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No, you don’t say!

Assisted dying is being abused in Canada with doctors coercing patients into ending their lives, members of the group who helped to legalise it have admitted.

Unfathomable.

According to the data, disproportionate numbers of people who ended their lives through assisted dying when they were not terminally ill – 29 per cent – came from Ontario’s poorest areas.

17 thoughts on “No, you don’t say!”

  1. Rest assured it won’t happen here.

    The govt will put in a provision to ensure that patients are at least a bit poorly before being euthanised.

  2. I’m surprised anyone is surprised. Doctors do their best to off inconvenient patients even without such legislation.

  3. JuliaM: « That Hippocratic Oath is taking a hell of a battering lately… »

    It’s now the Hypocritic Oath whereby licensed needle-wielders dispense dignity to depressives.

  4. “the group who helped to legalise it have admitted”

    Since it’s perfectly obvious that no system of safeguards can be expected to work well and speedily if under the supervision of government, then the question comes down to a utilitarian one: does the benefit for people who wish to avoid a lingering, painful death outweigh the cost of the occasional murder of someone who didn’t want to make a bolt for the exit? It’s a bit like discussing capital punishment: does the execution of the occasional innocent outweigh the extra murder victims that result from not having capital punishment?

    Incalculable, I’d have thought. It’s easy, perhaps, for people who believe in the old fascist in the sky, but it’s not easy for rational people. I’m biased: at my age and in my state the possibility of a big dose of morphine has its attractions.

    On the other hand I tremble at the thought that the safeguards might be under the aegis of, say, Judge Jeremy Richardson KC. Just look at that mugshot.
    https://ministryofinjustice.co.uk/his-honour-judge-jeremy-richardson-kc/

  5. Free ‘assisted dying’ clinics in prisons would have advantages in terms of, er, social hygiene, as does capital punishment…

    Dearieme
    Assisted dying is not like…capital punishment. We could now have objective criteria and protocols for the execution of murderers (eg dna evidence + other forensics + other specified evidence) that would prevent even the occasional innocent being topped. With assisted dying, there are no objective criteria because assessment of consent is often partly subjective.

  6. @theo

    I think people have unrealistic expectations about how foolproof DNA evidence is. Even in the absence of contamination, proving someone was at the scene is different to proving they did the deed, and even if you can do that then proving intent (and absence of mental disturbance etc) gets you into the realm of the mind where even overwhelming likelihood isn’t the same as never ever getting something wrong. We are always going to have a problem with “battered wife kills her domestic abuser” and “distraught son smothers cancer-addled mum who begged him to do it” killings even if we know full well whodunnit.

  7. Anon
    Yes, DNA is not always 100% reliable as evidence. But, with suitable protocols and additional evidence, we could execute murderers without any (often not so) ‘innocents’ dying. Capital punishment is necessary social hygiene.

  8. Part of the problem is the rights based culture and the human rights lawyers and activists.
    You pass the law with a load of safeguards then they go back and claim all the safeguards breach someone’s rights so they have to be removed

  9. The cited article is a mere piece of advocacy.

    Note that the article does not support the headline “…admits group that helped legalise it” as that confuses a group with its members. The article does not suggest that the group made any such admission. Instead, it starts by asserting that members have made the admisssion. But then it shortly weakens even that assertion to “members of … the group … have privately raised fears the practice is being “abused””. Fears are trivial, useless things in an objective argument. Some people fear that they will be abducted by aliens in flying saucers from distant stars, but the appropriate reaction to this is not setting up a defence force to track and shoot down such flying saucers, but to assess the true risk, find that it is negligible, and do nothing other than possibly try to convince those with the fear that it is irrational.

    Some of the supposed evidence is that “one of the two current BCCLA employees said: “It is the social and material aspect of [patients] disability and how that isn’t supported and how that’s treated in the community that’s creating intolerable conditions.”. So this is saying that people are being put in an intolerable position, and escaping this through dying, which is somehow wrong because they should be forced to endure the intolerable conditions for some reason.

    The best that the article cam come up with is “a grandmother suffering with breast cancer was offered assisted dying by the very doctors who were about to give her a life-saving mastectomy” – note that she was offered it, but did not accept the offer. And “another patient, Roger Foley, 49, who lodged a legal complaint after being offered assisted suicide four times” so he didn’t accept the offer either. And this is supposed to advance the argument that there is abuse of the provisions.

    And to address the observation about poverty – isn’t that what we would expect? The rich people who can afford private nurses, the best assistive technology, and do not need to worry about spending money that their family might need to rely on – surely they find a situation is not as intolerable as someone who can do nothing but lie in a bed somewhere and have no more than their basic needs met by the state.

    And, of course when it says “vulnerable people faced “potential coercion” and “undue influence” to seek out the practice” what it omits is that the opponents want people to face actual coercion and undue influence to avoid the practice.

  10. @ Charles

    I advocate you take a trip to Canada and avail yourself of their caring way of dealing with intolerable stupidity.

  11. Staff members also fear disabled people in Canada are being coerced by doctors into choosing to end their lives.
    People being coerced by doctors into doing things they wouldn’t otherwise do is the norm for doctors, isn’t it?

  12. @Theo

    More crucially, can you trust fuzz/cps/etc. not to tamper with the evidence if a conviction — any conviction — is politically expedient?

  13. @Theo

    We could now have objective criteria and protocols for the execution of murderers (eg dna evidence + other forensics + other specified evidence) that would prevent even the occasional innocent being topped.

    No, we don’t. We have an obscure investigatory and judicial process at any point in which false evidence can at least theoretically be introduced. I appreciate it’s unlikely, but it’s increasingly less unlikely in my view.

    Matt above +1

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