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The sad demise of Robin Williams made me a believer of assisted suicide. The option to go out with dignity should be available to everyone. That said, there is

The sad demise of Robin Williams made me a believer of assisted suicide. The option to go out with dignity should be available to everyone. That said, there is a problem in at least some places where assisted suicide is available where it keeps getting recommended to disabled people who don't want to die. That needs to be solved. Seems like an easy solve. Just don't do it. There is a cost reduction incentive, though, which is why it happens. Costs can be reduced for abled people by convincing them to exercise and eat more fiber, so the same pressure can do good instead of evil. At some point we have to decide to care about people.

sarchertech 1y ago
That’s the problem. If there’s a financial incentive people will find way to push it. That’s my biggest concern about assisted suicide for an otherwise healthy person who just wants to avoid the inevitable decline (as in this case). There is a direct financial incentive for families to push people into this. The only way I can see to remove that would be to require that your estate can’t go to anyone who potentially has influence over you in the case of assisted suicide for with no terminal illness.
- hypeatei 1y ago
  > There is a direct financial incentive for families to push people into this What financial incentives are there in killing someone?
  - sarchertech 1y ago
    Inheritance.
    - hypeatei 1y ago
      So... something you're entitled to regardless of how they die? I don't see why, in this hypothetical, a person would spend energy encouraging assisted suicide when they'll get inheritance eventually anyway. Am I missing something?
      - h33t-l4x0r 1y ago
        You seem to be forgetting that sometimes people want things now.
      - sarchertech 1y ago
        1. You get the money now as opposed to potentially many years from now. 2. You likely get much more money if they die now without spending it on cost of living, and healthcare. People do all kinds of awful things in order to get control of an elderly family member’s money—up to and including outright murder. Pressuring a suggestible family member into assisted suicide is a comparatively easy and low risk method.
        hypeatei 1y ago
        > People do all kinds of awful things in order to ... Okay, sure, but how much of the population is this awful and does it actually matter since they can't consent to someone else's suicide anyway? I don't think this is as much of a widespread issue as its made out to be, to be honest.
        sarchertech 1y ago
        I don’t know how many people are like this. I do know that financial incentives result in more or behavior. It’s already common for caregivers to begin to resent the people they care for and for old people to worry that they are a liability. I don’t trust the system to be able to protect vulnerable people who have been coerced. And I don’t want old people in general to feel like suicide is their obligation.
        LogicFailsMe 1y ago
        My brother likely exploited his power of attorney to accelerate our mother's demise and may have injected her with insulin to get the job done. So there's your first datapoint. What's definite, however, is that he made ~75% of her estate vanish into thin air before throwing her into a low-end nursing home where he wouldn't pay $6/day to have her bathed so she died in her own filth. Nevermind she had a 6-figure pension and longterm care for life. He wanted her gone because dementia had made her unmanageable to him yet he wouldn't let her go to live with any of her other children because he feared he would lose control of the estate through his PoA. And because he had that PoA, no one could dispute his choices in time to save her. The courts and Adult Protective Services were useless bordering on complicit. The day we finally got a positive court verdict was absolutely 100% coincidentally no connection whatsoever you see 2 days before she suddenly passed. Lesson learned: when you grow old, don't give anyone on the inheritance train any sort of PoA or they'll instantly become a PoS.
  - michaelt 1y ago
    Many western countries make dying slowly with Alzheimer’s very expensive, by the standards of normal families. Between doctors, nurses and lawyers you can burn through a million bucks in five years easily. And most families don’t have a million bucks cash to spare. On the other hand, if they die after six months, instead of after 5 years? The family doesn’t lose the farm.
    - hypeatei 1y ago
      > Between doctors, nurses and lawyers you can burn through a million bucks in five years easily That would indicate there is a financial incentive in keeping them alive, no? The "incentive" from the family's perspective, if they're that cold-blooded, doesn't make sense because they could just... not take care of that person.
      - sarchertech 1y ago
        You’re not understanding. They could just not take care of that person sure. But when the person dies, there will be nothing left to inherit because they will have spent it all on medical care.
        hypeatei 1y ago
        So we've outlined a society where: healthcare providers, lawyers, etc. ("the system") stand to benefit from keeping a person alive and suffering because they can squeeze money out of them in their final years. Assisted suicide is being made available and "family pressure to commit suicide" is brought up as a concern? Sure, valid concern I guess, but it just seems pointless as there are already guardrails around these processes and we're not recognizing the benefits of giving more autonomy to people which means their suffering can be stopped.
        sarchertech 1y ago
        >healthcare providers, lawyers, etc. ("the system") stand to benefit from keeping a person alive and suffering because they can squeeze money out of them in their final years Insurers and the government have the opposite incentive, but it's something to be concerned about. >there are already guardrails around these processes I don't think there are guardrails that can prevent what I'm talking about. Only the most egregious abuses would even be detectable. As long as you don't literally tell your mom to kill herself I don't think you could make it illegal. As it stands in the US I don't think you could make it illegal for someone to tell someone they "wish they were dead" in this situation.
  - ants_everywhere 1y ago
    We don't talk about it a lot as a society, but some people just like killing people. The ordinary outlet for them is the military. Sometimes they become serial killers. A euthanasia industry would attract these people similarly to how police and security work attracts authoritarians and how clergy jobs attract pedophiles. That's not to say that most people in the industry would enjoy killing people, but it would be a problem. And death is final; it's impossible to fix mistakes. This is the same reason many people are opposed to the death penalty.
    - hypeatei 1y ago
      > This is the same reason many people are opposed to the death penalty. Death penalty is the government deciding to take your life based on what they believe you did. I agree, mistakes there are bad. Assisted suicide consists of the person dying giving their consent to take their life. Quite different.
      - ants_everywhere 1y ago
        Unfortunately consent is not always clear. For example, see my other comment in this thread about the reports on Dr Kevorkian's assisted suicides. Not only is whether someone gives consent sometimes unclear, it's also unclear if the consent was informed consent and whether it was uncoerced. Informed consent is obliquely mentioned in my other comment. For example, a patient may falsely believe their illness is terminal. I realize I replied to a question about financial incentives to talk about non-financial incentives. But coerced consent would often fall under the financial incentive heading. E.g. "consent to be euthanized or I'll contest the will." Forced "suicide" also has a long history, including in the ancient world. Arguably things like kamikaze might fall into that category. And it's a favorite method of execution in financial and espionage type cases because the method of coercion won't show up in the forensics. For these sorts of reasons, I think the risk of mistakes is high.
        nick__m 1y ago
        The process in Québec doesn't have those flaws, it is much superior than the one used in the rest of Canada : To obtain medical aid in dying in Quebec, people must meet all the following requirements: have a Quebec health insurance card, be 18 years old or older, have the mental capacity to make their own decisions about their medical care, be in one of these situations: and be in a state where their abilities are severely and permanently getting worse, with no chance of improvement, have a serious physical impairment that greatly affects their abilities for an extended period, be in constant and unbearable physical or psychological pain, be informed about any available means to relieve suffering, have decided that those means are intolerable. Once a doctor or SNP assesses the request, they must ask a second doctor or SNP to confirm in writing that the patient is eligible to receive medical aid in dying. The doctor or SNP must also ensure that several measures to protect the patient have been respected. They must ensure that: The patient made their request freely and with all the information necessary to make an informed decision. The patient repeated their request at different moments. The patient has had an opportunity to discuss the request with their loved ones. The patient has the opportunity to change their mind right up to the very last moment. If the patient has trouble communicating, the doctor or SNP must also ensure that the patient was given a reliable means of communication and understands the information they had received. from https://educaloi.qc.ca/en/capsules/medical-aid-in-dying/ https://educaloi.qc.ca/en/capsules/medical-aid-in-dying/
  - dotnet00 1y ago
    Inheritance, and for the government/insurance companies, there's the incentive of the one-time cost of euthanization being lower than the cost of care for the poor, disabled and/or the terminally ill.
- thrance 1y ago
  Yet you don't see insurance companies hiring snipers to get rid of their oldest customers. Maybe the solution is to prosecute those who would push MAID too aggressively as we would those who push to suicide.
  - lazyasciiart 1y ago
    Their most expensive customers are not the oldest ones, it’s the ones getting targeted genetic treatment for cancer denied. They don’t need snipers: the patient dies for lack of treatment being paid for.
Freak_NL 1y ago
> That said, there is a problem in at least some places where assisted suicide is available where it keeps getting recommended to disabled people who don't want to die. Where? This is a thing which always pops up in these debates because it is a deep-rooted fear, but are there countries where this is a thing?
- nabla9 1y ago
  Canada. The critique is that people opt into euthanasia because of poverty, and that the government sees MAID economical alternative to investments in social programs and welfare. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_in_Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_in_Canada I don't think things are as bad, but I also think that old age in poverty is a valid reason for euthanasia if there is no alternative. If the society is cruel to the poor, holding poor elderly as hostage to improve situation is cruelty on top of the cruelty.
  - protocolture 1y ago
    From the article the safeguards seem fantastic and the biggest issue is the exclusion of mental health grounds.
- mitthrowaway2 1y ago
  MAID being inappropriately offered to people who haven't expressed interest in it, and also being extended widely to people without terminal illness, has certainly become a controversy in Canada. https://archive.is/bd0PV https://archive.is/bd0PV https://thewalrus.ca/assisted-dying/ https://thewalrus.ca/assisted-dying/ https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/article/doesnt-line-up-mps-challenge-minister-over-instances-of-maid-offered-to-veterans/ https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/article/doesnt-line-up-mps-c...
  - nprateem 1y ago
    Why should only terminally ill people get this choice? A 16 year old can decide who to kill in the army but apparently they (and we) aren't competent to choose whether to take one's own life.
ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
I think that Hunter Thompson basically did this. Kinda "on-brand" for him, really. I had a friend that decided to stop treatment (dialysis), when he realized that he'd never get off it (he couldn't get a transplant). He was in his late 60s. It was both a sad, and joyous experience. He took about a month to pass (renal failure). He was Catholic, and wouldn't do assisted suicide. During that month, a bunch of us would go over to his house, almost on a daily basis, and we'd just hang out. It was actually a great experience.
- mcdonje 1y ago
  >He was Catholic, and wouldn't do assisted suicide. I thought Jain the perspective shared in this comment is valuable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45548178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45548178 Well, not just the comment, but also the wikipedia article linked to in the comment. Obviously, Jainism isn't Catholicism, but this part of the wikipedia article got me thinking: >It is not considered a suicide by Jain scholars because it is not an act of passion, nor does it employ poisons or weapons. Catholics are probably never going to think suicide is ok, but I wonder if they could come around to a definition of suicide that is more narrow and which excludes death-with-dignity. If they did make that adjustment, I would personally agree with their stance. There is plenty of precedent for this legislation through definitional scoping in history in general, though I'm not an expert on Catholicism. The book "Legal systems very different from ours" talks about it, and gives examples. It's really the only option for any sort of change when you're dealing with decrees from a supernatural entity or an unchangeable part of a constitution.
  - anothereng 1y ago
    No, it will always be wrong to kill an innocent person whether that is yourself or another doesn't matter. Our lives are lent to us by God
    - jacquesm 1y ago
      You don't speak for or get to decide for other people, you only get to speak for and decide for yourself, and the same goes in principle for everybody else.
cal85 1y ago
> That needs to be solved. Seems like an easy solve. Just don't do it. I don’t do it, but I’m not sure how that solves the problem of other people doing it.
ryukoposting 1y ago
I've waffled between support and opposition of MAID a lot, for similar reasons. I think the morality of it depends heavily on social and economic context. In the US specifically, I worry that MAID could serve as a roundabout form of eugenics, even if it wasn't disproportionately recommended to any particular group. Imagine you're poor, your family is poor, and your friends are poor too. You spend 2 years in and out of inpatient care, and then die. Your family is now saddled with a debt they will never be able to pay. Your medical bills could make them homeless. Now imagine choosing between that, and MAID. MAID is obviously a cheaper "out." Now remember the demographics of poor people in this country. If poor people end up being more likely to choose MAID, that necessarily means MAID would be used disproportionately on ethnic minorities and disabled people. So you end up with eugenics again, just because of the sorry state of our medical system and class demographics. Not all assisted suicide is eugenics, to be clear. There's a discussion of Jain practices elsewhere in this comment tree. But man did I lose sleep at the thought that we could have people volunteering to kill themselves solely because they're poor. You could argue that it's wrong not to give someone the choice to die sooner, given that dying later could cause so much strife for their family. But I hold that the right solution isn't making people die sooner, it's building a medical system where people never have to grapple with this choice in the first place.
crossroadsguy 1y ago
I find it really weird. So someone pays CHF 10K to be given a lethal injection then it becomes dignified and the other way isn't? I think it is an insult to the departed if you question the path they choose - because then both the choices can be questioned and judged. And did you just go to eating more fibre from euthanasia in the same few sentences? :D
aniviacat 1y ago
> it keeps getting recommended In Germany, it was illegal for doctors to recommend or advertise abortion, and that worked pretty well. You could do the same for assisted suicide.

sarchertech 1y ago

That’s the problem. If there’s a financial incentive people will find way to push it. That’s my biggest concern about assisted suicide for an otherwise healthy person who just wants to avoid the inevitable decline (as in this case). There is a direct financial incentive for families to push people into this. The only way I can see to remove that would be to require that your estate can’t go to anyone who potentially has influence over you in the case of assisted suicide for with no terminal illness.

hypeatei 1y ago
> There is a direct financial incentive for families to push people into this What financial incentives are there in killing someone?
- sarchertech 1y ago
  Inheritance.
  - hypeatei 1y ago
    So... something you're entitled to regardless of how they die? I don't see why, in this hypothetical, a person would spend energy encouraging assisted suicide when they'll get inheritance eventually anyway. Am I missing something?
    - h33t-l4x0r 1y ago
      You seem to be forgetting that sometimes people want things now.
    - sarchertech 1y ago
      1. You get the money now as opposed to potentially many years from now. 2. You likely get much more money if they die now without spending it on cost of living, and healthcare. People do all kinds of awful things in order to get control of an elderly family member’s money—up to and including outright murder. Pressuring a suggestible family member into assisted suicide is a comparatively easy and low risk method.
      - hypeatei 1y ago
        > People do all kinds of awful things in order to ... Okay, sure, but how much of the population is this awful and does it actually matter since they can't consent to someone else's suicide anyway? I don't think this is as much of a widespread issue as its made out to be, to be honest.
        sarchertech 1y ago
        I don’t know how many people are like this. I do know that financial incentives result in more or behavior. It’s already common for caregivers to begin to resent the people they care for and for old people to worry that they are a liability. I don’t trust the system to be able to protect vulnerable people who have been coerced. And I don’t want old people in general to feel like suicide is their obligation.
        LogicFailsMe 1y ago
        My brother likely exploited his power of attorney to accelerate our mother's demise and may have injected her with insulin to get the job done. So there's your first datapoint. What's definite, however, is that he made ~75% of her estate vanish into thin air before throwing her into a low-end nursing home where he wouldn't pay $6/day to have her bathed so she died in her own filth. Nevermind she had a 6-figure pension and longterm care for life. He wanted her gone because dementia had made her unmanageable to him yet he wouldn't let her go to live with any of her other children because he feared he would lose control of the estate through his PoA. And because he had that PoA, no one could dispute his choices in time to save her. The courts and Adult Protective Services were useless bordering on complicit. The day we finally got a positive court verdict was absolutely 100% coincidentally no connection whatsoever you see 2 days before she suddenly passed. Lesson learned: when you grow old, don't give anyone on the inheritance train any sort of PoA or they'll instantly become a PoS.
- michaelt 1y ago
  Many western countries make dying slowly with Alzheimer’s very expensive, by the standards of normal families. Between doctors, nurses and lawyers you can burn through a million bucks in five years easily. And most families don’t have a million bucks cash to spare. On the other hand, if they die after six months, instead of after 5 years? The family doesn’t lose the farm.
  - hypeatei 1y ago
    > Between doctors, nurses and lawyers you can burn through a million bucks in five years easily That would indicate there is a financial incentive in keeping them alive, no? The "incentive" from the family's perspective, if they're that cold-blooded, doesn't make sense because they could just... not take care of that person.
    - sarchertech 1y ago
      You’re not understanding. They could just not take care of that person sure. But when the person dies, there will be nothing left to inherit because they will have spent it all on medical care.
      - hypeatei 1y ago
        So we've outlined a society where: healthcare providers, lawyers, etc. ("the system") stand to benefit from keeping a person alive and suffering because they can squeeze money out of them in their final years. Assisted suicide is being made available and "family pressure to commit suicide" is brought up as a concern? Sure, valid concern I guess, but it just seems pointless as there are already guardrails around these processes and we're not recognizing the benefits of giving more autonomy to people which means their suffering can be stopped.
        sarchertech 1y ago
        >healthcare providers, lawyers, etc. ("the system") stand to benefit from keeping a person alive and suffering because they can squeeze money out of them in their final years Insurers and the government have the opposite incentive, but it's something to be concerned about. >there are already guardrails around these processes I don't think there are guardrails that can prevent what I'm talking about. Only the most egregious abuses would even be detectable. As long as you don't literally tell your mom to kill herself I don't think you could make it illegal. As it stands in the US I don't think you could make it illegal for someone to tell someone they "wish they were dead" in this situation.
- ants_everywhere 1y ago
  We don't talk about it a lot as a society, but some people just like killing people. The ordinary outlet for them is the military. Sometimes they become serial killers. A euthanasia industry would attract these people similarly to how police and security work attracts authoritarians and how clergy jobs attract pedophiles. That's not to say that most people in the industry would enjoy killing people, but it would be a problem. And death is final; it's impossible to fix mistakes. This is the same reason many people are opposed to the death penalty.
  - hypeatei 1y ago
    > This is the same reason many people are opposed to the death penalty. Death penalty is the government deciding to take your life based on what they believe you did. I agree, mistakes there are bad. Assisted suicide consists of the person dying giving their consent to take their life. Quite different.
    - ants_everywhere 1y ago
      Unfortunately consent is not always clear. For example, see my other comment in this thread about the reports on Dr Kevorkian's assisted suicides. Not only is whether someone gives consent sometimes unclear, it's also unclear if the consent was informed consent and whether it was uncoerced. Informed consent is obliquely mentioned in my other comment. For example, a patient may falsely believe their illness is terminal. I realize I replied to a question about financial incentives to talk about non-financial incentives. But coerced consent would often fall under the financial incentive heading. E.g. "consent to be euthanized or I'll contest the will." Forced "suicide" also has a long history, including in the ancient world. Arguably things like kamikaze might fall into that category. And it's a favorite method of execution in financial and espionage type cases because the method of coercion won't show up in the forensics. For these sorts of reasons, I think the risk of mistakes is high.
      - nick__m 1y ago
        The process in Québec doesn't have those flaws, it is much superior than the one used in the rest of Canada : To obtain medical aid in dying in Quebec, people must meet all the following requirements: have a Quebec health insurance card, be 18 years old or older, have the mental capacity to make their own decisions about their medical care, be in one of these situations: and be in a state where their abilities are severely and permanently getting worse, with no chance of improvement, have a serious physical impairment that greatly affects their abilities for an extended period, be in constant and unbearable physical or psychological pain, be informed about any available means to relieve suffering, have decided that those means are intolerable. Once a doctor or SNP assesses the request, they must ask a second doctor or SNP to confirm in writing that the patient is eligible to receive medical aid in dying. The doctor or SNP must also ensure that several measures to protect the patient have been respected. They must ensure that: The patient made their request freely and with all the information necessary to make an informed decision. The patient repeated their request at different moments. The patient has had an opportunity to discuss the request with their loved ones. The patient has the opportunity to change their mind right up to the very last moment. If the patient has trouble communicating, the doctor or SNP must also ensure that the patient was given a reliable means of communication and understands the information they had received. from https://educaloi.qc.ca/en/capsules/medical-aid-in-dying/ https://educaloi.qc.ca/en/capsules/medical-aid-in-dying/
- dotnet00 1y ago
  Inheritance, and for the government/insurance companies, there's the incentive of the one-time cost of euthanization being lower than the cost of care for the poor, disabled and/or the terminally ill.
thrance 1y ago
Yet you don't see insurance companies hiring snipers to get rid of their oldest customers. Maybe the solution is to prosecute those who would push MAID too aggressively as we would those who push to suicide.
- lazyasciiart 1y ago
  Their most expensive customers are not the oldest ones, it’s the ones getting targeted genetic treatment for cancer denied. They don’t need snipers: the patient dies for lack of treatment being paid for.

Freak_NL 1y ago

> That said, there is a problem in at least some places where assisted suicide is available where it keeps getting recommended to disabled people who don't want to die. Where? This is a thing which always pops up in these debates because it is a deep-rooted fear, but are there countries where this is a thing?

nabla9 1y ago
Canada. The critique is that people opt into euthanasia because of poverty, and that the government sees MAID economical alternative to investments in social programs and welfare. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_in_Canada https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia_in_Canada I don't think things are as bad, but I also think that old age in poverty is a valid reason for euthanasia if there is no alternative. If the society is cruel to the poor, holding poor elderly as hostage to improve situation is cruelty on top of the cruelty.
- protocolture 1y ago
  From the article the safeguards seem fantastic and the biggest issue is the exclusion of mental health grounds.
mitthrowaway2 1y ago
MAID being inappropriately offered to people who haven't expressed interest in it, and also being extended widely to people without terminal illness, has certainly become a controversy in Canada. https://archive.is/bd0PV https://archive.is/bd0PV https://thewalrus.ca/assisted-dying/ https://thewalrus.ca/assisted-dying/ https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/article/doesnt-line-up-mps-challenge-minister-over-instances-of-maid-offered-to-veterans/ https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/article/doesnt-line-up-mps-c...
- nprateem 1y ago
  Why should only terminally ill people get this choice? A 16 year old can decide who to kill in the army but apparently they (and we) aren't competent to choose whether to take one's own life.

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago

I think that Hunter Thompson basically did this. Kinda "on-brand" for him, really. I had a friend that decided to stop treatment (dialysis), when he realized that he'd never get off it (he couldn't get a transplant). He was in his late 60s. It was both a sad, and joyous experience. He took about a month to pass (renal failure). He was Catholic, and wouldn't do assisted suicide. During that month, a bunch of us would go over to his house, almost on a daily basis, and we'd just hang out. It was actually a great experience.

mcdonje 1y ago
>He was Catholic, and wouldn't do assisted suicide. I thought Jain the perspective shared in this comment is valuable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45548178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45548178 Well, not just the comment, but also the wikipedia article linked to in the comment. Obviously, Jainism isn't Catholicism, but this part of the wikipedia article got me thinking: >It is not considered a suicide by Jain scholars because it is not an act of passion, nor does it employ poisons or weapons. Catholics are probably never going to think suicide is ok, but I wonder if they could come around to a definition of suicide that is more narrow and which excludes death-with-dignity. If they did make that adjustment, I would personally agree with their stance. There is plenty of precedent for this legislation through definitional scoping in history in general, though I'm not an expert on Catholicism. The book "Legal systems very different from ours" talks about it, and gives examples. It's really the only option for any sort of change when you're dealing with decrees from a supernatural entity or an unchangeable part of a constitution.
- anothereng 1y ago
  No, it will always be wrong to kill an innocent person whether that is yourself or another doesn't matter. Our lives are lent to us by God
  - jacquesm 1y ago
    You don't speak for or get to decide for other people, you only get to speak for and decide for yourself, and the same goes in principle for everybody else.

cal85 1y ago

> That needs to be solved. Seems like an easy solve. Just don't do it. I don’t do it, but I’m not sure how that solves the problem of other people doing it.

ryukoposting 1y ago

I've waffled between support and opposition of MAID a lot, for similar reasons. I think the morality of it depends heavily on social and economic context. In the US specifically, I worry that MAID could serve as a roundabout form of eugenics, even if it wasn't disproportionately recommended to any particular group. Imagine you're poor, your family is poor, and your friends are poor too. You spend 2 years in and out of inpatient care, and then die. Your family is now saddled with a debt they will never be able to pay. Your medical bills could make them homeless. Now imagine choosing between that, and MAID. MAID is obviously a cheaper "out." Now remember the demographics of poor people in this country. If poor people end up being more likely to choose MAID, that necessarily means MAID would be used disproportionately on ethnic minorities and disabled people. So you end up with eugenics again, just because of the sorry state of our medical system and class demographics. Not all assisted suicide is eugenics, to be clear. There's a discussion of Jain practices elsewhere in this comment tree. But man did I lose sleep at the thought that we could have people volunteering to kill themselves solely because they're poor. You could argue that it's wrong not to give someone the choice to die sooner, given that dying later could cause so much strife for their family. But I hold that the right solution isn't making people die sooner, it's building a medical system where people never have to grapple with this choice in the first place.

crossroadsguy 1y ago

I find it really weird. So someone pays CHF 10K to be given a lethal injection then it becomes dignified and the other way isn't? I think it is an insult to the departed if you question the path they choose - because then both the choices can be questioned and judged. And did you just go to eating more fibre from euthanasia in the same few sentences? :D

aniviacat 1y ago

> it keeps getting recommended In Germany, it was illegal for doctors to recommend or advertise abortion, and that worked pretty well. You could do the same for assisted suicide.