'I'm dying, you're not': Those terminally ill ask more states to legalize physician-assisted death
'I'm dying, you're not': Those terminally ill ask more states to legalize physician-assisted death
The laws would allow terminally ill patients under specified conditions to end their lives with a doctor’s help.
On a brisk day at a restaurant outside Chicago, Deb Robertson sat with her teenage grandson to talk about her death.
She’ll probably miss his high school graduation. She declined the extended warranty on her car. Sometimes she wonders who will be at her funeral.
Those things don’t frighten her much. The 65-year-old didn’t cry when she learned two months ago that the cancerous tumors in her liver were spreading, portending a tormented death.
But later, she received a call. A bill moving through the Illinois Legislature to allow certain terminally ill patients to end their own lives with a doctor’s help had made progress.
Then she cried.
“Medical-aid in dying is not me choosing to die,” she says she told her 17-year-old grandson. “I am going to die. But it is my way of having a little bit more control over what it looks like in the end.”
That same conversation is happening beside hospital beds and around dinner tables across the country, as Americans who are nearing life’s end negotiate the terms with themselves, their families and, now, state lawmakers.
The flip side of our ability to prolong life more and more successfully is that we equip ourselves to extend suffering more and more unbearably.
Puritanical attitudes around the right to die will impact a vast majority of people in terrible ways that will largely get ignored as on the other end of it the victims have no voice and often the family is mourning and wants to move on or just doesn't even fully realize how terrible that end was.
But the doctors and medical staff...
The people I know well in those roles get upset when healthy patients take a turn for the worse and die when they had so much life before that. But by far the most upset I see them is when a family member of a patient decides because of beliefs to choose life prolonging options that are the equivalent of extended torture.
As our medical capabilities improve we really need to continually rethink just what it means to "do no harm."
We need a federal constitutional amendment of bodily autonomy. Abortions, tattoos, personal drug use, gender reassignment, plastic surgery, suicide, neuralink, etc. All the same issue: My body, fuck off. You can make it more complicated than that but it’s not.
It doesn’t matter whether you agree with face tattoos or not. Nobody is making you get one. It’s not your concern. An artist can choose not to give face tattoos, as a doctor can choose whether they want to give a vasectomy to a young child-free man. But the government should have no say about what a person is allowed to do or have done to their own body. The government can regulate to make it safer, but not disallow.
For the last 10 years I have been saying this should be legal. As long as you are determined to be of sound mind and not influenced by anyone, then let them make the decision. You will have many arguments against it (religion, could be cured unexpectedly) but it's the patient's decision.
The only argument would be if doctors and nurses should assist. This is a huge argument against state sponsored executions. Maybe a device that can safely and painlessly assist the patient could be a resolution.
I work as an EEG tech. I see some really awful cases where there's no hope for a meaningful recovery. Lawmakers should be required to do a month of hospice/palliative care rounds before signing any legislation on right to die. There is so much misinformation and misunderstanding surrounding what that care entails. The patients I see often don't have the ability to make that choice and are left up on life preserving care for days to months at a time without any chance at meaningful recovery.
All the jabronis in this thread with "being able to decide when you die is BAD actually" have clearly never had a loved one painfully and slowly waste away in a shitty hospital bed praying for death every day.
People should have the right to decide when they decide to end the game of life. They should be able to make this decision with a qualified medical professional, preferably one who specializes in end of life care.
I'd support it for any nation with free healthcare. But people are now going to be choosing between being with their families and not bankrupting them. I would not doubt it would be used to justify insurance companies not covering terminally ill patients because they only cover death for the terminaly ill.
I think Kovorkian has the right idea, honestly.
I'm permanently disabled with a degenerative condition. Once I'm just surviving and not living, I'd love the freedom of a painless end. I watched grandparents suffer, I've watched them be kept alive through machines and drugs, I listened to my grandfather beg me for death.... you'll never change my mind that assisted suicide for the terminally ill is the ethical choice.
Now I know why you choose Phoenix zzz. From the ashes of your useless smoking brain arise another dumb and mundane thought.
Eh, I used to be all in favor of Right To Death laws, but when Canada passed theirs they started pushing the disabled and impoverished onto it, not just the terminally ill. Which is basically ethnic cleansing.
So while I understand the Slippery Slope argument is not a good one, I'm going to need to see some common sense restrictions before I could support this as fervently as I did before