Maine becomes 8th state to legalize assisted suicide for the terminally ill

[MasterJedi]

How is this good news??

People should not be allowed to choose to end their life??

Plus, they could possibly be tricked into doing this, bad idea!

People don't need the government to tell them whether they can end their own life.  You can never outlaw suicide, anyway.  The law passed in Maine allows people, who are already dying, to die with dignity.

It's not death with dignity when it's murder disguised as mercy so greedy survivors can get Grandma's inheritance earlier.

Grandma's already dying.  That is what the bill is intended for - terminally ill patients.  In what way does Grandma benefit from suffering needlessly for six months?

I just really feel uncomfortable with there being some sort of OBLIGATION to life.

What does "terminally ill" mean?

At a certain level, we're all dying.  There are people who have cancer that will die from it whose death may not happen for years, and who may have a decent amount of productive living in between that point.

Rebecca VanWormer, the woman who pushed for this bill whose breast cancer spread to her bones, could probably answer that question for you.  You know damn well there's a difference between prostate cancer, which may not kill a man for decades, and something as painful and debilitating as terminal cancer.

Even for you, this is an extremely disingenuous argument.

I'm not unmindful of this.  My own mother died of cancer in the 1990s.  It was a cancer that lasted a number of years, involved pain in both the disease and the treatment, and my mother was very much pro-assisted suicide.  It was during the time when Dr. Jack Kevorkian was being tried for his assisted suicides.  Someone asked my mother what she thought about him.  Her eyes lit up and she said, happily:  "Oh, he's the greatest!".

I'm not questioning the motives of this bill's sponsors.  I do fear that such a thing has the potential for horrific abuse.  And the definition of "terminally ill" has the potential to be a movable legal goalpost that would, indeed, legalize murder in some cases. 

That's where I'm coming from on this.

Is there any evidence of abuse in the seven other states where physician-assisted suicide is legal?  In Oregon, a patient can only end their life through assisted suicide if they have six months or less to live.  I don't think it matters to a selfish person whether their relative has six months or six days.  Both the patient and the doctor have to consent, so I don't see how it can really be murder.  A doctor cannot administer the drugs to a man whose prostate cancer hasn't metastasized.

I am glad you're keeping an open mind on this.

I'm opposed to the idea on religious grounds.  I do believe that most of its advocates, and, indeed, most of its utilizers are fully informed.  But I never sell short the potential for abuse in something like this.

So you're ok with Sharia Law and the like in Islamic countries because it's done for "religious grounds"? If you say no, you invalidate your own want of laws for your own religious reasons even though not everyone is the same religion as you here...

[Badger]

This is good. Better to let people go out on their own terms rather than needlessly suffer for six months. Look what happened Robin Williams. He knew he wasn’t coming back and hanged himself. Better to be able to do it a controlled medical setting rather than risk something going wrong.

Would this cover people with dementia though? You can live a long time with that.

The law requires someone to be certified by multiple positions as being of sound mind. Clearly dementia sufferers could not make this decision.

I suppose theoretically if want were to be given a prognosis of rapidly advancing Alzheimer's or the like, I'm not sure if one could qualify under the statute. Personally, (save the obvious jokes, please), if I knew my brain was deteriorating turn into a semi-sentient lump for the next several years to a decade or more, I might very well want to end things. I wouldn't want my family to be economically taxed how to keep me alive were standard of life is literally not worth living in my view.