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My personal anecdote around this issue was from when my mother was dying of pancreatic cancer. Once the actual process of dying started, the doctors and nurses worked to "keep her comfortable" but the pain killers didn't do much. For those last few days it struck me that in essence she was being tortured to death from the inside and all we could do was sit around and wait for the pain, and her life, to end. The last thing she ever said to me, through gritted teeth in her native tongue was "how long does it take to die?" I will never forget that and I will always support the right for anyone to choose dignity.
I’m sorry to hear that, the end for my mum was very similar.

Like many things, people are against it until they live the reality, then their story changes quickly.

In an episode of the The Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski narrates the seasonal migration (transhumance) of the Bakhtiari tribe of SW Iran. When they get to the raging river, an old man can't make it, so is left on the bank to die.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1ztord river crossing at 14-17 mins

This is the same epic migration recorded in the classic Grass

1925 ETHNOGRAPHIC DOCUMENTARY FILM " GRASS " MIGRATION OF BAKHTIARI TRIBE OF PERSIA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fVftguHwFc

And the tribe moves on .....

Oh puritanical Americans once again Afraid of a neighbour giving their citizens a bit of agency over their own bodies.

Bogeymen be here!

Can you imagine carrying around the MAiD tote which they apparently give out?
The article discusses two types of cases, with examples, that I find particularly interesting: people who are choosing to die because their pain is inadequately addressed, and people choosing to die because they are disabled and cannot afford to live.

If assisted suicide were available in the united states, I would have taken it at multiple points in the last three years.

I've been disabled by autoimmune arthritis for over 20 years now, and every year it gets more impossible to make it on SSDI. Within the year I will be on the streets unless something unlikely happens, and I will not live like that. Secondarily, doctors have been completely unwilling to treat pain for almost ten years now, despite never having had any addiction issues, or having any problems other than pain when discontinuing pain medication in the first place. I've had multiple surgeries required by the condition, and I've been on biologics and methotrexate and steroids. Nothing seems to be working anymore.

Over the years your friends drift away, you drift in and out of insane housing situations, and things steadily get worse and worse until you feel inhuman. My rent is 90% of my check. I cancelled internet this year, my last luxury. I read the threads that come up several times a year on hackernews where the consensus always seems to be that the poor or the homeless are irredeemable drug addicts, who if they weren't so stupid or morally bankrupt, wouldn't be where they are.

And there are people who are worse off than I am. I met a lovely young girl in her 20s a few years ago whose hands were bent and twisted with the autoimmune arthritis she'd had since around age 7 or 8. She had no family willing or able to help her, and was living on around $700 a month SSI (since she'd never been able to work). She survived by living on the couch in a one-bedroom apartment with a creepy guy she met online, and she was lucky to have that. Her doctor was refusing to treat her pain, and she was also going through treatment for a cancer caused by the drugs to treat the arthritis. When she walked, she moved like someone over the age of 90, and there was pain telegraphed loudly in every step.

Keeping people like us alive is inhumane torture, and yet, weirdly, people seem to on the whole, want to keep torturing us. It's also inhumane that people like us are forced to make these choices.

Do I want to die? No, but I want the option, because living like this is a living hell, and not if, but when I end up on the street it's going to be far, far worse. I won't do it. When it comes to that, I'm checking out. But I don't have Canada's humane option. I'll have to do it in my own clumsy way, and hope I don't botch it.

The nasty reality is that most of the time, I could do some work--tech support work from home? I could do that 80% of the time, and 10 years ago I could have been doing that full time. But all those jobs went to India and the Dominican years ago. I keep making abortive attempts to climb out of the hole, and never make it. Housing lists are closed. Waiting lists are something like 2 years in most places, and when they open they're full within hours and close again. And that's the waiting list. After you get on it, there are longer waits.

I could continue living independently for a quite a while, if I could get things like: an affordable apartment with a washer/dryer, grocery delivery during the bad flare-ups, a toilet that is raised, transportation to pharmacy and medical appointments, voice control tools that work, and internet. But I don't get any of those things, because in its great and vast wisdom, the United States, my home, has decided I must suffer instead. To prove what? To help whom? Who does my suffering help? I suppose it makes some people feel better that assisted suicide is out of my reach. The same with the opioid crisis.

It's so awful it's almost funny sometimes, in a macabre way.

Thanks for sharing your situation. I don't have any magical advice or anything, but from an internet stranger, I hope things go well for you.
> But all those jobs went to India and the Dominican years ago.

We really need to fix that. It's making a lot of people depressed that they can't get a job that would really help them here, in America

Wow, the article's accompanying graphic, which is like all you can see without a paywall seems heavily biased from the get go. I don't even know the article, but it sounds like whoever put that info-graphic disagree.
The article makes sense to me as a Dutch person.

When you no longer believe that death is up to god (practically impossible to imagine for religious folks) it becomes a normal part of healthcare.

Ain't nobody gonna spend even 1 day suffering needlessly if there's a medical way out.

Devils advocate, but you could still make an argument that it is unnatural, therefore making it wrong to naturalist. Suffering induced suicide is virtually unheard of in nature.
I find it's a very complex topic, and I'm not even sure where I stand on it.

That said, I think one big aspect of it as I understand is that medical advances are related to the situation. A lot of people wouldn't have survived or be surviving without society's help and medical advances.

In a simplified naturalist argument, you wouldn't expect people with those conditions to still be alive for the most part.

Simply "unplugging" someone from society's help seems barbaric. You wouldn't just drop their medication, accessories, social aid, etc.

Now you have this dilemma, most people don't want to see them suffer, and those people themselves don't want to suffer. Yet they are suffering, and we help them manage, pain meds, food, shelter, advanced machines, and what not. Now it creates this scenario where they can feel like a burden, and they're still going through a lot of suffering, but like I said, "unplugging" means going through even more suffering, it's hard for anyone to choose that option.

At this point, everything has moved beyond "naturalism". We're in the here and now, with a context that is totally modern. There is a way to "unplug" that is suffering free, should it be an option on the table or not?

That is a good counter, medicine intrinsically is a violation of strict naturalism. The only hole I can find in that is that not all maid cases come about from the ability of modern medicine to prolong life. One such case is maid for psychiatric issues. I also don't know where I stand on this topic. I assume like anything there are going to be cases I absolutely disagree with, but as a whole, I think it is probably better than doctors secretly doing this themselves without support (It's not talked about a lot, but it is common)
Suffering induced suicide is not a thing because normally a predator will eat a slow moving sick individual... So it is not suicide but arguably those creatures die
Certainly a good point.
It’s a graphic of the patient consent form (and not an “infographic”, in the usual sense of the term), what bias am I missing?
the patient consent form doesn't have CANADA IS KILLING ITSELF imposed behind the fields