"Nearly all of those who requested assisted dying - around 96% - had a foreseeable natural death. The remaining 4% were granted euthanasia due to having a long-term chronic illness and where a natural death was not imminent".
This is basically clickbait; the law is changing how people die of terminal conditions, but only a tiny fraction of those are deaths that really trace to the new law.
The corollary to the article is that almost all deaths in Canada result from severe or chronic medical conditions .. and now 5% of those cases are resolved via voluntary euthanasia.
>> The corollary to the article is that almost all deaths in Canada result from severe or chronic medical conditions .. and now 5% of those cases are resolved via voluntary euthanasia.
> A strong argument for euthanasia always was that it would be exceedingly rare, but 5% of all deaths is not exceedingly rare.
You talked right past the actual point being made, to beat a straw man instead. Being downvoted or shunned for not actually engaging with a topic yet condemning it anyway is not equivalent to being canceled.
And as far as the overall culture war reprise dynamic, I don't see much difference in having to placate the egos of HR drones talking about diversity and the previous culture of having to placate the egos of traditional business bureaucrats waxing poetically about the virtues of mega golf or spending money on a boat. Either way you just smile, nod, and fit in, or you forge your own way outside of the pop culture power structure.
> You talked right past the actual point being made, to beat a straw man instead
Your corolary, to me sounded like "It's not shocking at all that 5% of all deaths are euthanasia, it's simply the intended/logical outcome".
Maybe I created a straw man.
For me the arguments, narative, claimed outcome, scope, implications and all that for allowing something like euthanasia matter a lot.
I hope we won't push back in horror at this measure like we did with other measures, because at that point the story could easily reach nazi Germany eugenics horror levels
It was my corollary (a simple restatement of the information presented in the article), not the person you addressed, and no, it's not at all shocking that 5% of terminal cases in or facing pallative care, experiencing or about to experience chronic pain, cognitive loss, functional decline and lose of autonomy and dignity choose to knowingly take advantage of legal euthanasia.
> the story could easily reach nazi Germany eugenics horror levels
Riiiigght. Sure. If you say so.
Better to let humans suffer rather than allow them to make a choice on their own terms. Got it.
> Palliative care and end-of-life care are excellent in Australia. They help the vast majority of people to die without excessive pain and suffering.
> However, in a small number of cases palliative care cannot relieve all suffering. Palliative Care Australia estimates this to happen to around 4% of people
So 4% would be exactly the amount of people this is relevant for
I think that's the point? The title is grabbing for attention, but the point of laws to choose assisted dying is basically always that people with terminal conditions often are in such pain that they choose a peaceful death over extending the pain.
You can read this title in an alarming way or just the same in a way that says "the law is working and people actually want this option".
You cannot trust this article. Just check out the cases where they basically tell poor people that euthanasia is always an option. It's horrible. If they don't talk about where the program goes horribly wrong, we shouldn't listen to them when they talk about the supposed positives.
I don't think you need to try very hard to convince a terminally-ill patient in constant agony to end it, poor or not.
My 93 year old grandmother has COPD and she wants to end her life but cannot. She is NOT poor.
In her state in the US, a bipartisan bill was introduced to allow for euthanasia but the religious extremists killed it.
She coughs so badly, even on oxygen with frequent albuterol treatments, that she is constantly fracturing her ribs and spine and going on regimens of narcotics to keep the pain down to bearable levels-- which cause unending constipation and generally scramble her brain.
Can't move, can't talk, can't breathe, can't sit without pain, can't even shit.
If she came off of oxygen and albuterol, she would be dead within a day or two or three.
It would be an agonizing death, worse than her current situation.
So instead of drinking something and peacefully going to sleep one last time she has to slowly degrade until the machinery of the healthcare system sees fit to give her a dosage of morphine large enough.
That's the shittiest part of all of this, nearly 100% of all hospice deaths are medically assisted already. Personnel just keep upping the morphine as the gurgling increases in order to make it stop because the gurgling is "pain".
Eventually the doses get so high that literally every single person on Earth who knows what morphine is knows, irrefutably, that the morphine killed the patient.
But nobody calls it that. You can't call it that. You "managed the symptoms".
Canada has, to the best of my knowledge, a single documented instance of a single case worker who suggested MAID to perhaps as many as five veterens.
Not one was talked into euthanasia, complaints were made, oversight is strong, the case worker dismissed, further guardrails added, and even had any of the veterens chased up on the MAID suggestion there were secondary layers in place that required interviews with other medical professionals.
This is basically clickbait; the law is changing how people die of terminal conditions, but only a tiny fraction of those are deaths that really trace to the new law.