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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsJustin Trudeau Seeks to Legalize Assisted Suicide in Canada
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/15/world/americas/canadian-prime-minister-seeks-to-legalize-physician-assistedsuicide.html?_r=0OTTAWA — The government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau introduced legislation on Thursday to legalize physician-assisted suicide for Canadians with a “serious and incurable illness,” which has brought them “enduring physical or psychological suffering.”
The proposed law limits physician-assisted suicides to citizens and residents who are eligible to participate in the national health care system, an effort to prevent a surge in medical tourism among the dying from other countries.
If the bill passes, Canada will join a group of countries that permit some form of assisted suicide, including Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany. Assisted suicide is legal in only a few American states, including Oregon and Vermont.
Under Canada’s proposed law, people who have a serious medical condition and want to die will be able to commit suicide with medication provided by their doctors or have a doctor or nurse practitioner administer the dose for them. Family members and friends will be allowed to assist patients with their death, and social workers and pharmacists will be permitted to participate in the process."
Why do you think we aren't more advanced on this issue in the US? Even many liberal "Blue" states have not passed laws allowing this option for the terminally ill. What do you think is holding us back here in the US? I can understand why it doesn't fly in the Bible Belt, but not in other states that are typically socially liberal.
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azmom
(5,208 posts)smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)I think this is such an important issue. It amazes me that more people in this country don't find it to be an urgent matter. All I know is that when the time comes, I want to have the freedom to go out on my own terms. I do not want to be kept alive by artificial means against my own will so that the insurance companies can keep collecting on preserving my misery.
KamaAina
(78,249 posts)The disability community’s opposition is based on the dangers to people with disabilities and the devaluation of disabled peoples’ lives that result from assisted suicide. Further, this opposition stems from factors that directly impact the disability community as well as all of society. These factors include the secrecy in which assisted suicide operates today, even where it is legal; the lack of robust oversight and the absence of investigation of abuse; the reality of who uses it; the dangers of legalization to further erode the quality of the U.S. health care system; and its potential for other significant harms.
In view of this reality, we address many of the disability-related effects of assisted suicide, while also encompassing the larger social context that inseparably impacts people with disabilities as well as the broader public. First, after addressing common misunderstandings, we examine fear and bias toward disability, and the deadly interaction of assisted suicide and our profit-driven health care system. Second, we review the practice of assisted suicide in Oregon, the first U.S. state to legalize it, and debunk the merits of the so-called Oregon model. By detailing significant problems with Oregon’s supposed safeguards, we raise some of its real dangers, particularly for people with depression and other psychiatric disabilities. Third and finally, we explore the ways that so-called “narrow” assisted suicide proposals can easily expand. This article focuses primarily on conditions in the United States, though much of our discussion also applies in other countries.
In short, we must separate our private wishes for what we each may hope to have available for ourselves some day—a hope that often fails to understand how assisted suicide actually operates—and, rather, focus on the significant dangers of legalizing assisted suicide as public policy in our society today. Assisted suicide would have many unintended consequences.
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)don't want to go. It has already worked in many states and countries. This is just a scare tactic by the religious right.
Even very few people who have chosen the option have actually gone through with it in this country. The point is that they have the CHOICE, if they decide to do so. I think extra measures should be in place when it comes to the disabled, but this argument should not be allowed to stop so many of the terminally suffering from having the option to end their misery when they so choose.
I am sorry, but this is another situation where I think it is a matter of choice. If the disabled person does not wish to die they should have legal recourse. I really think this is one of those situations where the concern of the the opposition has been completely blown out of proportion. Like where people think that people will use abortion as a form of birth control. It's not reality, but it's a lame argument to prevent people from having agency when it comes to determining the course of their own lives and bodies.
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)I appreciate your post. I hope I didn't come off as hostile to you, I certainly didn't mean to. I always love your posts.
I just get very angry at these right-to-lifers who will deny people agency over their own end of life decisions. I hope you didn't take my rant personally. Peace. 
LostOne4Ever
(9,290 posts)NobodyHere
(2,810 posts)
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)They are great under Trudeau!
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)Our bodies belong to us, not to "god", not to the state, not to the "we know better" crowd.
That applies to the drug war, that applies to reproductive freedom, that applies to the right of the terminally ill to a pain-free exit on their own terms, that applies a lot of stuff.
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)Dog forbid the republicans ever get into office. We will never get the chance to decide on this. It terrifies me.
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)I remain an optimist but that is probably easier for me since I'm in a progressive state that passed a death with dignity act years ago.
But I do believe there is increasingly a consensus that people should be free to control their own lives and bodies. Hopefully that will percolate up even to the anti-choice statehouses, eventually.
One hopes.
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)Why are we so far behind this? Families are suffering every day, there must be a better way.
Warren DeMontague
(80,708 posts)But the Millennials hitting voting age has begun to change a whole bunch of stuff.
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)I would like to think so. We have a long way to come on this issue.
Monk06
(7,675 posts)doesn't like it
The Canadian Right wing, following the lead of the American Right insist on trying to belittle Trudeau. They tried through the entire campaign to put short pants on him and treat him like a child. They failed because they underestimated his intelligence and self confidence
Here he is responding to a right wing reporter's sarcastic comment in a presser
https://www.facebook.com/GlobalNews/videos/1014787141902384/?video_source=pages_finch_trailer
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)You have a true leader there and he's also pretty easy on the eye!
Monk06
(7,675 posts)doesn't like it
The Canadian Right wing, following the lead of the American Right insist on trying to belittle Trudeau. They tried through the entire campaign to put short pants on him and treat him like a child. They failed because they underestimated his intelligence and self confidence
Here he is responding to a right wing reporter's sarcastic comment in a presser
https://www.facebook.com/GlobalNews/videos/1014787141902384/?video_source=pages_finch_trailer
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)particular issue? If that isn't too personal.
Monk06
(7,675 posts)It's just that people don't call it that. If someone is at the end of their life with say a week of suffering left doctors routinely offer increased doses of morphine to alleviate the pain of passing
My own mother passed this way in 2000. She had end stage COPD and they gave her three days to live. So she took communion and the doctor steadily increased her morphine until she died
Even then it took six days She had a strong heart but her organs were slowly failing
She went peacefully with all of us visiting her every day until she was gone
Nobody should be condemned to dying in pain choking for their last breath
Trudeau is just codifying as a legal right something that is common and accepted practice here
Accept for Baptists and other religious fundamentalists and nobody cares about their perverted desire to make everyone suffer to the bitter end in order to earn a ticket to their particular version of heaven
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)Thank you for letting us know.
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)I think it will be a hot button issue once the election is over.
Alkene
(752 posts)To have the option to choose how much suffering one must endure was a great comfort to my wife.
That, and the cannabis.
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)This is an important issue. Please accept my condolences.
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)I don't get it. It affects so many lives, but yet so many people here seem to be indifferent about the issue. Can you tell me why?
Alkene
(752 posts)If we don't think about death, it can't touch us. That didn't work out very well for me.
My state, WA, already allows it.
I've been told by some who would know, that where it isn't legal it is sometimes "handled." I didn't ask them to elaborate.
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)People just want to avoid the conversation about death in this country altogether, however we all must face it. Seriously, there is something supremely fucked up in this country in the way we approach death and I think that is why we can't address this issue head on.
Thanks for your input. You are fortunate to live in WA.
libodem
(19,288 posts)Should be a human and civil right.
awake
(3,226 posts)Last year made it leagle and gave the Goverment a year to write new laws on the issue.
