from Hacker News

Spain passes law allowing euthanasia

by mpsq on 3/19/21, 9:50 AM with 118 comments

  • by mtmail on 3/19/21, 10:01 AM

  • by simonswords82 on 3/19/21, 2:10 PM

    Blows my mind that we will give animals the right to a humane end of life and yet here I am sat in a "civilised" country (UK) and it's illegal to give humans that same out.

    I watched my Dad die of cancer - and for the last week it was simply inhumane that we didn't let him die sooner through a cocktail of drugs. Others who have watched their loved ones die slow painful deaths will broadly agree.

    Besides, people can still kill themselves regardless of laws. They can take their own lives in various gruesome ways. They can also fly to a euthanasia centre like Dignitas.

    LAws were supposed to protect people from each other, not from ourselves.

    It's about time all governments reconsidered their laws on euthanasia.

  • by bengale on 3/19/21, 2:57 PM

    Theres a lot of talk about terminal illnesses and people dying in pain, but my Grandad would most certainly choose to die with dignity now and he isn't in a situation like that at all.

    He talks about it a lot, he's had a good life and now he's essentially decrepit. He can't really hear anything anymore so conversations are frustrating, he has no balance so can't really go far, he gets tired even just being taken for a drive, he gets sore sitting in front of the TV all day, he gains weight because he's not moving so he has to be careful about anything he eats. he has a type of dementia that thankfully hasnt stripped who he is, but has removed his ability to complete complex tasks or really anything more than a few steps. So now he can't use a laptop anymore, he can't login to any of his banking, he can't text or really use a mobile phone at all.

    When he asks me what the point is I have no answer for him, he's lucky in many ways as he's got enough money to live in a comfortable flat, and cover all of his bills, etc. But he's not happy, and is sitting in that chair waiting, many times wishing, to die. He essentially played the role of my father when I was growing up, I used to utterly dread the day he passed, but now I can't help thinking I'll feel relief for him more than anything.

    I see no reason why we shouldn't be able to gather the family, take him to place where we can all say our goodbyes and let him go on his own terms, with dignity.

  • by aseerdbnarng on 3/19/21, 12:56 PM

    My brother in-law works for the NHS. In every hospital and in every year, he's seen countless cases of families dropping their elderly relatives off for no reason other than to go off on holiday. The chance this law wont be used maliciously is zero.

  • by pilom on 3/19/21, 2:40 PM

    The reductum ad absurdum argument for assisted suicide had been decent at converting many skeptics I've talked to:

    There once was a man who fought in Vietnam who was burned by napalm. He had 2nd and 3rd degree burns over almost his entire body, lost both arms, both legs, eyes, ears and most of his mouth. And yet he survived for weeks in agony, a literal hell on earth, typing out "kill me" in morse code with his head.

    Surely, this person should be allowed to end his life as even people of faith should see this as a worse state than hell.

    Therefore if this person should be allowed, then we just need to determine where the line is, not if it should be legal or not.

  • by motohagiography on 3/19/21, 3:48 PM

    Even as someone who believes people have the freedom to take their own lives and can morally request help to do so to end suffering, a dimension to this is modern treatments for terminal illnesses can keep you alive long enough to suffer so much that someone else has to make the active decision to end it. That is to say, medically assisted dying often merely solves a problem that medicine and treatment itself created.

    While I respect the principle of religious objections to assisted dying, if they don't extend to assisted life extension as well, I can't assign them much weight. There should be some serendipity to dying, and the religious objection seems to be about people making a decision that should be left to the sacred.

    To compensate for this decision problem and the risks of non-consensual assisted suicide by a variety of legalistic players, a better solution could be to just liberalize rules on opioid pain killers for terminal pain management and improve self administration technology and management of the drugs.

  • by TrackerFF on 3/19/21, 2:43 PM

    Good. Watched the father of my friend suffer late-stage through end-stage COPD, which lasted around 4 years.

    The last year, he was confined to his bed, and needed 24/7 care to do pretty much anything. He simply could not move any distance himself, without passing out. Nor could he sleep, without feeling like drowning. As you can imagine, his life quality was inhumanely low.

    Both him, and his son/my friend, agreed that there should have been some easier way out. "Luckily" he went out with a heart-attack, just as things started to get very bad.

    It's a difficult topic. On one side, you have religious people with very negative views, and on the other side, you have medical professionals whos oath contradicts the action of assisted suicide.

  • by danielovichdk on 3/19/21, 1:24 PM

    I dont want to live if it hurts too much. I am pretty clear on death and it is simply foolish not to think pretty hard on how it is a big part of life.

    If you wish to die because you are in such a pain, no problem.

  • by dempseye on 3/19/21, 2:29 PM

    Euthanasia happens all the time already in countries where it is illegal. It just happens at the end of life, and it is ethically justified as a secondary effect of supplying necessary pain relief.

    But everybody knows that people are hurried along using a legal and ethical sleight of hand.

  • by coldtea on 3/19/21, 12:51 PM

    That's a first step, under the pretext of dignity.

    Next step: encouraging it. Why pay all those old-ish patients treatment, pensions, or end-of-life care? Encourage the poor to off themselves with "dignity".

    Coming soon to a modern state near you...

  • by wrongdonf on 3/19/21, 4:11 PM

    The human brain does not process all things equally. It does not take the chain of integrations, leading from input of data to output of some opinion or intuition, as far as it might unless it sees fit, regardless of what you want. I had thought about this right-to-die issue many times. But in the first few seconds of being in the position of needing to die, an new understanding washed over me, new angles and insights, and a decade of contemplation was overturned. When the need to die is not emotional but totally objective, one assesses his options rationally and weighs the different methods against each other in a pragmatic way. As I looked at each path I might take, new details filled in that I had never thought of before. Each method of suicide is different, has a different risk of going wrong, a different outcome in the case of going wrong. And each is different for the burden left to those who have to clean up. But what difference does any of it make if you are ultimately going to die? When you enter into this situation you are playing a game where becoming a lifelong vegetable is a possibility — this is a nightmare scenario. When its you, it becomes real to you and you understand that vegetables can be lucid, have the capacity for immense suffering and are kept alive against their will possibly for decades. Many people read that and arrogantly say “well if I just shoot myself in the head then that’s not a problem.” But did that person know that shooting yourself in the temple might only destroy the part of the brain responsible for executive function, rendering you a vegetable? The proper way is to shoot yourself with the barrel against the back of the mouth so that the brain stem is destroyed and there is no possibility of living. That is the terrifying realization that comes to you when it’s your turn: this is like anything else, it’s a practical undertaking where there are details and things to go wrong and the only way to ensure a good result is to do it many times or be in the hands of an expert, neither of which are on the table. It’s a lot of stress.

    The ultimate goal is to avoid suffering, and that includes being comfortable during a successful attempt, not just avoiding the I-have-no-mouth of being a vegetable. When it’s your turn, you all of a sudden realize that the brain remains active during and after the process of dying. And sure enough you will find the inconvenient fact buried: nobody is really dead until they are thoroughly dead. The idea of binary life/death only proliferated because for most of history science wasn’t around to illuminate the issue. You realize that people who are clinically dead are the most powerless, voiceless group of people in history and that their needs have been completely hidden or ignored even in the age of modern medicine, and that this weird and unfortunate situation has intersected with your story now and has completely fucked you over. You are tasked with cobbling together some kind of system that not only intelligently avoids the vegetable outcome, not only confronts the subtleties of what it really means to die and avoiding whatever strange things happen in the space between, but also performs flawlessly with an extremely low probability of failure. Because when it’s your skin that’s what you’ll want.

    And of course this is the perfect situation for some kind of solution to have been developed. We often benefit from things that were developed over hundreds of years of trial and error. To realize you are at the bottom rung of that process is unpleasant. And you won’t until it becomes real to you.

    The number of people who have a rational need for death, beyond and kind of doubt, is small at any given moment. It’s a minority group. Easy to sweep under the rug especially when the average person is not imaginative or able to think empathetically or creatively. Not able to understand until it’s them. I guess I’m guilty of that!

  • by Darmody on 3/19/21, 1:03 PM

    The left has been fighting for this over the last years. They finally managed to pass their law of death. Suicide on demand.

    Al this while palliative care is not given to those who need it. Only 40% of them do receive some kind of treatment to relieve their pain. Guess what the other 60% will think about now...

  • by throwaway8581 on 3/19/21, 1:25 PM

    Very sad to see a Catholic country go down this path. All human life has dignity, and it is always wrong to end your own life.