The laws would allow terminally ill patients under specified conditions to end their lives with a doctor’s help.
On a brisk day at a restaurant outside Chicago, Deb Robertson sat with her teenage grandson to talk about her death.
She’ll probably miss his high school graduation. She declined the extended warranty on her car. Sometimes she wonders who will be at her funeral.
Those things don’t frighten her much. The 65-year-old didn’t cry when she learned two months ago that the cancerous tumors in her liver were spreading, portending a tormented death.
But later, she received a call. A bill moving through the Illinois Legislature to allow certain terminally ill patients to end their own lives with a doctor’s help had made progress.
Then she cried.
“Medical-aid in dying is not me choosing to die,” she says she told her 17-year-old grandson. “I am going to die. But it is my way of having a little bit more control over what it looks like in the end.”
That same conversation is happening beside hospital beds and around dinner tables across the country, as Americans who are nearing life’s end negotiate the terms with themselves, their families and, now, state lawmakers.
The flip side of our ability to prolong life more and more successfully is that we equip ourselves to extend suffering more and more unbearably.
Puritanical attitudes around the right to die will impact a vast majority of people in terrible ways that will largely get ignored as on the other end of it the victims have no voice and often the family is mourning and wants to move on or just doesn't even fully realize how terrible that end was.
But the doctors and medical staff...
The people I know well in those roles get upset when healthy patients take a turn for the worse and die when they had so much life before that. But by far the most upset I see them is when a family member of a patient decides because of beliefs to choose life prolonging options that are the equivalent of extended torture.
As our medical capabilities improve we really need to continually rethink just what it means to "do no harm."
My grandpa passed a year ago now, COPD. Likely honestly a heart attack after all the steroid meds for his lungs created heart problems including a heart aneurysm. When he was diagnosed way back in 2006 they told us he had 5 years if he was lucky, I didn't think he'd see me graduate HS. Well he had a lot more than 5 years in him but after about 2014 it was all shit. He started telling my grandma that he was ready to die, wanted to die, in 2018, he begged for it on hard nights. He tried to kill himself in 2021 and 2022. Both attempts left him strapped to a hospital bed "for his safety" as he struggled to breathe, he hadn't been able to reliably breathe laying on his back for several years by then but they didn't care as long as he lived.
I never felt anything but sympathy for him after those attempts. As someone with chronic lifelong asthma, I know how my end will go. I know what it's like to suffocate and struggle to breathe and in case anyone wonders, it fucking sucks. It's terrifying, it's slow, and you know it's coming. Panic is inevitable. He felt like that for nearly 10 fucking years. He told me once after it had gotten bad that he'd always felt so bad for me as a kid to have asthma but now he finally understood, he said I was so brave to have dealt with it for so long but in that moment I didn't feel brave I felt lucky. When I use my inhaler I can breathe again, for him it just made him struggle less. For a long time I wished he would die, my absolute favorite person on the planet, and I wanted them dead. It destroyed me mentally for years. When he finally did die it was horribly sad and also such a massive relief for everyone to know that at least he wasn't suffering anymore.
I say all this, partially to get it off my chest but mostly to say, if we are going to prolong life we need to also give people the option to check out. Life isn't life without quality of health, it's just suffering. Prolonging suffering makes use torturers, it's not a saving grace. If we have the capacity to do this for our pets then people deserve the same mercy.
Best thing to ask your doctor is what they would do in the same situation. They usually give you the bestg medical advice answer but their personal answer can be very different with what they have seen. Although some won't answer that question which is in itself a kind of answer.
We need a federal constitutional amendment of bodily autonomy. Abortions, tattoos, personal drug use, gender reassignment, plastic surgery, suicide, neuralink, etc. All the same issue: My body, fuck off. You can make it more complicated than that but it’s not.
It doesn’t matter whether you agree with face tattoos or not. Nobody is making you get one. It’s not your concern. An artist can choose not to give face tattoos, as a doctor can choose whether they want to give a vasectomy to a young child-free man. But the government should have no say about what a person is allowed to do or have done to their own body. The government can regulate to make it safer, but not disallow.
My mom said the same thing most of her life. When it came down to it, (bone cancer in her hip) she asked to be cremated, and her ashes scattered somewhere she'd never been. That's hard to do, she's been a lot of places.
Personally given how fucked my brain is from mental unwellness, I'd like my remains to be studied for whatever I can provide to the future of modern medicine.
The dying and dead are great people to fight for, you get to name ANYTHING your heart desires and claim you're doing it for them.
The dying can contradict you and you can just blame it on delirium "See! They're so crazy from illness that they think they don't need me, that PROVES that they need me!", and the dead will quietly let you exploit them for sympathy!
For the last 10 years I have been saying this should be legal. As long as you are determined to be of sound mind and not influenced by anyone, then let them make the decision. You will have many arguments against it (religion, could be cured unexpectedly) but it's the patient's decision.
The only argument would be if doctors and nurses should assist. This is a huge argument against state sponsored executions. Maybe a device that can safely and painlessly assist the patient could be a resolution.
So what you are saying is that we need some of those suicide booths that they had in Futarama.
You bring up a good point that it would be hard to find many doctors or medical professionals willing to focus their careers on euthanasia, as it goes against their oaths.
I'm in agreement. My concern is that this gives people in control the ability to feign choice. "They wanted this route" when in reality, it was murder.
Just need some decent protections in place for things like these.
I agree, it needs to be a very strict and regulated process. No power of attorney or anything like that. The person needs to undergo a psychiatric evaluation by two or three psychiatrist that specializes in suicidal thoughts or self harm. It needs to be a somewhat long process. But, I don't want it to be a multi year process either.
In Canada, 2 doctors have to agree that the patient is of sound mind, wants Medical Assistance in Dying, and their condition meets the minimum legal threshold. I think that system has been working fairly well.
All the jabronis in this thread with "being able to decide when you die is BAD actually" have clearly never had a loved one painfully and slowly waste away in a shitty hospital bed praying for death every day.
People should have the right to decide when they decide to end the game of life. They should be able to make this decision with a qualified medical professional, preferably one who specializes in end of life care.
It should also be noted that these decisions primarily affect people who are too poor to afford to travel with their loved ones to places that currently allow assisted suicide. If you're wealthy you are able to die how you want.
I work as an EEG tech. I see some really awful cases where there's no hope for a meaningful recovery. Lawmakers should be required to do a month of hospice/palliative care rounds before signing any legislation on right to die. There is so much misinformation and misunderstanding surrounding what that care entails. The patients I see often don't have the ability to make that choice and are left up on life preserving care for days to months at a time without any chance at meaningful recovery.
But what about the pharmaceutical company shareholders? Don't they get any say in how long we need their products? Yes one person might be in terrible pain for years, but at least twelve people will make a lot of money.
With how much they can charge for every individual comfort, suicide will never be more profitable than suffering. It it was, we wouldn't be having these debates.
I'm permanently disabled with a degenerative condition. Once I'm just surviving and not living, I'd love the freedom of a painless end. I watched grandparents suffer, I've watched them be kept alive through machines and drugs, I listened to my grandfather beg me for death.... you'll never change my mind that assisted suicide for the terminally ill is the ethical choice.
Eh, I used to be all in favor of Right To Death laws, but when Canada passed theirs they started pushing the disabled and impoverished onto it, not just the terminally ill. Which is basically ethnic cleansing.
So while I understand the Slippery Slope argument is not a good one, I'm going to need to see some common sense restrictions before I could support this as fervently as I did before