To think people should not use 'we put pets to sleep' as an argument to allow assisted dying?

The person themselves would be choosing to die, rather than someone putting them to sleep, like a pet. So it's not quite the same thing.

But the point people are making when they say this is... we do not allow pets to suffer. Sometimes human suffering cannot be alleviated in this way, because of the law.

My late first husband begged me to kill him, when he was dying of brain cancer. Mercifully, the doctors had a loose hand with the tranquilisers and painkillers after that. But I understand that doesn't work for everyone.

I would have held a pillow over his head rather than allow him to suffer, but I remember thinking it won't do the kids any good if their dad is dead and their mother in prison.

Human Rights are a social construct as is the current law. The fact that they exist in their current form doesn't mean that this is objectively the correct or even best set of laws or rights that humans could design. It's all entirely subjective.

In this context, we are in a circular debate. Yes the current UK law prohibits AD and allows you to euthanise pets or abort fetuses. Some countries have different laws around abortion and provide legal personhood from conception. It's all subjective and can be changed.

Article 2 ECHR has been legally tested and found to neither prohibit or give an automatic right for indidvial to access AD the same is true for Article 8 around autonomy. It is up to each individual country to balance these Articles, the associated rights and build in strong safeguards around AD. To be absolutely clear though ECHR does not ban AD. Again, this could all change so in itself doesn't prove AD is the right or wrong thing to implement.

Advocates of AD will engage with discussion around safeguards but they won't necessarily agree with you. This is about balance of risks and harms and your view on those risks and harms is often completely subjective. You may feel the risk of one person being coerced into a slightly earlier death is worth millions of people living longer than they want, often in immense discomfort and pain. I disagree. Death isn't the worst thing that can happen to someone. We need all the checks and protections necessary to prevent coerced AD but we have to accept this won't be removed entirely. It is still worth implementing in my opinion despite this. Obviously in suggesting this then I am accepting the personal risk that I myself could potentially avoid a long and unpleasant death through being able to use AD but could also be coerced when I'm in a vulnerable state. I would still rather take the risk and allow AD.

@PencilsInSpace

What would you ever be happy with or feel safe with because when I have discussed it with peole who are against I get the feeling they will be against for ever so no point in debating it in good "faith"

No one wants to “kill Granny” ffs!

Some people do. Maybe because they find it very distressing to watch her in pain, losing her dignity and independence, maybe because 'Granny wouldn't want her children's inheritance to be eaten up by care costs', or maybe Granny is simply an arsehole and they can't stand her.

It’s about MY right , OUR right to choose to die peacefully if you are terminally ill with less than 6 months to live.

ECtHR has ruled that this is not a right.

https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng#{%22itemid%22:[%22001-60448%22]}

If you are arguing for a change in the law to give you this right then you need to show how any new law would protect other people's already existing and well established human right to life.

research …
Overall, most people who accessed voluntary assisted dying had cancer (66.5% of cases). Neurological diseases were the second most common (8.1%), followed by heart (6.8%) and lung (4.9%) conditions.
( from Go gentle , research university of Ottawa)

What about the other 13.7%?

YANBU OP.

It comes down to human rights. All people have legal personhood and human rights. Animals don't and foetuses don't.

If a vet mistakenly euthanises your pet your legal remedy is in the small claims court.

If a doctor gives you an abortion when you didn't want one you probably have a claim for medical negligence or malpractice.

If the state kills you, or legally permits someone else to kill you, and you didn't want to die, then your human rights have been breached in the worst possible way.

Article 2 gives us all the right to life - the state must not kill us and must take appropriate measures to safeguard life. Article 2 is an absolute right which means that there can be no arguments about proportionality.

How many AS of people who didn't really want to die are acceptable in order that the majority can have a more dignified, less painful or distressing death?

The law says none. Every single accidental or coerced AS will be an unlawful state killing - a murder.

The recent bill failed because, narrow as it was (<6 months to live, self-administered, full capacity to consent at the time of death) there were still insufficient safeguards. A whole raft of sensible safeguarding amendments were voted down in a cavalier fashion by MPs who appeared to be swept away by emotive arguments such as, 'we don't allow our pets to be put through this suffering.'

AS advocates might be more persuasive if they actually engaged with the safeguarding issues rather than accusing those of us with serious concerns of wanting people to die in agony or claiming we have secret religious agendas.

I think multiple applications of assisted dying get combined and it's not a straightforward debate or comparison to pets.

I, every day of the week, would prefer to die on a Monday surrounded by family and loved ones as peacefully as possible rather than in pain and alone on the Wednesday. It took my nan a week to die from cancer, a week of lying in bed not really conscious, no hope of surviving, in pain and had lost all dignity. She was at home and surrounded by love ones but I do feel that she didn't need to have lived those last few days and when pets have been in that situation we have made the decision to step in and end the pain and suffering before nature takes it's course.

We have also had pets put to sleep because of cancer with limited treatment options and I think this is where it falls down. Our pet would have struggled with the operation and life afterwards as a consequence and we couldn't have explained to them about what and why we had done it and potentially going down chemotherapy route too. By contrast when my PIL was diagnosed with a cancer with limited treatment options they embraced all of the options available and as it happened. One treatment made enough of a difference which meant a second treatment was an option and in that time and third experimental option became available. In a year they went from large inoperable tumour to remission. They are now 5 years in remission. I think with human health it's evolving so much I would be hesitant to introduce any rules that potentially is a significant shortening of life.

You've completely misunderstood me.

I'm talking about why the pet euthanasia analogy doesn't work (as the equivalent to putting down your pet would be 'putting down' a family member), not my opinions on assisted suicide, so I'm afraid your anger is misplaced.

In fact, I even said "I think it's possible for people to argue in favour of assisted suicide without bringing in the very flawed comparison of animals being euthanised."

No need for apology. You’ve clearly articulated how I feel and why I’m so bloody angry.

This misconception is why the bill for assisted dying has failed. No one wants to “kill Granny” ffs! It’s about MY right , OUR right to choose to die peacefully if you are terminally ill with less than 6 months to live. If you ‘sign up’ for the process it doesn’t mean you have to follow through.
It’s a personal safety net if you’re in unbearable pain not helped by medication, or living / dying from a neurological disease where you stop being able to swallow and are choking on your own saliva.

research …
Overall, most people who accessed voluntary assisted dying had cancer (66.5% of cases). Neurological diseases were the second most common (8.1%), followed by heart (6.8%) and lung (4.9%) conditions.
( from Go gentle , research university of Ottawa)

I want to have a choice how I die under these circumstances.

apologies but I feel very passionate about this .

You haven't just been taking about legal personhood at all. You have strayed into all kinds of different philosophical and scientific arguments. Claiming fetuses are as alive as cancer, that a fetus hasn't had a life so has no value etc.

Legal personhood is different. Many countries grant a fetus legal personhood and many dong (including the UK). It doesn't really mean much other than that's where the law sits at the moment. It can change and fetuses could be afforded legal personhood.

People are sadly murdered all the time - I don’t think getting someone to feign consent to assisted dying and then convincing medical professionals they want to do it and then they perhaps have to administer the lethal dose themselves is the most expedient way of murdering someone. People are murdered with knives and cars and drugs and bare hands and we don’t or can’t ban everything which could be used to murder someone.

I find it highly more likely you would find yourself with a terminal disease which makes your end of life a misery for yourself and your family than in a situation where you have been manipulated into signing your life away.

I can’t say about the slippery slope because as pp very eloquently pointed out - there are a lot of competing priorities. Say I’m 80 and I have dementia and £100k - now as a younger person I believe it would be a far better use of my end of life and resources for me to die at my choice and for my family to enjoy my legacy than to spend it on a care home for me when I don’t know who I am or what is going on. I can see some posters would find that horrifying and an example of killing granny to get the inheritance, but to me it’s the circle of life.

No 'desperation', I'm just talking about legal personhood.

I think this is a great example of cognitive dissonance. You have an incredible desperation to prove that a fetus isn't a life and is without value.

If it was all about how much life you have had then presumably a freshly born baby hasn't had a meaningful life either so can't be considered a person? A young person has had less of a life than an older person so have less value?

Moral personhood is inherently subjective. Many believe that an unborn baby can have personhood. You putting your personal views in bold doesn't make them objectively true.

I didn't suggest it's the pregnant woman that's relevant. I think for the purposes of AD it's the fetus and the idea that a life can be ended due to coercion or for practical reasons. We as a society accept this because the greater good of allowing abortion is deemed to be more important. People seem more reluctant to accept this trade off for older people who can actually consent to AD themselves and you could impose strict tests for informed consent. I think this is completely incongruent.

There is no comparison berween losing a human and losing a pet. The only argument is that we should at least give humans the same kindness as we do with animals.

The examples use the laws of physics, nothing to do with what we are talking about.

False certainty at its finest. The specific legislation that the UK would use for AD hasn't even been agreed on yet. In this context, it's impossible to insist that there are proven consequences. We also have lots of examples of where legislation implemented in different countries has achieved completely different outcomes despite it ostensibly legalising or decriminalising the same thing. The devil is in the detail.

The analogies you use are also completely inappropriate in this context.

By definition, an elderly person has 'had a life', or they wouldn't have got to old age. A foetus has quite literally never 'had a life', as it hasn't been born – and also it doesn't have personhood until it is born.

I think you trying to compare a foetus – which most likely isn't even viable – to an adult human, is what's dangerous territory here.

An undeveloped, unthinking foetus that is aborted by the pregnant woman can't be compared to a full grown adult choosing to die. As you yourself say, it's the pregnant woman who is the relevant person here, not the foetus (who literally isn't a person).

Anyway, this is well off topic, and I'm not interested in debating with someone who has suspiciously anti-abortion takes.

You have absolutely no evidence that what you assume will happen with assisted dying will indeed happen.

Yes you can know a fact in advance. It’s called a proven consequence.
For example, if you don’t pay the rent, it is a fact you will be evicted.
If you hit someone with your car at 50mph, it is a fact you will kill then.
If you light a stick of dynamite and throw it in a pond, it is a fact you will get loads of dead fish

We know it will happen because it has happened elsewhere under the same conditions. Just like we know that winter is coming in advance of it coming.

@KindlySurfiingPlatypus
The reason that an acceptable legislation keeps failing is because these competing priorities are irreconcilable. There is a huge spectrum (thinking of a colour-wheel spectrum with different axes of magnitude of pain, level of conscious awareness, capacity to consent, feasibility of palliative relief and imminence of death) of scenarios where at least some people think AD might be appropriate but everyone wants to draw the boundaries differently and across 90% of that spectrum there are passionate individuals on both sides fighting for and against that part of the spectrum either being included or specifically and irrevocably excluded. Those opposing views will never be resolved and it is the people in the centre of the spectrum (high magnitude of pain, high level of conscious awareness, high capacity to consent, impossibility of palliative relief and certainty of death within weeks or months of unendurable suffering) who are the victims of that.

well said, great examples too.

It isn’t unverified as we know for a fact that a certain number of people will be murdered by coercion if AD becomes legal

Do you actually know what a fact is?

You cannot know it in advance!

Given every other country or state with legalised AD has had abuses that led to murder, it’s a bit more than a supposition.

It isn’t unverified as we know for a fact that a certain number of people will be murdered by coercion if AD becomes legal. It is unquantified because we don’t know how many. I suppose the balance of risk and harm for you depends on how many people end up murdered? So it must be quantified for you.

Yes you have compared it to abortion and commented on being coerced into or out of abortion, which while serious, do not compare to being coerced into your own death. No one dies in an abortion.

We actually just passed laws criminalising the sort of domestic violence and cyber-bullying that has coerced people into suicide. Once a legal avenue is available these murders will go under the legal veneer of AD.

AD will expand to include mental and neurological illnesses. Around 10yrs post legalisation, we will have the same threshold as Netherlands, Canada, etc every country has gone down that road. The only threshold is unbearable suffering either as stated by the person seeking AD or in the opinion of a family member/carer.

I think the problem with the creation of a viable assisted dying bill that would pass through our legislature is that there are several different "lobbies" who aren't all opposed to the the fundamental principle but whose competing priorities will mean that it keeps failing.

The most desperate need for AD to be legalised are people like @PurpleThistle7's friend (yesterday 07:10) - fully aware of their pain and coming plight, taking weeks to die in torment when palliative care is incompetent to reduce their pain to a tolerable level.

However the safeguards that are needed to ensure that the action is restricted to people in this category comes up against the priorities of various other lobby groups. @XelaM (Yesterday 6:10) says "what is the point in keeping someone alive with severe dementia" but dementia is not a fatal disease and the patient themselves isn't suffering, they are often quite happy in a dreamworld where they have forgotten all the stresses of life, it is their families and carers who suffer most. Yes there are a few exceptions where the brain deterioration instead creates a nightmare world and the patient does suffer then, but every case is different. Someone with dementia clearly cannot understand and cannot consent so there is fierce resistance from people who want dementia to be included to stop any safeguards about understanding, consent and the condition being expected to be fatal. That then triggers the disability activists who quite rightly see that the same framework that would make it possible for a dementia patient to be included would also by definition create a carte blanche for eugenic clensing of a huge range of genetic conditions and disabilities.

Every safeguard that prevents an unscrupulous family from putting emotional pressure on granny to choose a swift death in order to preserve their inheritance is opposed by those who know of equally tragic scenarios where the person suffering and in pain could not meet the conditions that are there to protect that granny.

The reason that an acceptable legislation keeps failing is because these competing priorities are irreconcilable. There is a huge spectrum (thinking of a colour-wheel spectrum with different axes of magnitude of pain, level of conscious awareness, capacity to consent, feasibility of palliative relief and imminence of death) of scenarios where at least some people think AD might be appropriate but everyone wants to draw the boundaries differently and across 90% of that spectrum there are passionate individuals on both sides fighting for and against that part of the spectrum either being included or specifically and irrevocably excluded. Those opposing views will never be resolved and it is the people in the centre of the spectrum (high magnitude of pain, high level of conscious awareness, high capacity to consent, impossibility of palliative relief and certainty of death within weeks or months of unendurable suffering) who are the victims of that.

You said it much better!