Assisted Dying

Choices about Assisted Dying.

• Are there any circumstances under which assisted dying should be allowed?

• If so, what are those circumstances?

• If so, how do we regulate it?

• Should people have a choice?

Discussion:

Normally I do not express personal opinions pro or con any choice since this blog is only intended to stimulate discussion by asking challenging questions, however, in this case, I do have a personal bias.

Over the last two decades, I have witnessed the death of both my parents and both my wife's parents.  Three of the deaths involved very serious strokes with a medical prognosis of an extremely low quality of life possibly requiring full life support.  The fourth involved terminal cancer. Ages ranged from 75  to 94 years.  Two involved a Living Will or Medical Directive specifying palliative care only if the medical prognosis was a very low quality of life (with the living will giving specific examples of what would be considered a very low quality of life).

In all four cases, after extensive consultation with family and medical staff, the patients were provided palliative care only.  Death occurred within a few days to a few weeks.  Assisted dying was not an option.

While death was apparently pain-free, there was evidence of some distress with all the patients.  It is my belief that if euthanasia was an option, all four parents would have chosen it for a variety of reasons.

• Assisted dying would reduce the pain of the family having to watch a slow death
• Assisted dying would have freed resources which may have helped to save a life of someone who did have a prospect of a longer and higher quality of life.
• Assisted dying may have created the possibility of viable organ donations to help improve or save another life (all had given permission for organ transplants).

Assisted dying is an emotionally charged subject and one in which opinions are often strongly polarized.  For those who approach the subject from a religious perspective, we have to ask ourselves "Are we going against the will of God by intervening in the death process with extraordinary medical procedures?".  Given enough money and time, we will approach the possibility that we can keep a person alive (technically speaking) for a long period of time, and maybe, almost indefinitely.  "Is that the will of God?"

The money spent on prolonging low-quality life in the developed world could improve and save countless lives in poor countries around the world.  Is it our choice to let those people die so that we can prolong a low quality of life for a few (often against their own wishes)?  "Is that the will of God?"

Our choices in life are often not easy but it can help one's perspective to project well into the future - 100 years or more.  The current rate of growth in health care costs is not sustainable over the long term.  We will have to make some tough choices in the future.  Assisted dying is one of those choices.

The Living Wills and how the medical community handled them did provide a sense that there is a well thought out process with appropriate checks and balances - a process which could also work for assisted dying.

A website which tries to provide a non-biased discussion is  http://euthanasia.procon.org/

Terrorism

Choices about Terrorism.

• What are the root causes of terrorism?
• Can terrorism be eliminated?
• If not, how we deal with it?

Discussion:

• Today, it is apparent that conventional armed forces are not effective in containing or resolving terrorism.
• Should our armed forces continue to be used to fight terrorism?
• If not, what sort of social and police initiatives are required to end terrorism?
• It seems that terrorism is as much a cultural issue as anything else (all cultures have the potential for creating terrorists, albeit some more than others). You do not change culture with guns.
• Could the money spent on fighting terrorism using conventional armed forces be better spent elsewhere?
• By the end of the twentieth century, terrorists were able to kill dozens if not hundreds or even thousands of people primarily through suicide bombings.
• In the twenty-first century, technology is progressing so rapidly that terrorists will soon have the ability to kill millions using biological or genetic means. It may even be possible to effectively wipe out all human life on our planet using such means, and yet we continue to invest billions in jets, submarines and other conventional weapons. None of these weapons are likely to be effective against the use of such technology. We can make a choice to proactively consider radically different options.
• With current technology or technology soon to be available, it will be possible to record the location of 100% of the population 24 hours a day. It will also be possible to record everything people say 24 hours a day. And in the not too distant future, it will be possible to capture videos of everyone 24 hours a day. And all of this can be done wireless and securely encrypted. Human eyes would never have to see this data unless a criminal act was being committed. Computers could monitor all the data and flag only those criminal acts or plans to commit criminal acts and only under those circumstances would there be human intervention, which in itself would be monitored and subject to accountability.
• Radical, yes! But our choice may be to risk the death of millions or implement some sort of secure monitoring system.
• As the technology to have such monitoring either exists today, or will exist very soon, so too the technology exists, or will exist very soon, to implement such a system securely with extremely effective safeguards against abuse. In fact, the monitoring system is a self correcting system since it would flag any abuse of the system.
• Such a system could even pay for itself since the number of crimes and their related costs would likely decrease dramatically.
• We have a choice of considering such radical solutions or wait until some horrendous terrorist event occurs and then react to that event with subsequent knee-jerk solutions that are not well thought out and which are likely to be much less secure and subject to abuse. The history of 9/11 teaches us that.

What do you think? Are there other radical choices we should consider? Ask yourself "What are my choices?"