice is cruel.

Wikipedia summarizes:

> the Supreme Court held that the current legislation was overbroad in that it prohibits "physician-assisted death for a competent adult person who (1) clearly consents to the termination of life and (2) has a grievous and irremediable medical condition (including an illness, disease or disability) that causes enduring suffering that is intolerable to the individual in the circumstances of his or her condition.

> After a lengthy delay, the House of Commons passed a Bill (C-14) in mid-June 2016 that would allow for doctor-assisted suicide in the case of a terminal illness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carter_v_Canada_(AG)

The law was further amended by Bill C-7 (43) after another court case in 2019 (Truchon v Canada). The Superior Court of Quebec struck down the clause that restricted MAID to patients whose death was reasonably forseeable. From an unofficial translation of the decision:

> [The plaintiffs] claim that the reasonably foreseeable natural death requirement is tantamount to a prohibition of medical assistance in dying for any person who, like them, is not at the end of life. In this sense, it forces some of these individuals to take charge of their own destiny and take hasty steps to end their lives prematurely out of fear that they will no longer be physically able to do so once their suffering becomes intolerable. Consequently, they claim that the reasonably foreseeable natural death requirement exposes them to a heightened risk of death and, therefore, infringes on their Charter right to life.

The legislative background for C-14 (42): https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/other-autre/ad-am/p2.htm...

The legislative background for C-7 (43) https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/pl/ad-am/c7/p1.html

The current text of the law: https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/C-46/section-241.2....

What you need is a government equation to help. There should be a well thought out form, with simple answers that can allow someone who has undertaken the prerequisite amount of training to complete the form. With the right information, it would really be very simple, programmable even, to work out what one should do with the person.

Yes, this is a poor and politically charged article; we don't have to read far to get to a beautiful application of Godwin's law:

> Tim Stainton, director of the Canadian Institute for Inclusion and Citizenship at the University of British Columbia, described Canada’s law as “probably the biggest existential threat to disabled people since the Nazis’ program in Germany in the 1930s.”

Euthanasia and assisted suicide is not murder. It's helping people who feel they don't have any other option.

What do you call assisted suicide that is not assented to by the subject?

An impossibility. If there is no consent there is no "suicide", assisted or otherwise.

The term for what is done to pets and research animals is "euthanasia" — is that consensual? Or even "assented" or "acquiesced" to, if you want to side-step the question of how informed one has to be for it to count as "consent".

Pets are not people and cannot consent. Euthanasia is not assisted dying. There is no 'assistance' when one party doesn't share the goal. Straw man.

The previous comments, the link text, the article on the other side of the link, and the Canadian members of parliament debating this law all used the term “euthanasia”, so no, it is not a straw man.

A contradictio in terminis.

Any reference to Nazis is not in itself an example of Godwins law. This is a discussion about state-run eugenics programs, so the reference isn't fallacious. Even Reductio ad Hitlerum acknowledges this[1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_Hitlerum

A nitpick:

The Nazi “mandatory euthanasia” program began in December 1939, and continued until 1945. The first facility dedicated to killing the disabled opened in February 1940.

So it was the 1940s, not 1930s.

In short; if we can't take care of them we ought to be able to at least off them?

In short; if they decide we can't take care of them and they wish to off themselves, we ought to honor that decision.

Yes and in response we should abandon more people so they voluntarily choose to off themselves. It is consent all the way down.

Systems will always have suboptimal outcomes regardless of how they are structured, advances that are made, etc. Everything has a cost, regardless of if you acknowledge it, see it, etc.

Generally speaking, vast majority of current negative health impacts are self inflicted and require no major breakthroughs; for example, diet and exercise.