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Why is Canada euthanising the poor?
- LatteLazy 4y agoI remember just 8 years ago when the spectator was a respectable publication. Since Brexit/Trump it's gone full retard.
- donkarma 4y ago
- quickthrower2 4y agoHmm… starving someone and then offering $1800 a day bills … or die. Ok Royal Commission time?
- qualudeheart 4y agoHorrible stuff. I thought we didn’t like eugenics anymore?
- type0 4y agoNot eugenics yet, but we have made full circle to Social Darwinism Everything old is new again
- phkahler 4y agoMore like economic darwinism.
- dane-pgp 4y ago> I thought we didn’t like eugenics anymore? Since when? Abortion of children with Down’s syndrome (up to the point of birth) has been legal in the UK since 1967. http://enablemagazine.co.uk/interview-downs-syndrome-and-the-abortion-act-1967/ http://enablemagazine.co.uk/interview-downs-syndrome-and-the...
- d1sxeyes 4y agoEugenics is a loaded term with a lot of possible definitions, but the primary definition (and indeed the etymology) is 'improving the gene pool'. Abortion of children with Down's syndrome has a different goal, that of relieving suffering (either the child's suffering or the parents). There are plenty of arguments on both sides regarding the UK's stance on aborting foetuses diagnosed with Down's syndrome, but I don't think it would fall under the 'eugenics' umbrella.
- barrysteve 4y ago
- barrysteve 4y ago[flagged]
- bregma 4y agoThe suicides have always been happening. It's just been illegal to help someone kill themself safely and painlessly. It's just like any other harm reduction. Making something in demand illegal won't make the demand disappear, it just moves the activity into the unregulated and usually perilous shadows.
- barrysteve 4y ago
- Neil44 4y agoKind of a hyperbolic headline.
- kergonath 4y agoPar for the course for the Spectator. Do not expect anything remotely informative there, it ranks just between the Daily Mail and the Telegraph in terms of accuracy.
- vixen99 4y agoWriting gross summary statements like that is simple. Anyone can do it. Now how about backing up your claim ? What's not remotely informative about the following extracts? Or are they untrue? It's an opinion piece but there's not much of that in the following. "Canadian parliament enacted Bill C-7, a sweeping euthanasia law which repealed the ‘reasonably foreseeable’ requirement – and the requirement that the condition should be ‘terminal’.? "In 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada reversed 22 years of its own jurisprudence by striking down the country’s ban on assisted suicide as unconstitutional" "The next year, Parliament duly enacted legislation allowing euthanasia, but only for those who suffer from a terminal illness whose natural death was ‘reasonably foreseeable’. 'Not coincidentally, Canada has some of the lowest social care spending of any industrialised country, palliative care is only accessible to a minority, and waiting times in the public healthcare sector can be unbearable, to the point where the same Supreme Court which legalised euthanasia declared those waiting times to be a violation of the right to life back in 2005.' Please note that I'm not getting into the rights or wrongs of the debate on euthanasia.
- Neil44 4y agoI can accept that more 'poor people' might make use of euthanasia than 'rich people' by whatever metric you choose to define those terms. Poorer people tend to have worse health overall for various reasons, also there are a lot more of them. But the main issue I have with the headline is that Canada is not specifically euthanising the poor in the way that is implied. The statistical differences are clearly an emergence of many complex effects and situations, so to imply otherwise is inflamatory and pretty much text book hyperbole.
- ithkuil 4y agoeuthanasia in Italy is currently illegal, but you can work around it by killing yourself. Federico Carboni (previously known with the code name "Mario") "technically" killed himself using a drug and a special machine that costed 5k eu. A ruling of the constitutional court allowed this procedure to be supervised by a doctor and the money for the drug to be collected by an association helping the pro-euthanasia choice. Now; with this loophole, is euthanasia to be considered legal? The cost of the drug/machine, which albeit not impossibly high, is still perceived to be a high barrier to entry, in a country where healthcare is a right. But if the cost issue is solved; would that mean that now the state is "euthanising the poor"?
- bitwize 4y agoThis is called physician-assisted suicide in the USA and it is legal in a few states. Famously, the controversy around the practice was stirred up in the 90s by Dr. Jack Kevorkian, who offered it as an option to some of his terminal patience in defiance of the laws at the time (for which he was convicted of murder).
- timeimp 4y agoYeah but my feelings. My feelings override everything in this article. My feelings. Could you imagine being in this position? Could you? It's all about the goal here - peace and no pain. Nope, not about the system. Anyone who says otherwise is an idiot. /s
- sjaak 4y agoThe nazis used to call this "Gnadentod" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktion_T4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aktion_T4
- gherkinnn 4y agoGodwins law going strong. So unnecessary to bring in the Nazis. “Gnadentod”, as the page suggests, means “mercy death”. Nothing special. In fact, not unlike “euthanasia”, which is derived from “good death” in ancient Greek.
- dane-pgp 4y agoI don't think the focus of the parent comment was about the name used, but about the thinking behind the policy, and its consequences. Perhaps a better article to link would have been: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_unworthy_of_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_unworthy_of_life
- joemazerino 4y agoAs if Nazis were the only ones in history with this practice.
- davidpaulyoung 4y agoI don't think "euthanasia" is an ancient greek word. It is a modern neo-logism from the 17th century with the meaning of "easy death".
- dathinab 4y agoGnadentod can be roughly translated to "mercy death". Its not a word invented by nazies, through they loved abusing it. It tends to have been used in any use case where a mercy killing would be done. E. g. when killing a animal which is in constant heavy pain, has no chance to recover and will die soon. Like any case of mercy killing its at least moralicaly questionable especially if the being in question didn't agree to it out of fully fee will (e.g. can't consent) and more then questionable if you force it on anyone. As then it's nothing not then trying to reframe murder.
- pjc50 4y agoIt's the Spectator, but .. this is still a real risk of assisted-suicide schemes. It's very difficult to make sure that the person isn't being coerced, or that nobody else stands to benefit from their suicide. Which, if someone is a particularly difficult patient, there usually is several people or organizations that stand to benefit from it. This was the argument that moved me from "in favour" to "don't know" on the subject.
- defrost 4y agoEditorially The Spectator is generally happy to ignore any poor crushed under new development with either no comment or, as evidenced by former editor, then Mayor of London, then Party PM Boris Johnson, a bumbling segue into the charm of Pepper Pig World. Here we see faux concern used to highlight edge cases in euthanasia policy making progressives look bad while glossing over the real Tory concern; suicides paid for by a nanny state for those that should work harder and pay for their own rope.
- gorjusborg 4y agoThe article reads like it is written by someone who does not agree with euthanasia to begin with, and who is trying to use classism as a tactic to quash it. While it is interesting to think about how intractible problems for the poor can be minor issues to the rich, and how that affects one's decision to be euthanized, ultimately, it isn't the right to choose to die that should be taken away. There are real cases where euthanasia is a compassionate choice. Outlawing it just forces people to suffer needlessly. The authors appeal that the government is a uncaring cost optimizer pushing death on the poor misses (or misrepresents) the point. The issue isn't euthanasia, it is that living conditions of the poor are untenable. The solution shouldn't be to force them to live a long life through government enforced misery, should it?
- barrysteve 4y ago
- davidgrenier 4y agoTry steelmaning instead of strawmanning his position next time.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- barrysteve 4y ago
- dang 4y agoIf you continue to post abusive comments like this or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32923132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32923132, we will ban you. Flamewar comments are not ok generally, so please stop posting those. We've already warned you once. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
- bregma 4y agoThe article is confused. Is it advocating against laws allowing medically-assisted suicide, or is it just pandering for sympathy to gain eyeballs for ad conversions? It jumbles together federal legislation with provincial budgeting as if they're the same thing, and uses terminology like 'exchequer' familiar only to colonizers . It's sad that some poors have chosen to off themselves for reasons that speakers of RP look down their nose at. I guess we all have a burden to make sure their kind is free from choice. Thank goodness the green and pleasant land has no council flats.
- seszett 4y agoThis is the fourth time this article with a poor, inflammatory headline has been submitted within the last five months: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31227925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31227925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31216770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31216770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31453449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31453449 I'm not familiar with The Spectator but other than the title, this article contains the text "A woman in Ontario was forced into euthanasia" linking to an article with the title "Woman with chemical sensitivities chose medically-assisted death". That seems not only misleading to me, but pure lie.
- possiblydrunk 4y ago>That seems not only misleading to me, but pure lie. Did you bother to read the article about the woman, or just the headline? From the linked article: A 51-year-old Ontario woman with severe sensitivities to chemicals chose medically-assisted death after her desperate search for affordable housing free of cigarette smoke and chemical cleaners failed, advocates say. ... “The government sees me as expendable trash, a complainer, useless and a pain in the a*," 'Sophia' said in a video filmed on Feb. 14, eight days before her death, and shared with CTV News by one of her friends. She died after a frantic effort by friends, supporters and even her doctors to get her safe and affordable housing in Toronto. She also left behind letters showing a desperate two-year search for help, in which she begs local, provincial and federal officials for assistance in finding a home away from the smoke and chemicals wafting through her apartment.
- seszett 4y agoThis is rather off-topic but in my opinion, the government not providing affordable housing free of chemical cleaners in the second most expensive city of Canada is very different from the government forcing her to commit suicide. The government of Canada generally doesn't provide housing with such specific requirements, and very few governments around the world do. In her situation, almost anywhere in the world she would have had the choice between living on the street and living in a house that sometimes smells of cigarette from the neighbours. In some countries including Canada, Switzerland or Belgium, she also had the choice of euthanasia. > In one email to friends, Sophia suggested that her death was, in a way, a show of protest against the lack of response to her and her physicians’ pleas Doing something in a show of protest against the government is certainly not the same as being forced to do it by this very government.
- sh4un 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- incomingpain 4y agoLet me point out specifically what's wrong. >Since then, things have only gotten worse. A woman in Ontario was forced into euthanasia because her housing benefits did not allow her to get better housing which didn’t aggravate her crippling allergies. They use the word FORCED here. Actual article: Woman with chemical sensitivities chose medically-assisted death after failed bid to get better housing She CHOSE. Here's the thing. Reading the article. She's the first person in the world to be diagnosed with a disease, so this is almost certainly completely untrue. She's not a fan of cigarette smoke, who is? She's in government housing and smells cigarette smoke. She really wanted to get away from that cigarette smell. So the article is written with a rather hyperbole originally and then the spectator comes along and go much further which makes them fake news.
- possiblydrunk 4y agoThe tyranny of the local maxima. Maybe society should expend more energy to help you get off your local maxima and onto a new higher local maxima rather than facilitating your demise.
- oliwarner 4y agoThe stories within this are awful, but why does anyone imagine things are better when euthanasia isn't an option? People in other countries also get left in care homes, sitting in faeces for days. Some wait weeks or months for suitable pain relief and other palliative care. We should absolutely be looking to fix the underlying issues, but euthanasia isn't working against them, it's another treatment to minimise suffering. When your choices are inappropriate suffering or inappropriate death, why is one better than the other? That's well before you consider —and I mean really consider, working with— what it is to rot away with a neurodegenerative disease. Giving people an out at an appropriate time by an appropriate mechanism has to be better than losing yourself. But no, that doesn't sell the Spectator. "SOCIALISM KILLS THE POOR" seems much more their tone.