You are stretching the word often, most people in the ICU are close to the end of their life. A lot of people don't realize but most of the time if you needed to spend weeks in an ICU you are probably not "living" in a dignified way. Almost all ICU doctors/nurses I've talked to would rather have a DNR in their old age than live like that.
If I'm in pain, am delirious, and am unable to operate in the world. I've lost my dignity.
My human dignity does depend on whether I have to endure the rest of my life pooping my pants, not remembering my own name, and hooked up to some noisy machine telling my lungs to breathe and my heart to beat.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
> we let a 90 yr old with dementia/diatebetes/etc. pass with dignity.
Often it's a 4 week old baby.
For every 1 sophisticated family member, there are 19 unsophisticated ones, who toss a weighted coin and, if it's heads, they decide they want their dying, non-responsive relative - possibly their baby, possibly their mom, etc. - to be kept alive at all costs. I don't know if this is politically toxic as much as it is cultural, and possibly globally cultural.