If vulnerable people have been coerced into ending their lives, or if people have attempted such coercion, in the 25+ years since Oregon legalized medical aid in dying, there should be at least one case that Americans still opposing MAID laws could point to. But there is no evidence that this is happening. Quite the contrary:
In 2019, the executive director of Disability Rights Oregon (DRO), an organization mandated by federal law to investigate complaints of abuse or neglect of people with disabilities, reported that DRO has never received a complaint that a person with disabilities was coerced into obtaining a prescription for MAiD drugs.
But who's to complain if the victim is dead?
Family and friends. But I can't find a case where someone has even raised the suspicion that this took place.
I am concerned that if clinicians are regularly required to kill people, it will impact them in negative ways -
Have you read the existing statutes in other countries? Or what's proposed in Scotland? No one is required to kill people. Jesus, how can you think that? Do you really believe there are clinicians in the US, Canada, Switzerland and the Netherlands who only barely drag themselves to work some days because they have to kill people? Wouldn't they be screaming from the rooftops? Wouldn't people opposed to these laws be writing furious op-ed pieces talking about that?
People administer the drugs themselves. One of the main complaints lodged by some disabled people is that MAID is unavailable to them because they cannot self-administer drugs. No medical personnel are required to take part in the process of they don't want to. Institutions like hospitals and nursing homes may ban the practice from taking place on their premises.
I think, for example, writing the prescription for something for someone to use to kill themselves probably carries similar psychological risks to actually administering it yourself. (Of course I don’t know that, it’s speculation.)
I could just as easily speculate that some would see it as a routine part of their jobs, and others as an honor. But again, aid in dying has been law in some places for decades, so why speculate? Do you know of evidence concerning this either way? Pharmacists in Oregon where it's been legal since 1997 would have been saying this by now if it were the case.
You keep making up hypotheticals and speculating, with no reference to the real world evidence of decades of real people availing themselves of medical aid in dying, decades of real practitioners taking part in the process by talking to patients, writing prescriptions, filling them - look at what real people with experience are saying. Look at what the laws and proposed laws actually say, how this would work in the UK, what the safeguards would be. See if you think what's actually proposed would be okay, at least for other people if it's not something you'd want to do.
I am drawing analogies with what happens, and has recently happened in the UK with regard to end of life decisions, failures in compassionate care and everyday understanding of capacity.
Have you read the existing statutes in other countries? Or what's proposed in Scotland? No one is required to kill people. Jesus, how can you think that? Do you really believe there are clinicians in the US, Canada, Switzerland and the Netherlands who only barely drag themselves to work some days because they have to kill people? Wouldn't they be screaming from the rooftops? Wouldn't people opposed to these laws be writing furious op-ed pieces talking about that?
I have psychiatric colleagues who have been asked by patients to support them travelling to Dignitas, I have had to be involved in best interest decisions around DNAR for non-capacitous patients, it was extremely stressful, but as clinician involved in someone’s care you don’t just walk away from someone because it becomes difficult. Clinicians usually feel obligated to their patients, they generally don’t want to let them down.
Conversely, people who have burnt out and become callous to what they are doing do not always notice this and take time off work to recover. In the UK we have multiple major enquiries into the failure of compassionate care - one of the most famous/infamous being Staffordshire Hospital Scandal. You should not need to tell people you don’t leave a patient lying in a urine soaked bed, what actually happens in a chronically understaffed unit is that poor practice gradually becomes normalised. (Or there’s this kind of thing..)
In other words, I am worried palliative care clinicians (the most likely group to be involved on a regular basis) will end up being asked to participate relatively frequently. And if they do, they risk becoming desensitised in ways that impact their practice. What might that look like in practice ?
Well for starters becoming more casual about capacity. At the moment, in main stream practice, frontline staff at not reliable at spotting problems with capacity unless its barn door obvious. Even then, for example, the hospital who is caring for mother (otherwise well) and knows she can not remember where she is or what day it is - apparently assessed she had capacity to consent to having a photo taken of a gynae issue in order to have a referral they also thought she had capacity to consent to.
In the UK, there is a presumption of capacity unless there is some reason to question it (in her case advanced dementia) - then you have to be able to understand the information, retain the information, weigh up the the information, and communicate your decision. You have to have all four elements in order to be capacitous.
What tends to happen, is folk assume you are capacitous unless you don’t want to do what they think would be best for you.
The sort of laws being proposed in the UK - such as the last bill introduced detail here - are medically gatekept. Currently, when courts are asked about withdrawing treatment, they typically rely on the medical advice they are given - for the obvious reason that they lack medical expertise - so it will very much come down to medical opinions on prognosis and capacity. A private member’s bill is being introduced to the Westminster parliament with a vote on the 18th of a October - it is likely to be a clone of the Lords proposal.
I cited those because they discuss the impact, both positive and negative, on professionals who regularly engage in euthanasia - and specifically ask the question, what we can learn from this.
The human race has believed in some form of afterlife going all the way back in recorded history, and has understood death in this world to be an ending of our life in this world, whether followed by another realm (nice, nasty, shadowy and sort of blah, reincarnation, Nirvana, any combination thereof, or the like). Death as humans have understood it has not included “utterly ceasing to exist, even as a soul or spirit,” until recently, historically speaking.
I'm afraid this just suggests to me that we (human beings) are the kings of wishful thinking - that our desire for there to be something more to life than our mortal years has been a driving force for creative thought and imagination for as long as our awareness of our own mortality. (And that our creativity has thrown up some pretty unpleasant ways to manipulate that desire for gain.)
We’ll just have to disagree, then. But I should point out that even believing in an afterlife, etc., all these years, we still grieve. You might find random people who are glib about it, or even saints who have such great faith that they have less grief (not the same thing), but generally grief happens even if you expect to see them again in some sense, and always has.
In other words, I am worried palliative care clinicians (the most likely group to be involved on a regular basis) will end up being asked to participate relatively frequently. And if they do, they risk becoming desensitised in ways that impact their practice. What might that look like in practice ?
A coalition of disability rights organizations and two personally affected individuals have filed a Charter challenge with the Ontario Superior Court of Justice. They oppose Track 2 of Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) law, which provides assisted suicide to people with a disability who are not dying, or whose death is not “reasonably foreseeable.”
...
“People are dying. We are witnessing an alarming trend where people with disabilities are seeking assisted suicide due to social deprivation, poverty, and lack of essential supports,” said Krista Carr, Executive Vice-President of Inclusion Canada. “This law also sends a devastating message that life with a disability is a fate worse than death, undermining decades of work toward equity and inclusion. It’s time to put an end to helping people with disabilities commit suicide and start supporting them to live.”
The section 15 claim argues that MAiD systemically discriminates against persons with disabilities because it offers death as a viable and accessible medical treatment specifically to disabled individuals whose death is not reasonably foreseeable. This is argued to increase the risk that disabled persons will be more likely to seek death instead of getting the necessary social and medical supports to help them live; proposing death as a solution to systemic disadvantage. The notice of application contrasts this difference with non-disabled individuals who may get offered medical treatment or management options for their conditions, but not death.
...
This latest challenge is not the first against MAiD, which has gone through several iterations. Another major criticism is the goal of broadening eligibility to individuals with mental illness as their sole underlying medical condition. The Government of Canada recently extended a delay in implementing this change to allow further review. The earliest date of the mental health implementation is now March 17, 2027.
In other words, I am worried palliative care clinicians (the most likely group to be involved on a regular basis) will end up being asked to participate relatively frequently. And if they do, they risk becoming desensitised in ways that impact their practice. What might that look like in practice ?
And since I'm looking around for the old ::brickwall:: smiley, this is my last post on this thread.
Its an interesting article, with a small self-selected sample that doesn't really answer the question.
What I do get from that is, in Canada, a lot of healthcare professionals are involved in the process with varying amounts of distress for varying reasons. The decisions often involve the family, the family often feel they have to support the dying person's wishes regardless of their own views and grieving the death can be problematic, they are seeing some people seeking MAID due to feeling they are a burden, or because other potential fixable aspects of the end of their life are going wrong and these are exactly the kind of things I was saying I thought would be a problem.
And this from a group of people willing and able to answer questions of the subject.
The larger problem for me is that if the answer to the question "is death final?" is "yes and no", it makes it harder to have conversations about how we die.
I don't know if you'd include it in your list of realities, but one word that occurred to me was "separation". If you believe that separation caused by death is only temporary, it puts a rather different spin on how you might view the experience of death itself.
Sorry if I wasn’t as clear as I thought I was earlier.
And yes, I would definitely include separation in my list. Maybe even at the top of it. Even if I have hope of being reunited at some point after death (though I’m really not sure I’d describe my own views of afterlife that way), there is separation now, in this life.
My wife and I were discussing this just a few days ago—how often we think our parents will enjoy hearing about something, often what their grandchildren are doing, only to remember they’re gone and we can’t tell them, or hear their reactions. It’s a hole that never goes away.
...For my part, in isolation, I can't think of a good reason to prevent a terminally ill person from ending their life, with assistance if someone is willing. On a societal level I don't trust that the option won't become the expectation, as it has with the termination of foetuses likely to have Down's Syndrome.
...What I do get from that is, in Canada, a lot of healthcare professionals are involved in the process with varying amounts of distress for varying reasons. The decisions often involve the family, the family often feel they have to support the dying person's wishes regardless of their own views and grieving the death can be problematic, they are seeing some people seeking MAID due to feeling they are a burden, or because other potential fixable aspects of the end of their life are going wrong and these are exactly the kind of things I was saying I thought would be a problem.
There's clearly an issue with discrimination (which I'm starting to think should be added to death and taxes as a certainty of life).
And, in the UK at least, I would expect there to be an issue with service provision, and a broad range of consequent issues for the people providing the services, because pretty much everything to do with care and health in the UK is affected by resource scarcity. (And institutionality.)
But there's also a general issue about people's attitudes to death. And in regard to this, I'm still not sure that talking about the law is a useful place to start. So, thinking about death as separation, are there any perspectives or understandings that help?
(On a different tack, does anyone here think of death as the fulfilment of life?)
If vulnerable people have been coerced into ending their lives, or if people have attempted such coercion, in the 25+ years since Oregon legalized medical aid in dying, there should be at least one case that Americans still opposing MAID laws could point to. But there is no evidence that this is happening. Quite the contrary:
In 2019, the executive director of Disability Rights Oregon (DRO), an organization mandated by federal law to investigate complaints of abuse or neglect of people with disabilities, reported that DRO has never received a complaint that a person with disabilities was coerced into obtaining a prescription for MAiD drugs.
But who's to complain if the victim is dead?
Family and friends. But I can't find a case where someone has even raised the suspicion that this took place.
I was thinking of the case where the coercion was coming from the family. In which case they are not going to complain.
I'm also bit bemused by the emphasis on 'friends and family' as evidence. By the time someone is in a desperate situation with homelessness or neglect or disability with no-one to rely on but failing or hostile government agencies that's often precisely what they're missing - friends and family who could advocate for them. Socially isolated people will be those most at risk and least likely for anyone to complain about it after they've gone.
I wouldn't say Jesus wasn't moved when Jairus' daughter died--what would be your authority for that? In that case, the story moved quickly enough that you just don't get the little touches you see in the Lazarus story. Doesn't mean he was matter of fact, or didn't cry. But it's a miniature, to use an art analogy, not a full length portrait like the Lazarus story. He may very well have cried and the writer chose different elements to focus on.
I don't think authority comes into it -- it's just a story. There's something to be said for taking the text at face value, though, and no mention of tears most logically leads to there being no crying, but whatever. Add-in whatever you like.
I don't think authority comes into it -- it's just a story. There's something to be said for taking the text at face value, though, and no mention of tears most logically leads to there being no crying, but whatever. Add-in whatever you like.
If it’s not just a fictional story, then authority does come into it.
No mention of tears doesn’t logically lead to no crying, any more than no mention of breathing or blinking leads to an absence of those. Heck, there’s no mention of Jesus relieving Himself in the Gospels, but surely He did that.
But there's also a general issue about people's attitudes to death.
I agree with this. In fact I’d go further, and call it an unhealthy fixation on prolonging life.
The idea that it’s better for someone to be forced to eke out every single agonising second of life that medical science can possibly pump into them prior to their inevitable demise, rather than having a dignified and relatively pain-free death on their own terms, appals me.
The idea that it’s better for someone to be forced to eke out every single agonising second of life that medical science can possibly pump into them prior to their inevitable demise, rather than having a dignified and relatively pain-free death on their own terms, appals me.
I agree about the horror of the first, but I think there is a difference between ceasing extreme measures to keep someone alive artificially, and actively killing them, or them killing themselves. I’d even go so far as to say that palliative care, even if that is likely to shorten one’s lifespan, is still very different than actively killing one.
So, thinking about death as separation, are there any perspectives or understandings that help?
Help toward what goal?
Help inform our thinking, and our conversations and discussions, about our own death and the deaths of those we care about.
Thinking about my own conversations with my immediate family and friends, these tend to centre around the issue of how to die a good death - our personal preferences. And just across my immediate family, these preferences vary significantly.
But if separation is one of the most significant realities of death, it seems a bit strange that it doesn't explicitly appear in our conversations. Or maybe not so strange, given western attitudes and our largely unaddressed taboos about what we do and don't talk about.
But there's also a general issue about people's attitudes to death.
I agree with this. In fact I’d go further, and call it an unhealthy fixation on prolonging life.
We seem to be stuck in a system which values quantity of life over quality of life. Maybe part of this equation is because quantity is easier to measure than quality, or maybe quantities are simpler and cheaper to do something about - or at least were, given the increasing numbers of us undergoing long and costly periods of end-of-life "care". (If this is addressed by putting more emphasis on quality, it wouldn't be the first time exigencies inadvertently bought about beneficial societal change.)
And I wonder if life expectancy, on its own, is a particularly helpful measure of our progressive liberal democracies. Internationally, it's usually reported as though there were some kind of competition to reach the top of the table.
The idea that it’s better for someone to be forced to eke out every single agonising second of life that medical science can possibly pump into them prior to their inevitable demise, rather than having a dignified and relatively pain-free death on their own terms, appals me.
I agree about the horror of the first, but I think there is a difference between ceasing extreme measures to keep someone alive artificially, and actively killing them, or them killing themselves. I’d even go so far as to say that palliative care, even if that is likely to shorten one’s lifespan, is still very different than actively killing one.
I would say that it matters how much difference there is, and why we think there is a difference. One reason would be our beliefs about death and the taking of (one's own) life, which is a discussion I would expect to proceed along the lines that many other of our threads have gone.
BUT, in the context of this thread, and in the particular context of separation from someone we care about, I'm wondering if we (the survivors) are prepared to accept a bit of extra separation for the sake of relief of pain and suffering, but that there's a threshold beyond which we feel this to be unreasonable, or even selfish. In other words: subconsciously or unconsciously, we even blame the person for creating additional unnecessary separation.
Also, keeping in mind Louise's point, if separation is a significant reality of death, then those people without friends and family - the socially isolated - are likely to be affected by its apparent absence, in significantly different, but still unspoken and mostly unaddressed ways.
I don't think authority comes into it -- it's just a story. There's something to be said for taking the text at face value, though, and no mention of tears most logically leads to there being no crying, but whatever. Add-in whatever you like.
If it’s not just a fictional story, then authority does come into it.
No mention of tears doesn’t logically lead to no crying, any more than no mention of breathing or blinking leads to an absence of those. Heck, there’s no mention of Jesus relieving Himself in the Gospels, but surely He did that.
Some of you really seem to have issues with the idea that Jesus didn't cry at this girl's death nap. Why is that? If Jesus was fully human, could he not have moved through her alleged death without crying, as you and I go through our days knowing about deaths that we don't cry over? Occasional indifference seems eminently human enough to me.
I don’t have issues with the idea that Jesus might not have wept at this girl’s death - only with the assumption that because the text is silent about it we can conclude that he didn’t weep.
We seem to be stuck in a system which values quantity of life over quality of life.
YES. That's exactly it.
Maybe part of this equation is because quantity is easier to measure than quality, or maybe quantities are simpler and cheaper to do something about - or at least were, given the increasing numbers of us undergoing long and costly periods of end-of-life "care". (If this is addressed by putting more emphasis on quality, it wouldn't be the first time exigencies inadvertently bought about beneficial societal change.)
I think the long and costly periods of end-of-life "care" are an important factor here as well. We talk of the "demographic challenge" of having more and more old people in our societies, and the need for more and more younger people to be found to generate the taxes to pay for their care, but it's almost taboo to ask whether maybe the problem is that we've just got too good at keeping people alive despite infirmity - and, in the context of this thread, whether they even want to be kept alive or not!
Near the start of Lord of the Rings, Bilbo describes himself as feeling "thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread". Modern medical science has got very good at stretching out even small amounts of butter over more and more bread, but maybe we should instead be thinking about whether there's an upper limit, a right amount of bread beyond which scraping the butter ever thinner to cover it becomes undesirable.
Pneumonia used to be known as "the old man's friend" because it granted a relatively quick and easy death rather than a distressing dragged-out deterioration. That attitude, ISTM, had merit and should not have been so casually dismissed.
And I wonder if life expectancy, on its own, is a particularly helpful measure of our progressive liberal democracies. Internationally, it's usually reported as though there were some kind of competition to reach the top of the table.
Well, I think it's obvious that too low an average life expectancy ill befits a progressive liberal democracy, so up to a certain point such comparisons are valid. But perhaps there's a "sweet spot" for average life expectancy above which it starts becoming a bad thing again.
We seem to be stuck in a system which values quantity of life over quality of life.
YES. That's exactly it.
Maybe part of this equation is because quantity is easier to measure than quality, or maybe quantities are simpler and cheaper to do something about - or at least were, given the increasing numbers of us undergoing long and costly periods of end-of-life "care". (If this is addressed by putting more emphasis on quality, it wouldn't be the first time exigencies inadvertently bought about beneficial societal change.)
I think the long and costly periods of end-of-life "care" are an important factor here as well. We talk of the "demographic challenge" of having more and more old people in our societies, and the need for more and more younger people to be found to generate the taxes to pay for their care, but it's almost taboo to ask whether maybe the problem is that we've just got too good at keeping people alive despite infirmity - and, in the context of this thread, whether they even want to be kept alive or not!
Near the start of Lord of the Rings, Bilbo describes himself as feeling "thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread". Modern medical science has got very good at stretching out even small amounts of butter over more and more bread, but maybe we should instead be thinking about whether there's an upper limit, a right amount of bread beyond which scraping the butter ever thinner to cover it becomes undesirable.
Pneumonia used to be known as "the old man's friend" because it granted a relatively quick and easy death rather than a distressing dragged-out deterioration. That attitude, ISTM, had merit and should not have been so casually dismissed.
And I wonder if life expectancy, on its own, is a particularly helpful measure of our progressive liberal democracies. Internationally, it's usually reported as though there were some kind of competition to reach the top of the table.
Well, I think it's obvious that too low an average life expectancy ill befits a progressive liberal democracy, so up to a certain point such comparisons are valid. But perhaps there's a "sweet spot" for average life expectancy above which it starts becoming a bad thing again.
Long life is not the problem per se
Quality of life in the later years is. I don’t want to avoid a decade of infirmity from 80 to 90 by dying at 80; I want to avoid it by maintaining my health into my 80s.
There's a massive public health and preventative medicine challenge there.
Some of you really seem to have issues with the idea that Jesus didn't cry at this girl's death nap.
Some of them might, I suppose. I don’t—my concern here is making assumptions about the lack of specific reference in a text to mean that something definitely didn’t happen. He might have cried, He might not have cried.
I don’t have issues with the idea that Jesus might not have wept at this girl’s death - only with the assumption that because the text is silent about it we can conclude that he didn’t weep.
It's the composition teacher coming out in me. But I'll leave it alone now.
OMG you’re one too? 😮 Awesome! ❤️ (Let’s not derail the thread, but cool!) (“Then—there’s a pair of us? Don’t tell! They’d advertise—you know!” (Emily Dickinson, more or less))
Regarding quality of life vs quantity, I’m reminded of the Struldbruggs in Gulliver’s Travels. On their island, if someone is born with a special mark, it means they’re immortal, but everyone regards it as a curse, because they live forever but keep getting older, with all of the negative aspects getting worse and worse forever. 😱
I think that prolonging our earthly life in this world at all costs is definitely toxic—I’m just not in favor of suicide.
I will look for the citation, but I think the evidence around really long lived people is that the period in which their health declines moves forward to be roughly the same distance from death. It is not that, your health starts to deteriorate at 70 so if you die at 80 you have 10 years of decline and if you live to be 100 you have 30 years of declining health. But if you have a five year decline at end of life (so called terminal drop) it starts at 75 if you die at 80 and 95 if you die at 100 - obviously with individual variability.
Whereas, if you smoke very heavily or do high dose anabolic steroids or whatever - you likely start significant health problems early that continue longer and die younger as well. E.g. You smoke, get asthma by 40, get copd by 55, have a stroke at 65 and die at 70 - rather than potentially living to 80 with health problems starting later. This is some times discussed as healthspan vs lifespan.
But whilst we are talking about attitudes - part of the issue is the horror of disability, worship of youth and failure to understand the actual likelihood of various kinds of conditions and how tolerable they are in actuality.
The amount of people who say they would rather die than be incontinent for example - when discussing their future health. Many women are in fact incontinent for a period after giving birth, 75% of women over 65 report some level of incontinence. It is not in fact unbearable to live with.
If any of you have experienced a change in physical function you will be aware how quickly something becomes normal for you. I had a frozen shoulder after Covid, if you had described to me before it happened what it would be like I would have been horrified and would had have anticipated I would struggle to cope. In fact it was very unpleasant but I got on with it and gradually recovered, I still have not recovered full range of motion in my right arm but I have adapted to that.
Quality of life in the later years is. I don’t want to avoid a decade of infirmity from 80 to 90 by dying at 80; I want to avoid it by maintaining my health into my 80s.
That would be nice, but for many of us, that's not currently one of the options on the table - the option we'll get is to spend a period of time living with infirmity, which might well be painful and/or debilitating.
Given the state of our bodies, and the pace of change of our care and health systems, the number of years of infirmity each of us can expect is already established, to a fair degree.
Currently, a significant unknown factor affecting our life expectancy is the degree of self-determination we can expect to have over ending our lives.
There's a massive public health and preventative medicine challenge there.
Obviously.
The part of the challenge we can all do something about right now, is addressing our own attitudes to death.
I will look for the citation, but I think the evidence around really long lived people is that the period in which their health declines moves forward to be roughly the same distance from death. It is not that, your health starts to deteriorate at 70 so if you die at 80 you have 10 years of decline and if you live to be 100 you have 30 years of declining health. But if you have a five year decline at end of life (so called terminal drop) it starts at 75 if you die at 80 and 95 if you die at 100 - obviously with individual variability.
Whereas, if you smoke very heavily or do high dose anabolic steroids or whatever - you likely start significant health problems early that continue longer and die younger as well. E.g. You smoke, get asthma by 40, get copd by 55, have a stroke at 65 and die at 70 - rather than potentially living to 80 with health problems starting later. This is some times discussed as healthspan vs lifespan.
Compression of Morbidity: In Retrospect and in Prospect (PDF from the International Longevity Centre) addresses these issues from the perspective of reducing the period of infirmity as longevity increases, referencing data of the 24 years up to 2004 in the USA. It would be useful to know what the comparable data are for the first 24 years of this century, and for the UK, given that mortality rates recently appear to have stalled and even reversed (which is forewarned in the Afterword).
In 1980, I proposed the Compression of Morbidity hypothesis: By postponing the age at which chronic infirmity begins, disability and morbidity could be compressed into a shorter period of the average human life span. I foresaw a society in which the active and vital years of life would increase in length, the disabilities and frailties of ageing would be postponed, and the total amount of lifetime disability and morbidity would decrease.
I predicted a society in which the majority of people could enjoy a long and vigorous life, with a relatively brief terminal collapse at the end. Members of this society would maintain healthy lifestyles. There would be few smokers, many who exercised, many with good dietary habits, and few with obesity. People would understand prevention as postponement and would value the quality of life at least as much as its quantity.
...
The conventional wisdom took the discouraging view that any measure which improved health would be likely also to improve longevity and ultimately to expand the period of morbidity.
... Conclusion
The Compression of Morbidity paradigm must direct the future of health care policy for older persons. It has been personally gratifying for me to see the gradual acceptance of a positive, practical, and even optimistic vision of the future. Far too often we have been bombarded by approaches to health care reform that are not in any way directed toward better health. We know how to do better.
Some of you really seem to have issues with the idea that Jesus didn't cry at this girl's death nap.
Some of them might, I suppose. I don’t—my concern here is making assumptions about the lack of specific reference in a text to mean that something definitely didn’t happen. He might have cried, He might not have cried.
Right. Imaginations of Jesus are far more salient than what the text describes. Christianity is whatever you need it to be.
I think that prolonging our earthly life in this world at all costs is definitely toxic—I’m just not in favor of suicide.
This doesn't greatly surprise me, given what you've written about your beliefs. Do you experience this as a dilemma? Are you able to examine to what extent your attitude to suicide arises from your beliefs, and how much is from acquired societal norms (eg family)?
But whilst we are talking about attitudes - part of the issue is the horror of disability, worship of youth and failure to understand the actual likelihood of various kinds of conditions and how tolerable they are in actuality.
The amount of people who say they would rather die than be incontinent for example - when discussing their future health. Many women are in fact incontinent for a period after giving birth, 75% of women over 65 report some level of incontinence. It is not in fact unbearable to live with.
I think a big issue for teenagers is the "yuck" factor. I can't see social media's (and wider society's) long-standing obsession with appearance helping to address this any time soon.
What "I'd rather die" tells me is that we, as children, learn rather more about death as hyperbole than death as a reality of life that can be talked about.
If any of you have experienced a change in physical function you will be aware how quickly something becomes normal for you. I had a frozen shoulder after Covid, if you had described to me before it happened what it would be like I would have been horrified and would had have anticipated I would struggle to cope. In fact it was very unpleasant but I got on with it and gradually recovered, I still have not recovered full range of motion in my right arm but I have adapted to that.
I've learned to accept change and deterioration in quite a lot of my physical functions!
But whilst we are talking about attitudes - part of the issue is the horror of disability, worship of youth and failure to understand the actual likelihood of various kinds of conditions and how tolerable they are in actuality.
The amount of people who say they would rather die than be incontinent for example - when discussing their future health. Many women are in fact incontinent for a period after giving birth, 75% of women over 65 report some level of incontinence. It is not in fact unbearable to live with.
I think a big issue for teenagers is the "yuck" factor. I can't see social media's (and wider society's) long-standing obsession with appearance helping to address this any time soon.
What "I'd rather die" tells me is that we, as children, learn rather more about death as hyperbole than death as a reality of life that can be talked about.
This.
I've been increasingly disabled starting about age 25 or so, and it's not unbearable. Not something I think a whole lot about, really, beyond making whatever new adaptation I have to every so often in order to live my life.
To be sure, I'm fortunate in having people/a home/a job that permits me to make those adaptations; if I didn't, I imagine I'd be constantly thinking about my disabilities, and it would become unbearable much more quickly.
Which of course means that the changes need to be made in society and not in the disabled person....
Some of you really seem to have issues with the idea that Jesus didn't cry at this girl's death nap.
Some of them might, I suppose. I don’t—my concern here is making assumptions about the lack of specific reference in a text to mean that something definitely didn’t happen. He might have cried, He might not have cried.
Right. Imaginations of Jesus are far more salient than what the text describes. Christianity is whatever you need it to be.
That's not what I said, and it's rude and inappropriate.
Some of you really seem to have issues with the idea that Jesus didn't cry at this girl's death nap.
Some of them might, I suppose. I don’t—my concern here is making assumptions about the lack of specific reference in a text to mean that something definitely didn’t happen. He might have cried, He might not have cried.
Right. Imaginations of Jesus are far more salient than what the text describes. Christianity is whatever you need it to be.
That's not what I said, and it's rude and inappropriate.
It may be. It may not be. Doesn't mean it's wrong.
I think that prolonging our earthly life in this world at all costs is definitely toxic—I’m just not in favor of suicide.
This doesn't greatly surprise me, given what you've written about your beliefs. Do you experience this as a dilemma? Are you able to examine to what extent your attitude to suicide arises from your beliefs, and how much is from acquired societal norms (eg family)?
Yes, I have indeed examined it, and it specifically comes from my beliefs. The only thing I've found in my Christian faith that seems to allow for suicide would be a few early female saints who committed suicide rather than stop being virgins.
When I became a Christian, it was from outside, not raised in anything, even in the Jewish heritage I have on my mother's side. If I had been raised in some form of Christianity, it might have made it harder from me, since my bio-parents were toxic and I still bear the effects of their abuse and neglect, which will only fully be healed when I see Jesus face to Face. I largely converted via reading, particularly C.S. Lewis. (And I've actually come to believe some things that align with my toxic parents' views, not because they believed them, but in spite of it--since I did not want them to define me, even in the form of a photographic negative--being the same as what they believed OR being the opposite of what they believed would still let them define me. It's been a long and arduous process all my life.)
I did absorb some things from some people, like my political views in some ways back in the day, but one of the things that helped me change those things was reading very old books. And I'm not going to keep going as I just realized I'm in danger of shanghaiing the thread with my life story, so I'll stop now.
Some of you really seem to have issues with the idea that Jesus didn't cry at this girl's death nap.
Some of them might, I suppose. I don’t—my concern here is making assumptions about the lack of specific reference in a text to mean that something definitely didn’t happen. He might have cried, He might not have cried.
Right. Imaginations of Jesus are far more salient than what the text describes. Christianity is whatever you need it to be.
That's not what I said, and it's rude and inappropriate.
It may be. It may not be. Doesn't mean it's wrong.
No, it's definitely a rude and inappropriate personal attack on my intellectual honesty. and it's wrong for you to do it. I'm angry now. I don't need this garbage with a hurricane bearing down on me, either. Struggling to not pound the keyboard in increasing rage. You have done a wrong bad thing here.
Some of you really seem to have issues with the idea that Jesus didn't cry at this girl's death nap.
Some of them might, I suppose. I don’t—my concern here is making assumptions about the lack of specific reference in a text to mean that something definitely didn’t happen. He might have cried, He might not have cried.
Right. Imaginations of Jesus are far more salient than what the text describes. Christianity is whatever you need it to be.
That's not what I said, and it's rude and inappropriate.
It may be. It may not be. Doesn't mean it's wrong.
@The_Riv per commandment 6, follow the hosts directions - if you want to query them take it to Styx.
Some of you really seem to have issues with the idea that Jesus didn't cry at this girl's death nap.
Some of them might, I suppose. I don’t—my concern here is making assumptions about the lack of specific reference in a text to mean that something definitely didn’t happen. He might have cried, He might not have cried.
Right. Imaginations of Jesus are far more salient than what the text describes. Christianity is whatever you need it to be.
That's not what I said, and it's rude and inappropriate.
It may be. It may not be. Doesn't mean it's wrong.
No, it's definitely a rude and inappropriate personal attack on my intellectual honesty. and it's wrong for you to do it. I'm angry now. I don't need this garbage with a hurricane bearing down on me, either. Struggling to not pound the keyboard in increasing rage. You have done a wrong bad thing here.
I wasn't addressing *you*, @ChastMastr, or I'd have included your name, like I just did. Hope you're safe from the hurricane.
Some of you really seem to have issues with the idea that Jesus didn't cry at this girl's death nap.
Some of them might, I suppose. I don’t—my concern here is making assumptions about the lack of specific reference in a text to mean that something definitely didn’t happen. He might have cried, He might not have cried.
Right. Imaginations of Jesus are far more salient than what the text describes. Christianity is whatever you need it to be.
That's not what I said, and it's rude and inappropriate.
It may be. It may not be. Doesn't mean it's wrong.
No, it's definitely a rude and inappropriate personal attack on my intellectual honesty. and it's wrong for you to do it. I'm angry now. I don't need this garbage with a hurricane bearing down on me, either. Struggling to not pound the keyboard in increasing rage. You have done a wrong bad thing here.
I wasn't addressing *you*, @ChastMastr, or I'd have included your name, like I just did. Hope you're safe from the hurricane.
I am not going to continue the argument. I genuinely thank you for your good wishes.
Some of you really seem to have issues with the idea that Jesus didn't cry at this girl's death nap.
Some of them might, I suppose. I don’t—my concern here is making assumptions about the lack of specific reference in a text to mean that something definitely didn’t happen. He might have cried, He might not have cried.
Right. Imaginations of Jesus are far more salient than what the text describes. Christianity is whatever you need it to be.
That's not what I said, and it's rude and inappropriate.
It may be. It may not be. Doesn't mean it's wrong.
No, it's definitely a rude and inappropriate personal attack on my intellectual honesty. and it's wrong for you to do it. I'm angry now. I don't need this garbage with a hurricane bearing down on me, either. Struggling to not pound the keyboard in increasing rage. You have done a wrong bad thing here.
I wasn't addressing *you*, @ChastMastr, or I'd have included your name, like I just did. Hope you're safe from the hurricane.
It’s not unreasonable, when reading a post where a shipmate is quoted and then you is used, to assume that the you refers to the quoted shipmate. The generic you is sometimes hard to pick up on, especially in a context like an online discussion forum. There’s no rule that, if the generic you is not intended, a person’s name should be added to avoid that ambiguity. It’s helpful, but not necessarily expected, so the absence of a name doesn’t avoid the ambiguity.
Part of the problem is that not all of us would equate MAID with suicide.
I don't think that's an inherent part of the problem so much as inherent in how people understand the problem - two different ways of seeing it. Most of the opinions I've read (across multiple sources) embody one view or the other - often explicitly. These kinds of views - how we see the world - don't usually respond well to argument in the course of discussion about personal decision-making.
...
Are you able to examine to what extent your attitude to suicide arises from your beliefs, and how much is from acquired societal norms (eg family)?
Yes, I have indeed examined it, and it specifically comes from my beliefs. The only thing I've found in my Christian faith that seems to allow for suicide would be a few early female saints who committed suicide rather than stop being virgins.
When I became a Christian, it was from outside, not raised in anything, even in the Jewish heritage I have on my mother's side. If I had been raised in some form of Christianity, it might have made it harder from me, since my bio-parents were toxic and I still bear the effects of their abuse and neglect, which will only fully be healed when I see Jesus face to Face. I largely converted via reading, particularly C.S. Lewis. (And I've actually come to believe some things that align with my toxic parents' views, not because they believed them, but in spite of it--since I did not want them to define me, even in the form of a photographic negative--being the same as what they believed OR being the opposite of what they believed would still let them define me. It's been a long and arduous process all my life.)
That makes sense - freedom from being defined by other people isn't quick or easy.
I did absorb some things from some people, like my political views in some ways back in the day, but one of the things that helped me change those things was reading very old books. And I'm not going to keep going as I just realized I'm in danger of shanghaiing the thread with my life story, so I'll stop now.
Thank you for your reply. I hope you're staying safe.
[regarding societal attitudes]
I've been increasingly disabled starting about age 25 or so, and it's not unbearable. Not something I think a whole lot about, really, beyond making whatever new adaptation I have to every so often in order to live my life.
To be sure, I'm fortunate in having people/a home/a job that permits me to make those adaptations; if I didn't, I imagine I'd be constantly thinking about my disabilities, and it would become unbearable much more quickly.
Which of course means that the changes need to be made in society and not in the disabled person....
Thanks for this, Lamb Chopped.
One of the issues that comes up in discussions about assisted dying is individuals feeling like they're a burden. I expect most of us would say that we don't want the people we know to feel as though they are are burden (either to us, or to society). Nevertheless, most of us live in societies in which people in need are often treated as though they are a burden.
And most of us also live in societies which in principle legislate for a certain degree of individual autonomy - people making their own decisions about how they live their lives. At the same time, most of us live in societies in which individual autonomy varies widely. The circumstances which would enable all members of society to have equivalent degrees of autonomy are not distributed equally (let alone equitably).
The issue of assisted dying exposes and highlights many societal disparities. And it directly addresses the amount of individual autonomy we can expect - society has not traditionally allowed individuals much autonomy in this issue, for a variety of reasons which appear to have a long interwoven history.
So while the problem sounds pretty simple - how to reduce pain and suffering - it seems to me that the best solution that can be devised is still going to leave a lot to desired, and going to worry a lot of people. While trying to make sense of all this, one principle which occurred to me is that a precondition to dying a good death should be having lived a good life.
Comments
Family and friends. But I can't find a case where someone has even raised the suspicion that this took place.
Have you read the existing statutes in other countries? Or what's proposed in Scotland? No one is required to kill people. Jesus, how can you think that? Do you really believe there are clinicians in the US, Canada, Switzerland and the Netherlands who only barely drag themselves to work some days because they have to kill people? Wouldn't they be screaming from the rooftops? Wouldn't people opposed to these laws be writing furious op-ed pieces talking about that?
People administer the drugs themselves. One of the main complaints lodged by some disabled people is that MAID is unavailable to them because they cannot self-administer drugs. No medical personnel are required to take part in the process of they don't want to. Institutions like hospitals and nursing homes may ban the practice from taking place on their premises.
I could just as easily speculate that some would see it as a routine part of their jobs, and others as an honor. But again, aid in dying has been law in some places for decades, so why speculate? Do you know of evidence concerning this either way? Pharmacists in Oregon where it's been legal since 1997 would have been saying this by now if it were the case.
You keep making up hypotheticals and speculating, with no reference to the real world evidence of decades of real people availing themselves of medical aid in dying, decades of real practitioners taking part in the process by talking to patients, writing prescriptions, filling them - look at what real people with experience are saying. Look at what the laws and proposed laws actually say, how this would work in the UK, what the safeguards would be. See if you think what's actually proposed would be okay, at least for other people if it's not something you'd want to do.
I have psychiatric colleagues who have been asked by patients to support them travelling to Dignitas, I have had to be involved in best interest decisions around DNAR for non-capacitous patients, it was extremely stressful, but as clinician involved in someone’s care you don’t just walk away from someone because it becomes difficult. Clinicians usually feel obligated to their patients, they generally don’t want to let them down.
Conversely, people who have burnt out and become callous to what they are doing do not always notice this and take time off work to recover. In the UK we have multiple major enquiries into the failure of compassionate care - one of the most famous/infamous being Staffordshire Hospital Scandal. You should not need to tell people you don’t leave a patient lying in a urine soaked bed, what actually happens in a chronically understaffed unit is that poor practice gradually becomes normalised. (Or there’s this kind of thing..)
In other words, I am worried palliative care clinicians (the most likely group to be involved on a regular basis) will end up being asked to participate relatively frequently. And if they do, they risk becoming desensitised in ways that impact their practice. What might that look like in practice ?
Well for starters becoming more casual about capacity. At the moment, in main stream practice, frontline staff at not reliable at spotting problems with capacity unless its barn door obvious. Even then, for example, the hospital who is caring for mother (otherwise well) and knows she can not remember where she is or what day it is - apparently assessed she had capacity to consent to having a photo taken of a gynae issue in order to have a referral they also thought she had capacity to consent to.
In the UK, there is a presumption of capacity unless there is some reason to question it (in her case advanced dementia) - then you have to be able to understand the information, retain the information, weigh up the the information, and communicate your decision. You have to have all four elements in order to be capacitous.
What tends to happen, is folk assume you are capacitous unless you don’t want to do what they think would be best for you.
The sort of laws being proposed in the UK - such as the last bill introduced detail here - are medically gatekept. Currently, when courts are asked about withdrawing treatment, they typically rely on the medical advice they are given - for the obvious reason that they lack medical expertise - so it will very much come down to medical opinions on prognosis and capacity. A private member’s bill is being introduced to the Westminster parliament with a vote on the 18th of a October - it is likely to be a clone of the Lords proposal.
The discussion should be using the tools we already have for making life/death decisions for humans in other circumstances.
We’ll just have to disagree, then. But I should point out that even believing in an afterlife, etc., all these years, we still grieve. You might find random people who are glib about it, or even saints who have such great faith that they have less grief (not the same thing), but generally grief happens even if you expect to see them again in some sense, and always has.
If only there were people we could ask. As these Canadian researchers did.
And since I'm looking around for the old ::brickwall:: smiley, this is my last post on this thread.
Law reporting from JURISTnews:
Its an interesting article, with a small self-selected sample that doesn't really answer the question.
What I do get from that is, in Canada, a lot of healthcare professionals are involved in the process with varying amounts of distress for varying reasons. The decisions often involve the family, the family often feel they have to support the dying person's wishes regardless of their own views and grieving the death can be problematic, they are seeing some people seeking MAID due to feeling they are a burden, or because other potential fixable aspects of the end of their life are going wrong and these are exactly the kind of things I was saying I thought would be a problem.
And this from a group of people willing and able to answer questions of the subject.
There's clearly an issue with discrimination (which I'm starting to think should be added to death and taxes as a certainty of life).
And, in the UK at least, I would expect there to be an issue with service provision, and a broad range of consequent issues for the people providing the services, because pretty much everything to do with care and health in the UK is affected by resource scarcity. (And institutionality.)
But there's also a general issue about people's attitudes to death. And in regard to this, I'm still not sure that talking about the law is a useful place to start. So, thinking about death as separation, are there any perspectives or understandings that help?
(On a different tack, does anyone here think of death as the fulfilment of life?)
Help toward what goal?
I was thinking of the case where the coercion was coming from the family. In which case they are not going to complain.
If it’s not just a fictional story, then authority does come into it.
No mention of tears doesn’t logically lead to no crying, any more than no mention of breathing or blinking leads to an absence of those. Heck, there’s no mention of Jesus relieving Himself in the Gospels, but surely He did that.
But it sounds like you’re having a bad day (the_Riv, not Chastmastr, who is having a hurricane!) so I’ll be done now.
I agree with this. In fact I’d go further, and call it an unhealthy fixation on prolonging life.
The idea that it’s better for someone to be forced to eke out every single agonising second of life that medical science can possibly pump into them prior to their inevitable demise, rather than having a dignified and relatively pain-free death on their own terms, appals me.
I agree about the horror of the first, but I think there is a difference between ceasing extreme measures to keep someone alive artificially, and actively killing them, or them killing themselves. I’d even go so far as to say that palliative care, even if that is likely to shorten one’s lifespan, is still very different than actively killing one.
Thinking about my own conversations with my immediate family and friends, these tend to centre around the issue of how to die a good death - our personal preferences. And just across my immediate family, these preferences vary significantly.
But if separation is one of the most significant realities of death, it seems a bit strange that it doesn't explicitly appear in our conversations. Or maybe not so strange, given western attitudes and our largely unaddressed taboos about what we do and don't talk about.
We seem to be stuck in a system which values quantity of life over quality of life. Maybe part of this equation is because quantity is easier to measure than quality, or maybe quantities are simpler and cheaper to do something about - or at least were, given the increasing numbers of us undergoing long and costly periods of end-of-life "care". (If this is addressed by putting more emphasis on quality, it wouldn't be the first time exigencies inadvertently bought about beneficial societal change.)
And I wonder if life expectancy, on its own, is a particularly helpful measure of our progressive liberal democracies. Internationally, it's usually reported as though there were some kind of competition to reach the top of the table.
I would say that it matters how much difference there is, and why we think there is a difference. One reason would be our beliefs about death and the taking of (one's own) life, which is a discussion I would expect to proceed along the lines that many other of our threads have gone.
BUT, in the context of this thread, and in the particular context of separation from someone we care about, I'm wondering if we (the survivors) are prepared to accept a bit of extra separation for the sake of relief of pain and suffering, but that there's a threshold beyond which we feel this to be unreasonable, or even selfish. In other words: subconsciously or unconsciously, we even blame the person for creating additional unnecessary separation.
Also, keeping in mind Louise's point, if separation is a significant reality of death, then those people without friends and family - the socially isolated - are likely to be affected by its apparent absence, in significantly different, but still unspoken and mostly unaddressed ways.
Some of you really seem to have issues with the idea that Jesus didn't cry at this girl's death nap. Why is that? If Jesus was fully human, could he not have moved through her alleged death without crying, as you and I go through our days knowing about deaths that we don't cry over? Occasional indifference seems eminently human enough to me.
My day was fine, thanks.
YES. That's exactly it.
I think the long and costly periods of end-of-life "care" are an important factor here as well. We talk of the "demographic challenge" of having more and more old people in our societies, and the need for more and more younger people to be found to generate the taxes to pay for their care, but it's almost taboo to ask whether maybe the problem is that we've just got too good at keeping people alive despite infirmity - and, in the context of this thread, whether they even want to be kept alive or not!
Near the start of Lord of the Rings, Bilbo describes himself as feeling "thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread". Modern medical science has got very good at stretching out even small amounts of butter over more and more bread, but maybe we should instead be thinking about whether there's an upper limit, a right amount of bread beyond which scraping the butter ever thinner to cover it becomes undesirable.
Pneumonia used to be known as "the old man's friend" because it granted a relatively quick and easy death rather than a distressing dragged-out deterioration. That attitude, ISTM, had merit and should not have been so casually dismissed.
Well, I think it's obvious that too low an average life expectancy ill befits a progressive liberal democracy, so up to a certain point such comparisons are valid. But perhaps there's a "sweet spot" for average life expectancy above which it starts becoming a bad thing again.
Long life is not the problem per se
Quality of life in the later years is. I don’t want to avoid a decade of infirmity from 80 to 90 by dying at 80; I want to avoid it by maintaining my health into my 80s.
There's a massive public health and preventative medicine challenge there.
Some of them might, I suppose. I don’t—my concern here is making assumptions about the lack of specific reference in a text to mean that something definitely didn’t happen. He might have cried, He might not have cried.
Agreed.
OMG you’re one too? 😮 Awesome! ❤️ (Let’s not derail the thread, but cool!) (“Then—there’s a pair of us? Don’t tell! They’d advertise—you know!” (Emily Dickinson, more or less))
I think that prolonging our earthly life in this world at all costs is definitely toxic—I’m just not in favor of suicide.
Whereas, if you smoke very heavily or do high dose anabolic steroids or whatever - you likely start significant health problems early that continue longer and die younger as well. E.g. You smoke, get asthma by 40, get copd by 55, have a stroke at 65 and die at 70 - rather than potentially living to 80 with health problems starting later. This is some times discussed as healthspan vs lifespan.
But whilst we are talking about attitudes - part of the issue is the horror of disability, worship of youth and failure to understand the actual likelihood of various kinds of conditions and how tolerable they are in actuality.
The amount of people who say they would rather die than be incontinent for example - when discussing their future health. Many women are in fact incontinent for a period after giving birth, 75% of women over 65 report some level of incontinence. It is not in fact unbearable to live with.
If any of you have experienced a change in physical function you will be aware how quickly something becomes normal for you. I had a frozen shoulder after Covid, if you had described to me before it happened what it would be like I would have been horrified and would had have anticipated I would struggle to cope. In fact it was very unpleasant but I got on with it and gradually recovered, I still have not recovered full range of motion in my right arm but I have adapted to that.
Given the state of our bodies, and the pace of change of our care and health systems, the number of years of infirmity each of us can expect is already established, to a fair degree.
Currently, a significant unknown factor affecting our life expectancy is the degree of self-determination we can expect to have over ending our lives.
Obviously.
The part of the challenge we can all do something about right now, is addressing our own attitudes to death.
Right. Imaginations of Jesus are far more salient than what the text describes. Christianity is whatever you need it to be.
I think a big issue for teenagers is the "yuck" factor. I can't see social media's (and wider society's) long-standing obsession with appearance helping to address this any time soon.
What "I'd rather die" tells me is that we, as children, learn rather more about death as hyperbole than death as a reality of life that can be talked about. I've learned to accept change and deterioration in quite a lot of my physical functions!
This.
I've been increasingly disabled starting about age 25 or so, and it's not unbearable. Not something I think a whole lot about, really, beyond making whatever new adaptation I have to every so often in order to live my life.
To be sure, I'm fortunate in having people/a home/a job that permits me to make those adaptations; if I didn't, I imagine I'd be constantly thinking about my disabilities, and it would become unbearable much more quickly.
Which of course means that the changes need to be made in society and not in the disabled person....
Also if we're going to get deep into discussing biblical interpretation, that should split off to Ecclesiantics.
Gwai,
Epiphanies Host
That's not what I said, and it's rude and inappropriate.
Bad theology, perhaps.
It may be. It may not be. Doesn't mean it's wrong.
Yes, I have indeed examined it, and it specifically comes from my beliefs. The only thing I've found in my Christian faith that seems to allow for suicide would be a few early female saints who committed suicide rather than stop being virgins.
When I became a Christian, it was from outside, not raised in anything, even in the Jewish heritage I have on my mother's side. If I had been raised in some form of Christianity, it might have made it harder from me, since my bio-parents were toxic and I still bear the effects of their abuse and neglect, which will only fully be healed when I see Jesus face to Face. I largely converted via reading, particularly C.S. Lewis. (And I've actually come to believe some things that align with my toxic parents' views, not because they believed them, but in spite of it--since I did not want them to define me, even in the form of a photographic negative--being the same as what they believed OR being the opposite of what they believed would still let them define me. It's been a long and arduous process all my life.)
I did absorb some things from some people, like my political views in some ways back in the day, but one of the things that helped me change those things was reading very old books. And I'm not going to keep going as I just realized I'm in danger of shanghaiing the thread with my life story, so I'll stop now.
No, it's definitely a rude and inappropriate personal attack on my intellectual honesty. and it's wrong for you to do it. I'm angry now. I don't need this garbage with a hurricane bearing down on me, either. Struggling to not pound the keyboard in increasing rage. You have done a wrong bad thing here.
@The_Riv per commandment 6, follow the hosts directions - if you want to query them take it to Styx.
Doublethink, Admin
[/Admin Warning]
Gwai,
Epiphanies Host
I wasn't addressing *you*, @ChastMastr, or I'd have included your name, like I just did. Hope you're safe from the hurricane.
I am not going to continue the argument. I genuinely thank you for your good wishes.
That makes sense - freedom from being defined by other people isn't quick or easy.
Thank you for your reply. I hope you're staying safe.
Thanks for this, Lamb Chopped.
One of the issues that comes up in discussions about assisted dying is individuals feeling like they're a burden. I expect most of us would say that we don't want the people we know to feel as though they are are burden (either to us, or to society). Nevertheless, most of us live in societies in which people in need are often treated as though they are a burden.
And most of us also live in societies which in principle legislate for a certain degree of individual autonomy - people making their own decisions about how they live their lives. At the same time, most of us live in societies in which individual autonomy varies widely. The circumstances which would enable all members of society to have equivalent degrees of autonomy are not distributed equally (let alone equitably).
The issue of assisted dying exposes and highlights many societal disparities. And it directly addresses the amount of individual autonomy we can expect - society has not traditionally allowed individuals much autonomy in this issue, for a variety of reasons which appear to have a long interwoven history.
So while the problem sounds pretty simple - how to reduce pain and suffering - it seems to me that the best solution that can be devised is still going to leave a lot to desired, and going to worry a lot of people. While trying to make sense of all this, one principle which occurred to me is that a precondition to dying a good death should be having lived a good life.