The aesthetics matter quite a lot. Physician-assisted death should be a medical procedure administered by a number of professionals all agreeing it’s the right thing to do. “Hop in the bespoke space pod and all your troubles go away!” is not a level of accessibility anybody should be comfortable with.
I am far more worried about the opposite of assisted death being made illegal: normalizing it as a “treatment” for the outcomes of capitalism. It’s happening in Canada right now, and it’s messed up.
Physician-assisted death should be a medical procedure administered by a number of professionals all agreeing it’s the right thing to do.
Oh gods no. Nonononononono. you need to have a horrific experience with the healthcare system before coming out with a take like that. The choice to kill yourself needs to rest soley with the person alive, doctors will straight up looking your crying arse in the face and say “Hmm, I don’t understand why you’re in pain so it’s fake”.
Safeguards to reduce the chance of people being pressured and impulsive decisions yes, but bodies can become prisons and every moment waking hell. People need the right to die on their own terms.
Also this is not physician assisted, you press a button and the chamber fills with nitrogen. The point of the device is that the choice to die rests solely with the person dying. Requiring no assistance (beyond access to the device).
Safeguards to reduce the chance of people being pressured and impulsive decisions yes, but bodies can become prisons and every moment waking hell. People need the right to die on their own terms.
Correct. This is why it should be done by medical professionals.
Also this is not physician assisted, you press a button and the chamber fills with nitrogen.
Correct. This is the core of my objection: being able to hit the “press (x) to instantly die” button is fucked up. There needs to be guardrails. As you mentioned!
Medical professionals routinely torture people. They are not fit to decide whether people should be forced to live. Look at the history of medicine, women’s pain routinely discounted, racist notions like black people feeling less pain or ignoring differences in responses to drugs, hideous experimentation on people. Remember lobotomies?
What is wrong with someone deciding to die? The only person fit to decide whether they want to live or not is the person who has to deal with the consequences of that decision. Medical professionals have a role in giving advice on likely outcomes, interpreting test results, and diagnosis. That’s it.
The meme about “socialist” Canada making people choose suicide over healthcare is widely overblown by conservative media.
Haha, yeah, the “meme” about a comrade I have personal connections with choosing to die and being approved here in Canada is really overblown. Real “memey”. Roll on snare drum.
I’m not gonna engage in a discussion about whether or not a thing I know is real to actually be real.
It’s not just conservative media: https://jacobin.com/2024/05/canada-euthanasia-poor-disabled-health-care
Canada did genuinely really fuck this one up. There is a lot written about it from left wing sources. These types of things should always cause some concern for the discerning leftist when happening in capitalist hell holes
No. I don’t need a doctor’s note to jump off a building, why should I need one to asphyxiate in a pod? I have never understood the Western weirdness about death. People are not immortal; they die in stupid and horrifying ways with no control or dignity, or they’re forced to live in a state of living death well beyond their quality of life because their families can’t let go (or, in the necropolitics sense, they’re marked for “wearing out” by being in a precaritized class). Why should a medical board get a say? What could they know that a person ready to die doesn’t?
This is a question of bodily autonomy. If you don’t control your body, who does?
I think there’s a lot of blindess to just how horrible a lot of dying is. Death is very much pushed out of mind but death is not necessarily horrifying. Everyone sort of vaguely hopes for the good death in the medieval art motif sense. Dying peacefully, surrounded by your loved one and possessed of enough wits to wish them well fondly and receive their tender goodbyes.
That is a good death, but it is not common. Our medicine has advanced to the point where deaths are usually either abrupt and unexpected or violent, or bodies are so worn out that people die with multitudes of painful conditions and under a haze of drugs. In Australia, where I live, around 60% of old people are on TCAs (usually amitriptyline) for untreatable pain. That’s not people on deaths door, that’s just aging atm it gets much worse.
By the time people cannot be kept alive anymore faculties are often failing complicating concepts of consent to suicide. People are often heavily sedated, families are often stressed the fuck out by the sheer horror and degradation of watching people suffer for months on end. Elder abuse is rampant in aged care, familial or professional.
And obviously we see a lot of suicide, often reported as accidental poisonings (e.g. sodium nitrite and recent associated bans), refusal of food and withdrawing from the world, more direct methods. Hell I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the refusal for people to go under stricter monitoring when at risk was in part motivated by a desire to risk death while maintaining a sense of autonomy.
Societies have often not been strangers to suicide, we all see there are fates worse than death. We are not immortal, we will die, and consequently we need to grow up about it and let people decide for themselves. So that more people can die surrounded by loved ones, comfortable, able to articulate themselves and express their love and acceptance of the end. The alternative is damning large chunks of the population to torture, and nobody has any right to decide what is or is not a tolerable existence or acceptable end for anyone.
