back
122 comments
I believe ultimately we will head towards a situation where anyone can request it at any time for any reason. Gating with health conditions is just to ease the transition.

That said, the great problem in countries with tax funded social and health services is the government have a distinct interest in persuading certain people to jump, and this is a serious moral hazard as some of the Canadian experience has demonstrated.

Today though the UK has the opposite problem, which is an enormous private residential “care” system keeping huge numbers of unwilling near vegetables wired up until they eventually die, transferring as much of the family money to the “carers” as possible. They have an awful lot to lose from this too, so I expect the fight to be a lot nastier from here on.

> I believe ultimately we will head towards a situation where anyone can request it at any time for any reason.

Not a chance. This will always be gated by medical evaluation for suitability.

Suicidal ideation occurs transiently in many conditions or life circumstances. Giving these people tools to follow through with their impulses "at any time for any reason" would be disastrous.

Canada is letting people request suicide for non terminal and non physical disabilities (e.g. autism)

Whilst I am genuinely supportive of the legislation, I have a disability myself and am cautious about what it might lead to.

> Today though the UK has the opposite problem, which is an enormous private residential “care” system keeping huge numbers of unwilling near vegetables wired up until they eventually die, transferring as much of the family money to the “carers” as possible.

Same as the US.

Nobody below the Fussellian upper-middle class in the US has savings—just accounts that temporarily hold money for the hospitals and elder care & hospice facilities.

>"That said, the great problem in countries with tax funded social and health services is the government have a distinct interest in persuading certain people to jump"

Well, government may have a "distinct interest..." for reasons that are far away from being health related. I think that any hint of encouragement must be severely punished.

Bit of a nitpick but we don't have "an enormous private residential “care” system keeping huge numbers of unwilling near vegetables wired up until they eventually die"

We have enormous private residential “care” system where they sit around in chairs. The "near vegetables wired up" are in NHS hospitals.

I don't think most of the care home folk are going to go for assisted dying. Also it's not as profitable as you might think - real estate is expensive and it's not that easy to get staff to wipe up 24/7.

Nope. If you have the means you will be ejected from the hospital into the private system until you do not.
> as some of the Canadian experience has demonstrated

I live in Canada, and I keep hearing this kind of stuff brought up by Americans.

What, exactly, is "the Canadian experience"?

It would be best if your sources are not American media outlets intended for American audiences they are looking to manipulate.

I am British and Canadian.

Some of the famous incidents: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/veterans-maid-rcmp-investig... https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/paralympian-trying-to-get-wh...

The Canadian “care” industry is also a dumpster fire: https://globalnews.ca/news/4870784/gilles-duceppes-mother-fo...

By Americans? Why do some Canadians try to sweep under the rug actual debates by dismissing them as being "american arguments"? Surely as a Canadian you have seen that there has been a constant debate about the limits and excesses of MAID? Even the CBC has a few yearly articles about someone getting euthanized because they wanted to die because they were too poor and similar.

I mean, we live in a country where the ruling party has 30% of the vote, and 35% when they had a majority in parliament. So why pretend that disagreements with Canadian policy is somehow just coming from Americans not understanding our wonderful country? It's super weird and it's oddly common on places like here and Reddit.

It’s a potentially lucrative business: https://youtu.be/EbmQxZkSswI?si=G5-eaqTBhKYzns65
Fight? Who is fighting in this instance?
I was on the fence until a family member was diagnosed with inoperable glioblastoma. I would encourage anyone in opposition, or in doubt, to read about late stages of GBM, and imagine their mother or child going through that end, which is 100% certainly for everyone who got unlucky. There is no cure, and no known cause.

This is not murder, it’s mercy - just imagine being in a soul crushing place of having to end the suffering and life of your parent or child, then being told it’s not possible.

My mother died that way, after a fairly long and cautious consultation process, but through medical assistance. She had a cluster of health problems, and also suffered from mental problems caused by recurring memories caused by dementia. The other prognosis would have been: suffering in a hospice until her body would give up. Now she could die in peace, surrounded by her family. We didn't really know the extent of her suffering, but after the first injection, a strong sedative, she spoke her final words: "I have no pain. I have no pain."

It's really good that it's possible.

This is called the "I don't care until it happens to me" mindset.
I am a nurse and work on a unit with quite a lot of the End of life patients. Including patients with MND and COPD which need careful management for breathlessness.

I don't support this legislation. My opposition is based on the fact that enabling someone to have a peaceful death involves a interplay of numerous environmental social and biological factors. The new legislation will need to fit into this complex environment without disrupting the practices which have built up to manage EOL care.

For example suffering for a patient will be significantly eased if the doctor explains clearly what is expected to happen and what the patient is likely to experience.

A patient with COPD, might be afraid to experience breathlessness. But the medical team explain how it will work, the nurses introduce it gradually and the patient does not suffer. Its the interplay of the technology, the professionals, the biological process and, obviously the patient and the beliefs and uncertainty.

Likewise a completely dependent MND patient will requite 16 full time nurses to provide for his needs. They might feel like a burden. Again its an interplay between the patients needs, symptoms and the professionals and technology we use to meet these needs.

If we overlay on this situations the knowledge that the patient could simply take their own life, its not clear to me that this would alleviate suffering.

My grandmother, who I visited today, is a 93yo COPD patient.

She can't breathe. She can't use the bathroom without help. She can't hardly move. She's hooked up to a nasal cannula 100% of the time. Albuterol breathing exercises 4x a day means she can't sleep more than six hours at a time because if she skips one, even on O2, she experiences suffocation.

She coughs so badly that she has constant rib/spine fractures so she's on and off narcotic painkillers that only make life bearable in doses enough to turn her brain into mush.

She wants to die. She's done. She won life. She's the last lady standing. Every single friend from her youth is gone. It's over.

I've already told her that when I get into my 60s I am going to stockpile a cache of painkillers and when the time comes go out on my own terms. There is an exact and precise 0.0% chance that my family is going to cry out in the hallway for days/weeks while I shit/piss myself in bed and slowly drown to death as my organs fail.

But it's too late for my grandmother because she waited until she was under the watchful eye of the skilled nursing facility nightmare.

In my idealized world, there is no violence, no accidents, and all diseases have been cured except for the inevitable and unstoppable phenomenon of heart failure and 100% of ALL deaths are medically-assisted suicide, decided on by the individual once they reach the point where your heart can no longer support independent living but before you get to the Morphine downward spiral.

I am a volunteer FF/EMT so I've seen my fair share of end of life patients in the last 25 years and apparently I am the only responsible adult in my family so I've handled the hospice phase for every member of my family for the last 20 years.

It is incomprehensible to me that anyone who has any exposure to death whatsoever does not fully support a person's right to determine the time and manner of their death-- even if it comes with problems.

The only reasons I can come up with for not supporting it are: a financial stake in prolonged expensive end-of-life care, the belief that the patients are too stupid to determine their fate, and/or trying to impose their personal religious beliefs on the masses.

For some terminal patients, there are types of pain that no amount of morphine or money can fix.

I'm thankful to know that when its my time to go, I'll have the choice to skip enduring several days of torture should I wish.

If I am in horrendous and incurable pain, I hope I have the option to calmly and painlessly end my own life without having to worry about my loved ones going to prison for it.
First reading, there are lots of stage before the bill is passed.

It look like Parliament, via private members bill working at its best.

Lots of debate, lots of people listening to the debate and then voting.

I watched the debate as it was happening on Sky News and it seemed to be one the most respectful debates in a long time when it comes to a divisive issue (cough cough Brexit).
This was the second reading fyi.
It requires extreme naivete to believe that this will not rapidly shift from doctor assisted suicide to mandatory removal of medical benefits except "end of life care". The medical-insurance complex in the US cannot wait for this to happen.
What makes Canada so different from other countries where this didn't happen?
I believe a patient currently & their family members are required to state what kind of care a person should have if things go wrong before a surgery.

Why could the law not just continue this by adding an additional option that states when you would want assisted suicide? I would think lawmakers could specify that insurance or doctors are not allowed to make this decision or let it effect their services.

Worked out fine in the Netherlands, which has an even more progressive assisted dying act.
in single-payer government funded healthcare systems (Canada UK), medically assisted suicide is ENORMOUS cost savings.

imagine paying taxes all your life and hoping to get a good care in later stage of your life, and government just MAIDs you instead of providing care

The current UK/CA social contract seems to be: you work for 45+ years and pay taxes, but when you get old and sick and need medical care, we will just MAID you and instead give away all your taxes to welfare recipients

Out of curiosity why do people need permission or help from their government for this? Is it related to life insurance? Or is it that in some cases people can not get to the hardware store for a mask, hose, some duct tape and a tank of nitrogen? Or is it a business thing meaning someone is trying to corner the market on those crazy expensive suicide pods?
I don't want to die. However, I can imagine many scenarios that are worse than death. In many of them I am too incapacitated to arrange my own painless suicide. Allowing third parties to help in these circumstances, with appropriate controls to ensure this freedom isn't abused, seems to me the least bad option.
> Or is it that in some cases people can not get to the hardware store for a painters face mask, the corresponding hose with the 40mm NATO connector, some duct tape and a tank of nitrogen?

Certainly part of it. Some people by the time they have no other hope are physically incapable of doing that.

Some people would rather not DIY such a consequential thing the same way they rather not brew their own antibiotics or do their own dentistry. Obviously in this case the “worst” which might happen is that they don’t die but suffer even more pain and indignities.

It is also the legal risk for those who remain. Every time someoen DIYs their end as you write it there is a police investigation. (As there should be, to make sure that there were no trickery around the death.) Depending on how things go your loved ones might get arrested and thrown into prison (if the system believes they killed you, or even if something they did or accused of doing is deemed to have “assisted” you). Similarly they might not be able to inherit after you if they were deemed to have assisted in your suicide. And that can be some small thing, like your partner driving you to the hardware store, or paying for the purchase, or helping you tighten a NATO connector. Now they lost you, they might have lost their home and they might be looking down the barrel of a risky legal case with years of prison as a possibility. That is not something anybody would wish on their loved ones.

I think this is to do with the ‘assisted’ component. I.e. When people need help from others to die.

If the law didn’t cover this, then people who provided assistance would be open to criminal prosecution.

Many opponents to the bill have been very cagey about their reasons for opposing it, and eventually admit it's for nebulous "religious reasons".

Personally I'd like the right to die with dignity if I were unfortunate enough to find myself facing horrible, imminent, certain death.

I'm glad it passed and I hope it makes it into law.

I dislike these proposals because they always eventually encourage the erosion of help for people who very much want to live. I don't think the end of life is very dignified, but I don't trust the government to ever decide to spend money helping people in pain reduce their pain, instead of shrugging and saying, "Well, you can choose to die" We're seeing this in Canada and it was utterly predictable
In Canada they have proposed assisted dying for young people suffering from depression. What better way to harvest organs and save money than by making unproductive young people want to die?

If this was seriously restricted to people facing severe debilitating injuries or pain I might be more in favor. But you know it won't stop there.

Does the Bible say you shouldn't end your life if you're dying of something incurable and terribly painful?
progress should mean learning from the successes of other countries, not the disasters
the expected cost savings only increases as the age for assisted dying decreases

in the limit, health care is abortion and euthanasia only.

we all know that abortion prevents suffering of the mother and the child who will never experience it.

euthanasia fixes the mistake of not aborting.

we cannot suffer if we just dont live.

Why Assisted Dying is only being pushed and promoted in White Christian countries?

It is not allowed in Muslim countries and is explicitly banned in Israel.

Orthodox Christian is not allowing MAID as well

It's also legal in Colombia.
A couple of articles with more critical views, the first discusses how proponents of the law have been avoiding scrutiny ahead of the bill, and have been talking up safeguards that aren't actually in their proposal:

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/history-will-not-be-kind...

The second argues that this will disproportionately affect women, who already suffer more under domestic abuse including being killed by partners, predicting that this will be used similarly:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/11/25/assisted-dying-i...

According to this report, the main charity that is pushing this, Death in Dignity, uses case studies from violent men who murdered their wives and has men working for them who have killed women.

It's easier to go down a slope than go up it. It's a tragedy.

Most doctors, all disability organisations and charities, all hospices and elderly care organisations opposed this. A visit to the doctor should never even have the possibility of a conversation such as "have you considered dying? I can help". This was decided by people who are not old, not disabled, not vulnerable.

Additionally, we have a case now where the national health service will in one section prevent ill people considering suicide and help them out of it but will in another section help those who are considering suicide and encourage them into it! It fundamentally changes the nature of what a health service is.

The Samartians number is 116 123

The Samaritan's motto is "every life lost to suicide is a tragedy"

Can you cite your sources?

https://jme.bmj.com/content/47/12/e64

This paper suggests the vast majority of disability rights organisations in great britain are not publicly opposed to assisted dying.

https://www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-support/ethics/end-of-life...

This survey of doctors presents data that does not correspond with your claim that most doctors oppose assisted dying.

I live in Canada. I know people who chose MAiD (our euthanasia process) way because of certain conditions (e.g. one in 80s, with incurable cancer, constant pain). There is nothing more heartbreaking than seeing someone suffer, endlessly, begging to go, but having no avenue to go peacefully.

I saw my grandmother go through the most intense amount of pains for about a decade in early 2000s (at about ~70) while she lived with us. We did everything we could. Seeing my mom cry endlessly throughout years rewired my brain to the point where I will always support assisted suicide.

I really don't care if it's "immoral", "slippery slope", "against the natural way of life" and so on. If, at any point in the future, my parents are suffering and decide they want to go out with their own way, I want them to have the choice. And I want that choice to be available for me as well, if it ever comes to that.

Cite sources for your assertions, they appear to be false.
The Samaritans. I remember a story about that in the bible, explains your conservative Christian views
> encourage them into it!

They will not encourage them into it. That's not the idea.