In 2015, Canada passed the MAID laws — Medical Assistance In Dying — which allow terminally ill patients to request life-ending treatment. This seems like a no-brainer — why anyone would want to extend a painful, miserable death is a total mystery to me. Yet I definitely recognize that these decisions are always going to be agonizing and not everyone will agree. Sometimes, even within the same family.
The Guardian recently profiled just such a case.
A Canadian man has called on a judge to block his 27-year-old daughter's medically assisted death, arguing she lacks the ability to fully consent to the procedure in a case that highlights the limits on family members' ability to intervene when a person has decided to die.
I'm a firm believer we should have similar MAID laws on the books in every U.S. state, but I also think we should have strict gun laws, too, and I don't foresee that happening any time soon either.
This journal article on the NIH website lays out the non-religious arguments against such laws:
Presented here are four non-religious, reasonable arguments against physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia: (1) "it offends me," suicide devalues human life; (2) slippery slope, the limits on euthanasia gradually erode; (3) "pain can be alleviated," palliative care and modern therapeutics more and more adequately manage pain; (4) physician integrity and patient trust, participating in suicide violates the integrity of the physician and undermines the trust patients place in physicians to heal and not to harm.
All thoughtful arguments. I really understand why any one person or physician would be profoundly uncomfortable with this. No one should be forced to participate.
But why does that mean the rest of us are precluded from opting in? When our pets are terminal, we don't let them suffer. Why do we insist that humans have to?
See also: High-tech assisted suicide pod may be legal in Switzerland as soon as next year
