UK Lawmakers Vote in Support of Assisted Dying (cnn.com) 61
British members of parliament have voted to legalize assisted dying, approving a contentious proposal that would make the United Kingdom one of a small handful of nations to allow terminally ill people to end their lives. From a report: Lawmakers in the House of Commons voted by 330 to 275 to support the bill, after an hours-long debate in the chamber and a years-long campaign by high-profile figures that drew on emotional first-hand testimony.
Britain is now set to join a small club of nations to have legalized the process, and one of the largest by population to allow it. The bill must still clear the House of Lords and parliamentary committees, but Friday's vote marked the most important hurdle.
It allows people with a terminal condition and less than six months to live to take a substance to end their lives, as long as they are capable of making the decision themselves. Two doctors, and then a High Court judge, would need to sign off on the choice. Canada, New Zealand, Spain and most of Australia allow assisted dying in some form, as do several US states including Oregon, Washington and California.
Britain is now set to join a small club of nations to have legalized the process, and one of the largest by population to allow it. The bill must still clear the House of Lords and parliamentary committees, but Friday's vote marked the most important hurdle.
It allows people with a terminal condition and less than six months to live to take a substance to end their lives, as long as they are capable of making the decision themselves. Two doctors, and then a High Court judge, would need to sign off on the choice. Canada, New Zealand, Spain and most of Australia allow assisted dying in some form, as do several US states including Oregon, Washington and California.
the death penalty is being removed in states! (Score:2)
the death penalty is being removed in states!
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Honestly if you're Canadian (Score:2)
I'm actually genuinely surprised how low the suicide rate is in America given how poorly we treat people. It's probably going to get a lot worse in the coming years given what we know about trans people and suicide rates...
Re: Honestly if you're Canadian (Score:2)
given what we know about trans people and suicide rates...
"Know" is doing a lot of work here, considering how little the scientific community has chosen to know.... https://www.nytimes.com/2024/1... [nytimes.com]
Re:That's how it starts (Score:4, Insightful)
How horrible that people should have control over their own bodies. Perhaps we should have the government dictate what we can do. That will solve the problem.
Sin (Score:3)
One of the core beliefs of our evangelicals is that God is basically an asshole drill instructor and he punishes everyone if anyone fucks up.
The other thing you need to understand is sin against God comes in gradients. Like temperature. Imagine a sin thermometer. Measuring the level of sin and if it gets too high God smites everything. That's what these people believe.
Once you understand that their insistence on contro
Re: Sin (Score:2)
The wife is a physician who occasionally works with terminal patients. She informs me that there are practitioners out there who will try to apply heroic treatments to people already near the ends of their natural lives who are suffering because
a) The patients' families demand heroic attempts at treatment
b) Dead patients skew the averages unfavorably, whether in an actual metric that matters or purely along the axis of ego.
c) Can't charge billable hours on a dead guy. A technically still alive guy though...
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Not everything is a theocratic conspiracy.
But sometimes it is. [theguardian.com]
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You have to look at it from the perspective of a American Christian extremist.
No thanks. We're British.
Re: Sin (Score:2)
I honestly can't tell if you're trolling people, have been living under a rock for the past few decades, or are just fishing for Inigo Montoya quotations.
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Yep. Probably among the most evil people around.
Implementation Details Matter a Lot (Score:2)
How horrible that people should have control over their own bodies.
This is not about control over your own body it is about giving someone else control over your body albeit with your permission. The problem with assisted dying is in the details of how you implement it. The way Canada has done it is frankly horrific. It started as being only available to people who had a reasonably foresable imminent death but that was deemed unconstitutional so now you can do it for almost any reason, including mental illness. Indeed, it has been reported that some cases were for purely
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Two doctors, and then a High Court judge have to decide before anyone in the UK will be allowed to kill themselves. It's hardly going to be a wave of dying.
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How horrible that people should have control over their own bodies. Perhaps we should have the government dictate what we can do. That will solve the problem.
You've always had control over your body. What the assisted dying laws try to minimise is the control over other people's body. No law is going to stop someone from sticking their head in an oven. But there are laws stopping you from turning on the gas while someone else is in the oven.
The issue here is that people who are unable to end their lives themselves are sort of stuck in the middle. This is why I think a product like the Sarco Pod https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] is in theory a good idea. It remov
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It allows people with a terminal condition and less than six months to live to take a substance to end their lives, as long as they are capable of making the decision themselves
That's how it starts. "Oh, we'll be so careful. We'll have all these restrictions."
And then everywhere this gets implemented, it loosens, and loosens, and loosens ...
Predictable. And predicted. And literally happens, over and over.
Where are you going with this? What in history, is over and over? I’m guessing this really isn’t of any major benefit to anyone except the one who is suffering and wanting an end to that suffering. They’re probably not going to “cheat” a single life insurance company out of their money anyway.
Only people that will lose out are those in the business of squeezing every last drop of financial blood from a dying stone who probably feel they are being “robbed” somehow
Re:That's how it starts (Score:5, Insightful)
What a load of dribbling idiocy. I watched both my parents die slow horrible painful deaths from dementia in their mid 90’s. Exactly what they both feared for years, and didnt want to happen, they both had DNRs but there was nothing further I could do. We treat dogs better. There is no slippery slope, no loosening at all, its just an excuse made by mainly religious people who want to control others choices, regardless of how torturous their deaths are.
Re:That's how it starts (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed. The religious nuts essentially want people being tortured to death. Or having to kill themselves with a high risk of botching it. How people can get this evil and cruel is really beyond me. "We treat dogs better" nicely sums it up.
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There's no need to invoke religion. The legal system itself has effectively enough problems with the concept. Where's the line between murder, first or second degree, and assisting suicide? In the case where people are "tortured to death" they are often in capable of making decisions themselves (as with the parents of the person you are replying to).
So what do you propose (leaving religion out of it)? Do we assign everyone a "get-away-with-murder-ability score" that starts at 100 when they are fully functio
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There is no slippery slope
Given that your parents couldn't even make the decision to end their own life you've most definitely just blurred the line of murder. There's no need to bring anything related to religion into this debate. The debate is loaded with problems from a legal perspective alone. Do we start including a quality of life moderator to the laws relating to ending *someone else's* life? That's the whole point of the "assisted" bit here. No one can stop suicide, but the line between helping someone kill themselves and ki
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Sooo, you support torturing these people to death? Because that is essentially what you are advocating for.
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False. We will allow the person to decide if enough is enough. Not the government, which is what you want, the power of big government to decide how we live and die.
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False. We will allow the person to decide if enough is enough. Not the government, which is what you want, the power of big government to decide how we live and die.
You must be talking about a completely different country? This story is about the UK, the most busybody government-knows-best nannystate that exists in the developed world.
Let's review the recent case of Sudiksha Thirumalesh [wikipedia.org]
- past the age of majority (19 years old)
- wanted to go to Canada for experimental treatment
- parents also wanted that
- judge rules she cannot go, is not competent to make medical decisions (not because of any mental deficiency), and must die in palliative care instead (which she does)
-
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In Canada patients are being recommended assisted suicide as an alternative when they are disabled, stuck on patient waiting lists, or too poor to receive treatment.
Bullshit. Especially the last; given that medical care in Canada is free, nobody is "too poor" to receive treatment.
Free Medical Care in Canada (Score:2)
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Funny how you distort the facts, just so that you can prevent people from making their own decisions. Funny how, for example, the dutch story comes with "the first time a doctor has been charged since the Netherlands legalized euthanasia in 2002.", but you do not mention that. Funny how the actual details in the "Sudiksha Thirumalesh" case are not clear. If she was ruled unfit to make her own medical decisions, have you considered that might actually have been the case? Obviously not. And have you considere
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Are you a complete asshole by ignoring that the _patient_ makes the decision or are you utterly dumb and have not noticed it?
MAID in Canada now accounts for 1% of all deaths (Score:1)
MAID in Canada now accounts for 4.1% of all deaths (Score:2)
How is it a slippery slope? I think it's much better to have MAID in Canada account for 4.1% (your stat is wrong) of all deaths if that's what people choose instead of a painful and drawn-out death when death is inevitable.
The fact that MAID accounts for 4.1% of deaths means probably cancer and other terminal illness deaths are down by the same amount.
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The latest report I could find from Canada was from 2022 [canada.ca].
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How is it a slippery slope? I think it's much better to have MAID in Canada account for 4.1% (your stat is wrong) of all deaths if that's what people choose instead of a painful and drawn-out death when death is inevitable.
Death is always inevitable for everybody.
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Yes, death is inevitable, but people should have the right to choose a dignified peaceful death over a drawn-out painful one, if death is imminent anyway.
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In any system, you'll be able to find bad examples if you dig enough. I know someone who has a pretty serious disease that has periodic flare-ups, and during one of these, she asked about MAID. The doctor said she was not eligible because her disease can be controlled. This is a far more common response than the couple of examples you posted, but it doesn't make the news or engender outrage.
I also know someone who had bone cancer that had metastasized and was going to kill her within months. She opted
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I live in Canada and have had experience with the MAID system with close friends and family.
"Slippery slope" is a common argument when nobody wants any changes whatsoever.
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I also know someone who had bone cancer that had metastasized and was going to kill her within months. She opted for MAID. Should she have been forced to suffer those extra few months? For what?
So that the cult of suffering and pain can worship its God better. Clearly. These people are _evil_. They are essentially trying to scarify others that very much did not consent.
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I only wasted enough time to read two of those links before I realized you were just absolutely full of shit with the rest of your post.
Those articles are families complaining that they disagreed with the deceased's decision to end their life. Its none of their fucking business. No one was forced to die. No one died against their will. They only died when they decided they wanted to die. Thats it.
It doesn't matter if you disagree with their reasoning, you do not get a say in their decision. Neither does the
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Those articles are families complaining that they disagreed with the deceased's decision to end their life. Its none of their fucking business.
Ah, but the religious fanatics to not recognize the right to make your own decisions.
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We already have the Canadian system to prove it's a slippery slope where the law proposed will be modified once in.
I don't buy the "budget" stuff. Sure you might find some random bozo thinking that of their own accord but no Democratic country is going to push that.
The question is how do you deal with suicidal people and elderly people with a low quality of life, but no immediate terminal illness.
If they have a sustained sincere desire to end their lives perhaps we should respect that. Certainly, if that path is available there will be people who choose that path who wouldn't choose it otherwise. At the same time, some
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How is it a slippery slope? I think it's much better to have MAID in Canada account for 4.1% (your stat is wrong) of all deaths if that's what people choose instead of a painful and drawn-out death when death is inevitable.
The fact that MAID accounts for 4.1% of deaths means probably cancer and other terminal illness deaths are down by the same amount.
Having recently watch my mother pass away - very slowly - from Alzheimer's, I very much hope I can one day soon do an advance directive to avoid that fate myself. While they debate whether the law should be amended to allow MAID for mental illness, which I can completely understand is contentious, I wait for the law to allow me to make my wishes known ahead of time.
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Yes. I watched my grandmother die from Alzheimers. It's a terrible disease.
My mother, thankfully, kept her mental faculties right up until the end, and she did not have a long, drawn-out terminal disease when the end finally came.
Right now, I cannot think of any circumstances that would make me want MAID. But I sure as hell want the option just in case.
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Nobody's pressuring patients in Canada as a cost-cutting measure. That's bullshit.
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MAID not just for Terminal Conditions (Score:2)
if that's what people choose instead of a painful and drawn-out death when death is inevitable.
But that is not what is happening. It was deemed unconstitutional to limit access to MAID to only those facing imminent death so now it is open to anyone for seemingly almost any medical condition including mental illness. Even non-medical, social conditions like homelessness [theguardian.com] have been accepted for MAID.
Having it available to people suffering painful terminal conditions would be one thing and something I'd potentially be in favour of but Canada's system is closer to state-assisted suicide which somethin
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But that is not what is happening. It was deemed unconstitutional to limit access to MAID to only those facing imminent death so now it is open to anyone for seemingly almost any medical condition including mental illness
What do you mean, specifically by "almost any[..]including mental illness"?
The suffering caused by mental illness is every bit as real as physical illness.
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These evil fucks want people tortured to death.
Re: MAID in Canada now accounts for 1% of all deat (Score:2)
You know, people kill themselves with booze. People kill themselves with hard drugs. People kill themselves by eating their guns, not wearing their seat belts at the drag race, declining medical treatments.
What Ever.
That's between them and whatever God they believe in. If the modern-day Quakers weren't a magnet for Marxists, treehuggers, and other crazies, their philosophy of no intermediaries between Man and God might have had more penetration into the zeitgeist than it has.
Hegh'bat! Qapla'! (Score:2, Funny)
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From my wife (Score:3)