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Legal Medically Assisted Suicide is a Terrible Idea
I found this information horrifying: Almost 5% (technically, 4.7%) of deaths in Canada are from legal medically assisted suicide. 15,343 medically assisted suicide deaths out of 326,571 total deaths.
If practiced in the United States of America (3,279,857 deaths in 2022), that would be a little over 154,000 “medically assisted suicide” deaths in a year. That would be more than three times the number of people who die in car crashes. And more than three times the number of people who die from gun-inflicted injuries (many of which are already suicides).
Apparently you can “qualify” for “medically assisted suicide” in Canada even if your illness is not terminal, or even if you’re not physically sick. (We’re all “terminal” in some sense, as eventually we’re all going to die, at least from an earthly perspective.) And apparently the number of medically assisted suicides has exploded since the activity was legally formalized in 2016.
During the Covid year of 2020, I developed an enhanced understanding of why some people want to commit suicide. Government officials, social institutions, and others kept telling me that my very existence was a threat to others, and that nothing I might do outweighed the probability that my presence would hurt someone else. So of course I began to think that the world would be better off without me. I never did anything with those thoughts, as my longstanding Christian faith told me somehow I was still worth something, and that my life here on Earth still had value. But I got a more thorough understanding of why some people commit suicide. And how easy, if government and social institutions support and encourage suicide, it can be for people to decide their lives are not worth living, and that the world would be better without them.
Amid rumors that “medically assisted suicide” is a part of the program of the Canadian government to control the costs of government-provided medical care, it is easy to see pressure to further increase “medically assisted suicides” in the future.
I am horrified that such a statistically significant number of deaths is directly attributable to legally sanctioned suicide. The United States should not follow that path. We should not be encouraging (or even tacitly approving) people to think so little of their lives that they conclude that the best course of action is killing themselves.
Published in Healthcare
It’s abused everywhere it’s tried. Patient costing too much for the healthcare system? “Have you thought about suicide?”
The prophesy will be fulfilled, when the dead are turned into Soylent Green.
Except Soylent Green seemed to be based on an assumption of continued “population explosion” which was definitely the… zeitgeist?… of the time. It doesn’t work so well when people are having children below replacement rate.
I am supportive of placing medical meters next to hospital beds like how we have medical . If you can’t pay a hundred dollars when it beeps you don’t get any of the drugs that you need to live.
Joking aside. We don’t have the cash to fund sick people indefinitely. Once we Americans can’t fund our entitlements anymore. We will let the old people die out of necessity.
No, we will steal resources from places to support them. Anyone who disagrees gets gatling thermonuclear oppression.
Not so long ago, medical ethics prohibited doctors from taking a life.
Letting nature takes its mortal course while providing palliative care to alleviate pain is not at all comparable to so-called “medically assisted suicide” or its proper term, euthanasia.
Switzerland’s suicide law allows others to provide advice, facilities, and materials, but requires that the person has to do the actual deed themselves. Hence the “suicide pods” that flood the chamber with pure nitrogen once the person pushes a button themselves.
It’s a sad comment that the morbid legal paradigm that Switzerland has devised actually manages to be superior to what the Trudeaupians have inflicted on Soviet Canuckistan.
There is a Canadian Paralympic medalist (her name escapes me) who asked for a chairlift for her home. The social worker (whatever s/he was) suggested MAID rather than a chairlift.
(If this is an urban legend, I expect Misth will quickly correct me.)
This issue is very personal to me.
First off I’ve been involved in a couple of “pulling the plug” decisions which is awful to go through. We had very clear instruction in a couple of cases and much less in the other. All were awful decisions.
Another close relative once boasted that he wanted to see Dr. Kevorkian (for those of you who remember him) if my relative was subject to a incurable, fatal disease. About 15 years later he got that diagnosis…lung cancer. The oncologist said that 2/3’s of his patients with the same diagnosis were dead a year after the initial visit. And it is not a pleasant death. That relative worked his tail off to fight the cancer with approved and unapproved treatments. We also covered him in prayer. He lived an incredible 5 years with pretty good standard of life being able to see a couple of his grandchildren get married, graduate from H.S., g-grandbabies were born, and other wonderful events.
10 weeks before his death he assisted moving 80 pound rocks for a backyard fountain. Truly assisted not just put his hands on it. When death got much closer his family medicated him like crazy and he died in relative comfort surrounded by loved ones.
Watching his transformation from bragging to fighting like crazy for his life was a lesson for me.
Indeed. We don’t know what we would really do until we face it.
So you give a patient morphine and as the patient gets sicker and sicker than you give them more and more morphine until they fade? As I understand it, that is standard practice. Is that all that different from medical suicide?
This is very different from medical suicide as practiced in Canada, Belgium, Holland et al. In the latter, a person who is presently strong and relatively well, who is not imminently facing death, but who has a potentially fatal diagnosis, is subjected to lethal therapy.
I have performed morphine fades twice, once on a patient in extremis and once on a relative who was near death. I would not dream of performing a MAID. Nor should any physician.
Amen.
I had an up close and personal encounter with hospice and palliative care. My wife had survived pancreatic cancer through nearly 4 amazing years of harrowing chemo treatments and abdominal surgeries, interspersed with precious periods of a good quality of life, interludes when we traveled, said good byes to old places and friends, and got ready for the inevitable.
Once in hospice, at home, she had a morphine pump that the hospice nurses checked daily, and recalibrated when break through pain was too much. In no way did the morphine hasten my wife’s passing, but it gave her the opportunity to live to the fullest until the very last few hours.
The Babylon Bee doesn’t miss:
To the best of my knowledge, this is a true story.
Yes, it is different. The clandestine administration of increasing doses or morphine happens when people are clearly at the end of their life and are in great pain. It happens more often than one might imagine, but still it happens relatively rarely. Once MAID is legalized the slippery slope kicks in and you get more and more categories of people qualifying for it until there are no meaningful restrictions on the practice whatsoever and you get government agents pushing suicide on anybody that had become an inconvenience to society.
Here’s a good article detailing more of the shocking statistics of Canada’s MAID regime:
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/first-reading-hundreds-seeking-death-due-to-loneliness-inside-canadas-new-maid-figures
(Edit: I originally posted a broken link. I’ve now fixed it.)
I understand that at the margins there is a fuzzy line when management of extreme pain may accelerate death. I watched that happen in real time at the end of my father’s dementia compromised battle with pneumonia. But I suspect that is a tiny percentage of the medically-assisted suicides recorded in the Canadian statistics. A Misthiocracy has noted above, once society and the legal system approves acceleration of death that is not already imminent, there seems to be a clamor to allow ever more categories of people to claim the “right” to seek actively death rather than dealing with the realities of life.
I’m rather a fan of medically assisted suicide and look forward to the day when our high streets feature competitive chains of organizations—both profit-making and non-profit—offering the service. With suitable regulation, they could go a long way to helping people recover from the harmful effects of religious belief and see their bodies as they really are: animated bags of blood, bones, and offal entirely without moral significance that can be switched off at any time if the owner chooses to do so.
Glad you confirm that you are an moral-less idiot who deserves to be completely ignored.
I suspect that suicide. Be it medical assisted or some other version will come to the US and the whole world soon and fairly quickly. There is too much money to be saved by the government and given to others be they government, bureaucrats, corporate and religious for it not to happen. As the Catholic Church and Christianity cede the ground, the pagan beliefs will bring back these old ways and the people will take it to heart.
Look dude. I am an open nonbeliever and I openly disagree with believers on some points. But I try not to be jerks to believers who aren’t jerks to me.
Please express your materialist atheism in a polite way.
That is also the logic that leads a large percentage of people to agree that murder is an acceptable activity for those with whom one disagrees. A large number of people think the assassination of the CEO of UnitedHealthcare is a good thing. Maybe an even greater number of people like Yarob would consider the murder of Yarob to be a a good thing.
Unlike at least one response to my comment, nothing I wrote was impolite.
No atheist I’ve ever known or read accepts murder as that would contravene the moral code we subscribe to that we believe exists independently of magical, invisible beings.
I don’t think “morphine fade” is included in the statistics, but on the other hand I wager that legal MAID has probably all-but-eliminated clandestine “morphine fade” in Canuckistan.
Perhaps if we require a CAT scan before a medically assisted suicide the Canadian government will make more machines available.
What a rebel! A village atheist, alongside a continuous gadfly. All of my least favorite types of people online rolled into one person. Quite efficient.
Ricochet should hire you to be the victim in a dunk tank for large meetups. Charles Cooke would be able to buy his own .50 cal Ma Deuce off of the proceeds.