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They is currently an 8 month old baby in the UK with a mitochondrial disease which is almost definitely terminal. The babies name is Indi: https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/italy-grants-citizenship-terminally-ill-british-baby-after-104666139
A UK judge has ordered that that the baby be killed. Her parents have protested this, saying that they don’t think the government should kill their baby.
The Catholics have said: give us the baby and we will put the baby in our pediatric Vatican hospital, and the Italian government has said they would cover the medical bills. The Italian government has also said that the family can have Italian citizenship.
The UK has said no, you can’t leave, you need to keep the baby here so we can kill it.
I know this sounds hyperbolic, but…I don’t think it is. Read the article.
Absolutely deranged behavior.I understand that in socialized medicine countries there is some calculation about how much life support will cost, and famously in Canada sometimes this means the government just tries to get you to kill yourself, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. The Catholics are being pretty Catholic about this and just trying to save the baby. The UK government won’t let them and insists that they should just kill her.
Insanity.This is just a weird mind worm that Catholics have. They’ve lost control of society, of culture, Francis is on the verge of allowing gay marriage, Vatican 2 has been in place for 60 years, divorce is commonplace, but one brain-dead infant needs to be pumped full of drugs and kept alive as a vegetable for the longest possible time. Maximizing the number of deformed, disabled, unwanted, underclass or critically sick babies appears - in the 21st century perhaps along with supporting large scale immigration - to be the guiding principle of the Catholic Church.
This isn’t even opposition to euthanasia, because as others have suggested, she wouldn’t survive for any period naturally (which is the traditional threshold), but rather must be artificially kept alive in what amounts to a gruesome and morbid Frankenstein-esque medical experiment.
I will respect Catholic trads when they actually fight for for something that might improve civilization in a material way for people currently alive and their healthy descendants instead of kvetching endlessly about irrelevancies. Until then, for God’s sake if for nobody else’s, they ought to let this deeply unfortunate child rest in peace.
Canada already proved euthanasia is a slippery slope, so I don't buy all the talk about how this isn't an important issue.
All the misery of modernity was brought upon us by people obsessed with material improvement, so I'm happy respecting Catholics now.
I don’t have any issue with Canada’s euthanasia system, and the only flaw people seem to note is that they get upset when someone they don’t think should choose to kill themselves does so. But again, depressives, people dealing with extreme loneliness etc have always killed themselves at disproportionate rates, I don’t consider it morally abhorrent to ease their pain more painlessly.
That seems like a gross over-reaction to me, as I've had reason to say already today, insulin is cheap enough that the beleaguered and impoverished Indian government gives it away for free, and we're no NHS or Canadian equivalent.
There is no country in the world that can afford truly unlimited healthcare for all of its citizens, because that necessarily entails spending tens of millions or more on the more intractable cases, or even an indefinite sum if you include exploratory therapies.
I personally support the right of anyone to commit suicide for just about any reason, though I think they should be restrained if it's because of an acute mental or physical illness where we can reasonably expect their future self to desist and be thankful we saved them. I don't succumb to the usual temptation of terming any desire to end your life as a mental illness in of itself, if someone thinks I'm ruling out 100% of people by that heuristic. I recognize plenty of philosophical or personal reasons to prefer non-existence, including more prosaic ones such as terminal or incurable chronic illness that ruins QOL. I'd normally exhort people who think that way to hang on for just a few more years till the Singularity, but my timetable for the same is only a modestly informed guess and I can't demand anyone adhere to it.
The problem is that very, very many people are flaky and short-sighted. Death is a one way trip, with no ability to undo a mistake. Euthanasia always gets sold based on this ideal image of a well-thought out, persistent desire. In reality, the advocates seem to slippery slope themselves into supporting euthanasia for cases that are light years from the ideal.
For example, an increasingly common scenario in The Netherlands is that someone with dementia in the family writes a euthanasia declaration where they state that they want euthanasia when they get dementia. The problem with dementia is that usually, people don't yet want to die as long as they are still reasonably rational. So euthanasia only becomes an option once they are so demented that they are effectively unable to make rational statements. The horror show that family members experience and which results them into making a euthanasia declaration beforehand, is also not necessarily what the patients feel themselves, once the time comes. We have about as much sense of whether a person with severe dementia experiences enough happy moments to want to keep living, as we do for a cat. People with dementia appear to lose the ability to form a long term happiness level anyway and experience emotions much more in the moment. How can we then judge if the good outweighs the bad?
What happens in practice is that the doctor tries to extract some proof for a persistent death wish, from a person with no ability to reason rationally. In the absence of solid evidence, the risk is enormous that the doctor will interpret their own feelings, or the feelings of the family, as being the feeling of the patient, intentionally or unknowingly.
For example, in one case, a patient would declare that it was too early for euthanasia on some days, but would say that she didn't want to live a moment longer on other days. In the face of this lack of clarity, the euthanasia doctor based her decision on statements by the family and the GP of the patient. Then the patient was killed by secretly putting a sedative in her coffee, followed by a lethal injection while she was sleeping. At no point was the patient even told that she would be killed, so there was no ability for her to object.
A Dutch political party is pushing for euthanasia with no medical grounds (either mental or physical illness is currently necessary) for those that have a 'completed life,' which I consider to be a manipulative propaganda word, which implicitly writes off people who do not contribute a lot to society, as it implies that once you get to a certain stage in life, there is nothing left for you to live for (after all, your life is completed). Research into a desire for euthanasia by the Dutch elderly with a death wish found that:
I personally see a lot of red flags in the data, in particular the extent to which the desire to die is flaky and often seems rather weak. Do we really want to kill people who are edge cases and who may just be going through a bad period? Also, a lot of factors that people name as reasons for wanting to die seem like they could potentially be fixed. Excessive worrying might be improved through mental health care or altering people's news diet. Loneliness seems highly influenced by how we organize modern society and was much less in the past. Shouldn't we try to fix society instead of killing the people who are unhappy because of societal pathologies? Similarly, a feeling of being a burden to others seems heavily influenced by modern beliefs, where people are valued on what they can do, versus beliefs of the past where the idea of inherent human value was more important. That the group with a desire to die is disproportionally poor, urban and single, suggests a strong societal component is at play.
Funny you should say this, since about an hour back, I was woken from a much needed nap by a panicked nurse in order to attend to a cancer patient, and arrived to see her grossly decompensating, with particular issues that made most of the initial resuscitation measures I'm in a position to provide useless.
I lost a bit of hair over how I was supposed to treat her, but was incredibly relieved to discover that, despite the nurses losing their shit, she was a palliative patient who had just had her End of Life and DNR forms filled by her family after the consultant in charge had informed them that all hope was lost as the brain mets gradually ate away at whatever made her human.
No amount of medical care any ICU could provide would save her or make her whole, at most we could prolong the process by keeping a living corpse hooked up to a ventilator at ruinous cost and taking space better served with the living. That calmed me down, even if this was the first time I had to deal with a dying patient entirely alone with nobody to back me up, I've read the guidelines, I know the drugs, and after some faffing around because apparently the oncology ward of the fanciest hospital in my part of the country didn't have syringe drivers capable of providing subcutaneous meds (utterly ridiculous, but they almost certainly have them in the ICU, but she was categorically forbidden from being transferred there), I managed to figure out a protocol that would ease the pain, or at least any residual discomfort someone who hadn't been conscious for days and never would be again might feel till her lungs filled with fluid and her heart became fitful and her ribs were no longer a cage for her soul.
So there you have it, I'm complicit in killing someone today, and I think it was a good decision, or at least the least bad of the options at hand. That's euthanasia for you, the modal case, representative of the end of suffering for millions.
It still hurt, at least for me, you'd think that working in an Onco ward would dissipate delusions that you can make sure your patients always walk out hale and hearty, but I did enter the profession because I'm proud to heal people. If that's not possible, may they pass gently into the good night, rage is more appropriate for the living who must deal with the banal, apathetic cruelty of an unfeeling world.
Speaking very broadly, since practised and legal norms vary so grossly, euthanasia for the atypical cases where they're "physically" healthy involve lengthy periods of consultation and various opportunities to back out, though I think Canada has a more streamlined process, for better or worse.
So it's typically the case that multiple earnest medical professionals and social workers will repeatedly inquire as to the continued choice of the person to continue on the course. Even then, in my opinion, if someone who doesn't have a lack of capacity earnestly tells me they want to die, I wish to do my best to accommodate them promptly, even if I won't literally pull out a gun the moment they say so. This decision is obviously dependent on factors like acute pain or a severe bout of acute depression, where I can reasonably expect that treating them or will reasonably make the patient desist from their demands, but there's nobody who just kills people who have acute pain that I'm aware of, usually it's chronic and refractory to treatment.
People make plenty of decisions that they might vacillate on before death, the act of dying isn't special in that regard even if I agree it's rather terminal. They might want to adjust their will as they succumb to dementia and lose capacity to do so, they might want to feel the arms of a lover estranged for decades, it's the very lucky few who get to leave with no regrets at all.
Should their be due process and a period of waitful watching? I would certainly endorse that, but if someone over a span of weeks, months or even years keeps asking to die, I'm going to live and let die. That's how I address:
As for-
I can only chuckle ruefully at the idea that the majority of people who opt for euthanasia haven't had "mental health care" and oodles of it. They're usually refractory to treatment in the form of drugs, therapy and even physical interventions like ECT. They've failed to work.
I doubt the average neurotic woman with Trump Derangement Syndrome or even those who become anti-natalists or anti-humanists are lining up to kill themselves.
That's a false dichotomy in my eyes. We can do both, and should do both.
All associated with severe unhappiness and poor life outcomes and for good reason. Being poor, "urban" and single against your wishes sucks.
If you have a means of turning such people into rich, rural and married individuals, then I'm willing to hear it, but I doubt anyone does short of waiting for the world to get much wealthier.
But in my society we are not actually doing both. At least some of the issues are caused by choices that people are doubling down on, if anything. Loneliness is now only on the agenda because it is becoming such a huge issue, but no one is undoing the cultural and political changes that caused it, or coming up with any real, new solutions. Unless you count euthanasia as a solution.
What I see is a pathological unwillingness to even face facts and instead, everything gets viewed from extremely dogmatic viewpoints, like the idea that all problems will be solved if we achieve things like inclusivity, gender equality, racial equality, etc; despite a completely lack of a rational analysis of what we would actually need to achieve such things; let alone an honest analysis of the up- and downsides of the policies being implemented (politically, culturally, etc).
In the face of such irrationality, 'solving' issues by getting rid of the evidence as much as possible by killing the victims of modern culture and modern policies, seems like a logical outcome that will lessen the pressure to recognize or fix the pathologies of modernity.
And yet people of modest means seemed to have an easier time in the past of actually getting the main things that most people want, a house, a partner, children and a decent level of respect (which may have just been 'successful while knowing your place,' but that is a lot better than just a bare 'loser'). And they were poorer than today, so this idea that wealth can fix a broken society seems false, as things have become increasingly broken despite increased wealth.
In my country even the progressives have woken up to the reality that people increasingly see lower education as a path to failure. Of course, their solution is foolish, to rename it to 'practical education,' due to their post-modern belief that words create, rather than reflect reality.
And rural living is itself failing as well. Rural women get convinced that they need to find a leftist yuppie and be part of city life, so they leave for the city, leaving a large gender imbalance, forcing men to leave as well and to become yuppies, but those men often fail, since the official messaging is sabotaging. So many boys don't see this as a path to success. Again, the progressives seem to have finally woken up to this too, but of course their answer is to vilify and censor people like Andrew Tate, rather than fix their own messaging or even just giving a shit about boys/men.
And it is not just sabotaging for men, but also for women, many of whom now seek out parasocial, dysfunctional substitutes for real friends and a real partner, for instance by streaming (although men do that too).
And of course, globalist culture stimulates breaking physical bonds with family and the friends you grow up with.
I could go on, but I think you get the point that I disagree very strongly with sentiments like 'of course the poors/urbans be sad' or with ignoring that society has a big influence on how successful people are at finding and maintaining relationships (romantic, but also friendships and family relationships). I see your beliefs as part of the pathological culture that refuses to learn from the cultures of the past and pretends that its dysfunctions and problems are inevitable.
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