Hey, if you’re old and sick and hurting and tired of living, and would rather find a way to accelerate your departure from this planet, that is your business. So maybe you stop taking the countless pills various doctors prescribe and get a stiff drink or three instead. Maybe you take up heavy smoking again. Maybe you refuse treatment and only accept pain-killers (or pain-numbers). If the choice is between being dependent on machines or dying, many of us would choose to go. That’s a choice only you and the people who love you can make.
This is what I call your right to die by refusing treatment, getting disconnected from life support, or simply by living extremely dangerously. All adults have it, and provided your loved ones (and ideally your lawyer as well) are made aware of your preferences, you should be able to get your wish, even if you are not in possession of your faculties. I don’t believe this author has any reason to be worried about the current legal framework surrounding end-of-life issues. He currently has the right to choose not to be kept “alive well past what nature had intended”. And given how stretched medical resources are in this country, I’m willing to bet he won’t run into very strong protests on the part of his doctors should he find himself in such a situation.
Having the right to refuse treatment and die more or less your own way is not the same as instituting state-sanctioned euthanasia. It would help if people didn’t mix up the two so often.
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When prisoners are executed authorities are careful to select the least painful way to ease the person from this world.
I think we should allow patients who are suffering to be afforded the same assistance.
Of course we would have to put in place a system of procedures to make sure that the patient is really suffering, that there is no medical option, and that the patient is making the request freely.
I know that in war soldiers sometimes end the lives of their comrades who have been severely wounded in order to ease their suffering.
I think I would like that option for myself when the “time” comes.
I may not choose to die that way…but I’d like the option to choose.