In the Netherlands, a friend's mother was recently able to end her life at age 95, via euthanasia assisted by her regular doctor.
Her husband had died some years before, and she had just been diagnosed with the early signs of dementia. She decided she had had a good life already, and that now was the right time to go, while she was still in control of her life.
The process and safeguards have been formalised and are uncontroversial in the main. Some doctors opt not to be part of this for their patients. That's their right. Usually a colleague steps in to guide the patient through the process.
In our friend's case, her children supported her in this decision. Her friends were also aware she was planning to end her life. Her funeral was a celebration of her life, not shock at her death.
Whenever I suggest adults should be in control of their own lives, I get a response along the lines of “we’d see mass suicide if people had an easy option to end their life”.
Ok, so let’s think about that. There may be thousands of people whose lives are so bad they’d take an easy way out if it were available. So the idea is to keep that option off the table, so those people are forced to live out the rest of their lives suffering?
To anyone who holds this opinion, I’d really like to know why. What reason could you possibly have to prefer someone you don’t even know to live in suffering opposed to them having control over their own life?
Exactly. Their body their choice. And if there are thousands of people going out this way it should be a trigger for society to do better and work on reducing the suffering.
These maximalist individual freedom ideological positions always astound me. Like people haven't thought one step past "you should be able to trade with anyone, anything, and put it into your body." Should you be able to buy an instant feel-good suicide pill at the corner store? That way anyone who is having a temporary tough time has a one-way door to ending their entire life that future them would've been glad they hadn't ended?
We already see what a catastrophic mess there is when people can buy instant feel-good fentanyl pills that wreck the rest of their entire life.
Because who would serve them their fast food and receive unwanted abuse if not some miserable wretch who isn't allowed to die? I wonder what the working pool would look like if a policy like this were adopted.
* Reduced suffering, the methods available for assisted suicide are as painless as you can get. You go under anesthesia and just never wake up.
* Less room for accidentally surviving. I can't even imagine the horror of surviving a gunshot to the skull.
* Less trauma for those around you, no body hitting the street or washing up on shore, no discovering your friend or kid who has bled out in the bathroom.
* Closure, some methods of suicide the family has no way to know for sure what happened and might assume they disappeared or otherwise foul play.
* More opportunity to help people find alternatives. They don't have to take them but you have a more structured opportunity to talk people off a ledge and have a cooling off period to avoid rash decisions.
* You have documentation of freely-given informed consent. Someone who commits suicide by more painful methods when easily accessible painless death becomes inherently suspicious.
* Estate planning can be built in so it's less of a mess for next-of-kin.
I have other ways to search anonymously. For 95% of my searches I'm happy to have my search history tracked, used to drive better results for me in the future and available for me to browse if I want to. As long as Kagi isn't selling my search history to another company, I actually prefer that they track my search history.
Note: currently Kagi doesn't track search history; I hope they find a way to enable it in the future.
