Ok Boomers and euthenasia

[Backinthecloset123]

I'm in NZ where a bill has just been passed to have a referendum on euthinasia/assisted dying. This will take place next year.

I have always been a firm advocate....until now. As one of the last baby boomers I'm aware that our numbers are starting to peak in elder care and resources, and will continue to peak for quite a few years.

My issue is, will euthenasia be embraced by the woke in a similar way that gender/queer/trans issues have?

Will, or could, many non boomers think of us boomers the same way they think of te*fs? (non rationally). Could it get out of hand as trans ideology has?

I'm blown away how quickly queer Theory entailed rationality went out the window, and can see the same possibly happening in other areas including assisted dying.

Strange times.

We can give euthenasia to an old dog who is suffering with no quality of life and no hope of getting better. So why can't we do the same for people we care about?

Dogs also get put down because their behaviour is difficult to manage, because their chronic illnesses are expensive to treat and because there is no one available to look after them.

I certainly wouldn’t want those scenarios for humans (and I don’t really want them for dogs, either).

I think if I was offered a quick way out, I'd take it.

Of course we older people will be expected to give up our lives for the benefit of younger people. Of course. I think we'll accept it. And yes, there will be hostility towards us. There already is. You can read it every day on MN.

This world is fucked up. We are expected to swallow wholesale any obviously ridiculous lie we're told. We'll be easily convinced we should die.

If I voted yes I’d be worried about some possible ramifications

In some circumstances the end of life is very difficult and distressing

Finding it hard to know what I’d do

In my professional experience there are very large amount of elderly people who are just ready to go, and will say as such, over and over again. I saw a patient in primary care with a very sore infected leg the other day, was just taking her bloods and redressing it and she said “do you have to do all of this, can’t they just let me go”.

There’s always those patients who will gently tell you “I’ve had enough now”, “I’ve lived my life”.

And for those with enduring mental health problems, unlikely to every get better or return to the quality of life and enjoyment that they’re missing out on. Why shouldn’t they have a choice? Who are we to say that people should have to tolerate such unimaginable pain and turmoil because there’s a remote chance it might improve?

*I don't see anyone advocating state sponsored euthanasia for the poor. For goodness sake, keep within the parameters of the argument!

Is the state funding abortions for the poor*

Yes it does.

Abortions are available on the NHS and women who find themselves pregnant without the means to keep a child do have an abortion.

Society expects it.

On here posters encourage women to have an abortion if going ahead with the pregnancy is going to impact their income negatively.

Take that one step further. If euthanasia was legal how many would be encouraging euthanasia if a person in your family was negatively impacting your life.

People I think are naive if you don’t think that doesn’t already happen and it is brought to its conclusion by drs and the family when the patient gets ill.

I think that giving people the opportunity to request DNR leaves the door open in some cases to others deciding for patients what they want instead of asking the perfectly sane and alert patient.

I do remember a middle aged woman finding the DNR on her medical records at the foot of her bed when she had not requested it and was only in for an operation for her ingrowing toenail.

Atm there is some sort of protection but without it and you put the elderly and those who are most vulnerable in a very unsafe position.

FWIW, I’m 33, with a clean bill of health and I would have a DNAR if I could. I’ve seen multiple cardiac arrests where they may well have got a pulse back but the person was as near to brain dead as they could be without actually dying. I also worked in a neuro and spinal injuries unit when I first qualified, where amongst our residents were many people who had an incomplete suicide attempts that now left them laid in bed, unable to do anything for themselves, or other people who’d had catastrophic car accidents and terrible traumatic brain injuries and surgeries which whilst they did keep them alive, they’re alive with the mental age of a toddler and needing 24hr care, with no voluntary movement of their bodies. A lot of those service users were so unbelievably angry at the world and the fact that they’d been “saved”.

I don’t think we’re doing a lot of these people a kindness in saving them on the off chance that they turn out to be one of the few inspirational stories that pop up in the media.

The point is you would choose.

How would you feel if you didn’t want it and someone chose for you

QueenofPain I can absolutely see what you're saying. My grandmother, for instance, clearly wanted to die round about the time a severe leg ulcer meant that living independently was no longer possible. She spent the last 8 or 9 years in a (relatively nice) old people's home, the last couple of them pretty out-of-it mentally. The point at which she lost the ability to live independently was the point at which (all other things being equal) she would have wanted to die (suicide however wasn't an option for her given her religious beliefs).

Similarly, my elderly father is very clear that his wishes are "DNR".

But... it's still a situation with no clear-cut answer for every person. As I said upthread, in the Netherlands where people can request physician-assisted suicide if they are willing to testify that they consider their depression to be severe and intractible. But (terrifyingly) the statistics show that women are much more likely to avail themselves of this route than men. Maybe women do suffer depression more readily than men, and more severely - but my money's on the fact that the entrenched sexism in society plays some part in this.

The question is how do you frame a law round euthanasia without opening the situation to abuses? From what I've read, it's not clear to me that countries which do allow it have sufficient safeguards - even the much vaunted poster-child cases like the Netherlands (excellent social care, excellent health care).

Again, as I said upthread - we don't just make laws for the straightforward cases, we make them to protect people in the most complex, tangled, muddled cases too.

@EoinMcLovesCakeJumper we don't think we're unique for being hated. I'm well aware that the wartime generation thought the rock n rollers were horrid too... but we are the first generation to have grown up with the internet which is actually pretty unique

Also just look at the responses to my comment, you're all immediately treating me as the enemy.

I’ve seen several articles already about our needing to learn to eat insects in the future to get our protein. I’m quite sure the “our” here doesn’t include the wealthy or the professional-managerial class.

We are being guided towards a future of food-scarcity (for some.)

For nearly 25 years, I’ve been reading that the Baby Boom generation are the most selfish in history.

We are being guided toward a future in which the Baby Boomers will have to atone for that selfishness. I’m quite certain that atonement will be demanded in the form of relinquished pension and healthcare benefits up to the pint of relinquishing longer life.

In the same way, with all the “sex work is work” propaganda, we are being guided to a future of job scarcity, one in which a great number of women will be pushed out of the labour force.

This “guidance” is called “nudge theory,” developed by economists, and is all about educating the masses about what’s best for us, in gentle ways that conceal the force at work.

Are you hard of comprehension?

Well, I can be, yes!

I don't want to labour the point, but when you enshrine what you are asking for in law, there are all sorts of consequences. You are not just making a choice for yourself. And, you are, effectively, asking someone else to kill you.

How many doctors do you think would agree to do this do you think, based on poverty?

But, if we changed the law, there would be an unscrupulous few who would agree. Can you not see that this is to destroy all concepts of a civilised society?

If you choose to kill yourself because you are poor then you take full and personal responsibility for your actions without bringing others into the equation.

I am not advocating suicide. I found it sad that you should feel like you do. But the answer to things like poverty is not death.

If euthanasia was legal how many would be encouraging euthanasia if a person in your family was negatively impacting your life.

I take it you're assuming some number would? By way of contrast I see many people killing themselves (metaphorically) to allow their parents to continue to live at home when the easier thing would be to move them to a nursing home. People don't always take the path that has the least negative impact on their lives.

You're also assuming that the person at the centre of this "encouragement" is likely to be "encouraged" to make a decision that runs counter to their own personal wishes. I must know a more bolshie set of older people than you do. I can't imagine convincing any of them to do anything they didn't want to.

I'm 64 so tail end boomer. Having watched my grandmother and now my MIL spend the last years of their lives with no mobility and no agency over what they can or can't do I know that I don't want that for myself. I support euthanasia and would choose to do so if it was allowed. It's about quality of life not length

LemonPrism not really. Many responses have tried to point out that focusing on tensions between different generations is missing the point, since we should be focusing on the class divide, which is pretty consistent across all generations. In 20+ years, the world will be run by the top 1% of the wealthiest and most privileged people from the Millennial generation, and I have no doubt that they will be as self-centred and money-focused as their Boomer and Gen X predecessors. And at that point, I'm also sure they will adopt the same "everyone for themselves, I worked for what I have, so why can't you do the same" mindset that they are currently accusing older people of, and will point towards their generation's hardships to back themselves up. It all serves to distract attention from the inequalities caused by poverty, which are just as likely to be suffered by a woman in her 60s whose pension rights got screwed over by the NI opt-out as by a 25-year-old woman who can't afford to move into her own place.

We are being guided toward a future in which the Baby Boomers will have to atone for that selfishness

How do you consider baby boomers have been selfish.

3timeslucky

Whilst you know a lot of bolshie older people you have to understand that not everyone has that attitude.

Even the bolshiest if they are ill or in pain (even with something treatable) will crumble.

Change the law and you give no veil of protection to those that need the protection at one of the most vulnerable times of their lives

I'm a Millenial who cut ties with many friends after the referendum due to their views on not allowing older people to vote "because they'd be dead soon." I found it chilling with echoes of the Cultural Revolution. Ok Boomer is a watered down version of that, with the added benefit of being a thought terminating cliche.

I appreciated BickerinBrattle's excellent posts on the US context and how the ruling classes are using these tropes to fuel intergenerational anger and direct the blame away from the 1%. Anyone who thinks the current problems are more to do with a 65 year old retired factory worker than a 40 year old Wall Street banker has been sold a dangerous fairy tale.

Due to the large numbers of baby boomers, from about 2030 onwards the number of elderly in care will be unprecedented, with lower numbers of people still working.

Just the economic implications of this are huge.

As an aside, I have just arranged an Advanced Care Plan due to my medical history, and my two doctor's visits to sort it were free, as there is govt funding available for this. (NZ).

There's an article in the Spectator about Boomers v 'Zoomers'.

www.spectator.co.uk/2019/11/ok-zoomer-is-that-really-the-best-youve-got/

the passions of Generation Z are so impoverished, so fixated around screens large and small, that they have missed out on the juicy stuff of teenage life... Where will the great novels, films and records that define Generation Z come from?

I've just finished reading Brave New World and found the parallels to the way our society could easily be heading very creepy indeed. In that, women had been removed from reproduction and 'mother' had become a dirty word and concept.

Additionally, due to social conditioning from conception, inhabitants of the society embraced euthanasia once they reached the limits of their usefulness: "ending is better than mending" is one of the mantras they are fed from young age.

It takes a 'savage' from a tribe outside of the state to provide the alternative viewpoint that we are invited to relate to:

"All right then," said the savage defiantly, I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."
"Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind."
There was a long silence.
"I claim them all," said the Savage at last."

I do worry that if we went down the route of legalising euthanasia that societal pressure would form a kind of coercion on people, so I understand where the OP is coming from.

The frightening thing to me, as someone who is experiencing suicidal ideation right now, is that legal euthanasia, especially for mental illness, knocks down all my internal barriers to killing myself.

It's sanctioned, seem positively in society, it's relatively painless, it is accessible.

I know that I will stop experiencing this feeling at some point, or experience it less intensely; the combination of that forward looking perspective PLUS social taboo keep me safe.

it frightens me to think of the social taboo being removed.

The elderly parents and dementia threads might be worth a look, posters are desperately trying to care for their parents, negotiate the social care system, manage financial, legal and medical conditions, get help whilst respecting their parents need for independence, all while holding down jobs and bringing up small children, and, God forbid, having some form of life of their own. These are the people that, according to some on here, would start chipping away at their parents resolve should euthanasia be ever be legalised? No. Most people are only willing to make that decision with regards to their own lives.

It’s also pretty ageists to label one generation as coercive killers. We got mote than enough crap thrown at us from our elders years ago, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t stoop that low.

. And like it or not economics come into it. There is no infinite fund of money in the healthcare system. I personally (note I said personally) would be deeply unhappy that my comatose body was occupying a hospital or nursing care facility bed while someone with a prospect of life was on a waiting list or a chair in A&E

And there we have a great example of how people with end of life conditions become bodies in a bed taking up resources. May as well just get rid of people, eh, before their bodies naturally die. Selfish bastards daring to live and use up finite resources!

I don’t think potential, future risks need stop action to benefit a relatively small number of people with terminal illness such as MND

If only a small number of people would benefit, then the risk of unknown unknowns and unforseen implications to a potentially larger number of people, should surely take precedence over the small number who would benefit?

if you change your mind, you change your mind

How would you articulate that if robbed of the power of speech by dementia?

The thing is, people tend to base their decisions, about whether they would want to be alive with a certain illness, based on their outside perception of it.

Having worked with dementia patients, I have never known one person with severe dementia want to die. People may articulate this at diagnosis, but by the time they are so deeply affected by it, that they would have previously imagined their existence to be intolerable, they often do not want to die at all.

So, there would be a risk of some people with dementia having an advanced directive, getting to the point where they previously said they would wish to be euthanized, and then not wanting to die. BUT also lacking the mental capacity to articulate that they have changed their mind, or even the speech to do so.

This ISN'T about the horror of those of us who, having witnessed loved ones suffer something like dementia, think "I don't want that if it happens to me". This IS about how the person feels when they are ACTUALLY IN that position themselves.

I used do think I wouldn't want to be alive if I was disabled, based on what I had seen others go through. Guess what? I now AM in that position and don't want to die.

It scares the shit out of me to wonder what would happen if I had had an advanced directive in place, and my disability had robbed me of my ability to communicate. I very much want to live, with a condition I thought I would rather die than have.

I don't currently feel selfish for being a burden on society (though I feel guilt for my family) because society has no other choice. Euthanasia isn't legal, so society has to suck it up that people like me exist and drain resources.

Do you think I would get PIP and all the other support if I had had an advanced directive in place I had chosen not to follow? Don't be naive.

Do you think society would be willing to care about helping my family shoulder the burden of looking after me, if euthanasia was possible? Of course not.

The pressure on me to go through with it, both financially, practically and societally would be huge.

It pisses me right off when people haven't been in any remotely similar position themselves pontificate about "what they would want" if something happened. Until you are there, you DON'T know.

My daughter has a mum who can love her and who she loves, and it turns out that THAT is a far bigger reason to live, than my disability is to die.