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A late reply to @urquan on assisted suicide
A close family friend has Lou Gehrig's Disease. She cannot drink without choking, she cannot move through space without falling, she cannot manipulate objects. Her life is miserable, and every day that goes by she loses further capacities.
Her options are something as follow:
Enlist the help of someone, potentially the state, to kill her within the next few weeks;
Tough it out until the line on the graph for "care necessary to life" crosses the line for "care available from friends and family and oupatient caretakers", and allow herself to die of neglect - I'm guessing by suffocation, once her diaphragm stops working - within more or less the same timeline as the previous;
Engage with the medical system, which will do its very best to keep her going, until even the best medical technology our public system can buy cannot keep her blood flowing, probably before Christmas this year, and she expires after spending her last few weeks highly medicated in a sterile white prison.
I understand what your Christian ethics say in general, as you have beautifully laid them out for us. But in the specifics, in full contact with reality, if this were you or your mother or your close family friend, what would you say or do? Where would your heart be?
I am cautious about New Zealand's euthanasia law, and in fact voted against it in the referendum that made it law, but I do think one good measure that it instituted is that no doctor can introduce the idea, when dealing with patients. They are only allowed to discuss it if the patient chooses to bring it up.
This isn't foolproof -- an exhausted family caregiver or malicious beneficiary of the will could still bring it up with the patient and, potentially, try to coerce them into going along with it. But it does, I hope, prevent the creation of a class of doctors who routinely recommend it.
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This isn't a response to urquan, but to the commenter they were replying to. I took particular issue with this line:
If that's the answer a Christian would give in your friend's case, my response would be "then your God is an asshole, since his plan is apparently to cause a human being, and everybody who knows and loves them and has to watch, immense suffering as they waste away, for no good reason whatsoever."
I live with somebody who is slowly dying from a degenerative neurological condition. It is heartbreaking to see their life gradually, painfully and inevitably reduced to nothing. What's God's purpose in doing this? To teach me patience and compassion? Surely an omnipotent God could do that without destroying another human being in the process.
I know none of this is any new insight to the faithful, they've had to deal with arguments from unbelievers about why a just God would allow suffering to exists for as long as religion has existed.
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Another option, and the option I would take in her situation is cryocide. She could refuse food and water while under the care of a hospice that works with a cryonics organization such as Alcor.
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I don't know about urquan, but my answer would be
I won't give advice about such things over the Internet to someone I don't well personally and
I especially won't do it if someone's trying to use it as a gotcha in an Internet political debate.
It is a honest question.
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I think this is an unfair reading of Obsidian. The example they bring up is basically the central point pro-euthanasia people are advocating for. Any person who is opposed to offering advice or opinions here, essentially doesn't have a position worth listening to at all on this matter.
I could at least respect someone saying something like, "Look, this is obviously a tough thing for any family to go through, but I've already included that in my moral reasoning. I believe that humans are made in God's image, that human life should be treated with dignity and respect, and that every effort should be made to keep her alive." I don't agree with it, but I can respect it. If instead, when faced with a real world example, one were to fold and say, "I don't give advice over the internet, and I don't answer gotcha questions" - it seems like that person is not really prepared to engage with the realities of this problem as they exist on the ground, and that their castles in the sky might as well blow away in the wind.
A widespread conversational norm when talking directly to people is to not say negative things about them personally or their circumstances, even if you believe those things.
Getting into a political debate where in order for someone to justify himself, he'd have to say such things, is exploiting the norm to win a debate. Even if you're not intentionally doing it, that's the effect it's going to have.
Yes, it's true that the norm is not so strict that nobody will violate it, but that doesn't make this right. Yes, he could say "this is a tough thing for you, but my religion still prohibits..." He could also just go silent, being unwilling to speak what he believes because he doesn't want to upset someone who has bad family circumstances. If he did that, his silence could be interpreted as "See! He has no answer for that!" And in this sort of debate, it's often interpreted exactly that way.
I agree with you there should be a soft-norm against putting someone on the hot-seat with a personal anecdote. Besides the risk of being rude, you run the risk of the OP whipping out additional details as necessary to make you look like a fool.
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Situations like this are the main issue which makes this a difficult question (for me). In general, I am against euthanasia / assisted suicide (in particular proposals where the medical / healthcare system is to provide it) but supportive for legal suicide. Near all euthanasia proposals tend to include or slip into including people who have full mobility and no physical limitations to taking their own life. It is not really a suicide if it is not you but someone else pulling the trigger.
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Other options;
purchase a gun and a bullet
purchase a small tank of helium from Walmart or Amazon
try and meet a serial killer online
"Gun and bullet" has a horribly high rate of survival with nasty complications, something like 1-in-6 in practice IIRC. I'm guessing that's a particularly stressful time for someone who's never aimed a gun before to try to figure out how to aim backwards?
I've never looked at anoxia from helium. I'd assume the tricky part is getting a sealed (at least well enough for positive pressure to keep the O2 out) space of the right size, though - too large and/or poorly sealed and you might just end up with brain damage before the tank runs out and you can breathe again; too small and well-sealed and the excess CO2 is going to cause suffering as you go, or even panic (at which point you rip the bag off your head or whatever and we're right back to worrying about survival with brain damage).
I read a post the other day by someone who was trying to get a hitman to kill them and instead found themselves talking to an apologetic FBI sting operation with suicide prevention hotline recommendations. Not sure how common that is, but I'd bet that finding a competent hitman rather than a scammer has poor odds.
These also sound a bit tough for someone who cannot manipulate objects and doesn't want to get a helper convicted of murder. Situations like that are part of why I can see a benefit to legalizing assisted suicide; by the time living is actually worse than death, it's probably too late to do anything unassisted.
To put it mildly. If you do not have very good connections of this kind, if you do not know this kind of shady people who trust you and know even shadier people, forget about it.
Fortunately, we are on the internet, where any interest, no matter how obscure, finds its dedicated fan and support group, and suicide is no exception.
Since the demise of 8chan
https://web.archive.org/web/20190804172611/https://8ch.net/suicide/res/376.html
SS forum is the place to go (it gained enough notoriety to be noticed by normie news, including NYT, it is not some deep secret anymore)
https://sanctioned-suicide.org/threads/suicide-resource-compilation.3/
admins: if this kind of content is too mature for this community, feel free to delete it and ban me
Having to continually upgrade my estimate of how blackpilled you are, gotta say.
Blackpilled because there are people researching the best ways of exit in rational scientific way, or because there are people preventing exit by any means necessary with diligence of conscientious guard patrolling the perimeter of camp, checking whether walls are strong and whether barbed wire is not torn, looking for every possible nook and cranny prisoners can use to sneak away?
Remember the SN controversy?
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/04/technology/amazon-suicide-poison-preservative.html
This Dr. Death's super mega deadly connoction NYT wants to ban (for ordinary normies OFC) and fears so much it refuses to name it, is sodium nitrite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_nitrite
Essential medicine and ordinary household chemical, used for preservation of food.
Not any more, if NYT get its wish. Who are you to think about making your homemade ham, sausage, bacon and smoked meat? Go to supermarket like everyone else, consume MegaFoodCorp products like everyone else. If it saves only one life, it is worth it.
Wait when people discover how easily you can use New York Times for suicide...
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Personally I would just try to buy fentanyl.
Or plant opium poppies when you get the diagnosis.
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My condolences to you and your friend. I'd like to chime in as a secular person who is against assisted suicide for young, physically healthy people but is fine with euthanasia for people who are terminally ill, elderly, or extremely physically disabled.
Some other people have put this more eloquently, but I believe by okaying euthanasia for the first group we will get a lot of people opting to end their lives who would have stuck it out and become happy, productive adults. If a healthy person wants to take their life, I'm not going to cast moral judgement on them. But they should do it on their own terms — by bringing in the state we legitimize it and widen the net of people who will be lost. Suicide may be an option, be it should remain culturally taboo.
In the case of someone with no future due to terminal illness, or for someone physically incapable of ending themselves (the example I'm thinking of is someone who is paralyzed from the neck down due to an accident), the suffering is both clear and incurable at our current level of medicine. It's a lot easier of a call and has clear limits that won't (shouldn't?) lead to healthy people being killed by the state.
I suppose my guiding principle would be: what societal guidelines/guardrails will lead the average person to happiness and produce a functional, healthy society?
I think there's something to be said for assisted suicide for healthy people if a mandatory waiting/counseling period is long enough. Suicidal impulses are very often brief and very often regretted by survivors after just time to think; giving suicidal people an incentive to take time and get help, even if that incentive is "this way it'll be reliable and painless if you still want to go through with it", might save a lot of them.
Or I could be completely wrong. This is the sort of thing I'd want to see as a years-long pilot program in a small country or two, not immediate larger-scale adoption.
By offering a legitimate, state-sponsored path we run the risk of turning euthanasia into a goal to be worked toward as described by this recent quality contribution by @VelveteenAmbush. He is talking about gender transitioning but uses this topic as a directly analogous example, and makes a good argument that providing a legitimate path will wind up doing more harm than good.
With women this could be a big problem, as they are more likely to attempt suicide but tend to do so with less lethal methods. If there was an accepted path to suicide that had a 100% success rate once approved, we'd probably see more deaths overall.
I agree that whatever changes we make to a system like this should be carefully tested in a small region. Then again, after seeing how easily studies are manipulated and misrepresented, part of me wants to just put a big "do not cross" line over this particular policy. Once it becomes accepted policy and people are used to it, it's a lot harder to turn back the clock than it is to just keep it taboo.
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I'm not @urquan, but my mom died at 58 under similar circumstances, having to choose between starving to death or dying of bowel obstruction. People have come to understand dying with dignity as meaning dying on your own terms, or dying without a lot of suffering or something, but there is something to be said for equating dignity with triumph, in the sense that you can whip slaves all you like, but they can still stand tall and ask for more, thereby denying you the victory of degrading them. As painful as it is to see someone suffer, it also painful to see someone reduced to bemoaning their state and begging to be put out of their misery, not because it fills one with pity, but because it fills one with scorn. By the end of someone's life, it is perhaps too late to inculcate stoicism, but in my mom's case I basically told her to man up and quit being a pussy, that she would soon be dead, but everyone but her would have to live with the memory of her final days, so she should consider pulling whatever victory she could out of the situation. And she did. She did it out of maternal love for me, rather than out of any attachment to airy principles, but even still, in dying she left the gift of an example of courage and forbearance in the face of certain defeat. It doesn't get much more dignified than that.
Thank you, this is very thoughtful.
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I'm fully in favor of elective euthanasia for the terminally ill, so I'd choose option #1 in a heartbeat (assuming it didn't risk getting anyone in trouble with the law), but isn't there another option where the medical system eases her pain but doesn't provide intensive care, and she passes away painlessly?
"Hospice care" is the term for @Obsidian to search for. It doesn't have to be at a dedicated hospice facility either, "home hospice" is a thing.
It may fall into the "die of neglect" category, I suppose, but I think "neglect" would be overstating things. My mother died under home hospice care a few months after deciding not to try to fight stage-4 cancer (don't smoke, kids!), and although death is always horrible, an oxygen concentrator and strong painkillers and such made it less horrible than it would have been otherwise.
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