Assisted Dying is Sexist

[lcakethereforeIam]

This is a facet that I hadn't thought of, now I'm thinking how could I have been so blind

https://archive.ph/uhGgX

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/11/25/assisted-dying-is-sexist-report-finds/

I'm not entirely against people being killed by their Doctors, if that is their wish, they're going to die soon anyway and the alternative is unrelievable pain. My misgivings were from watching how it had played out in countries where it is legal, particularly Canada. I was also worried about coercion but somehow I hadn't thought how gendered that is. How it's usually the male sex that does the coercion.

I have doubts about the 6 months to live diagnosis. At the moment elderly people are being encouraged to sign 'do not resuscitate forms' i.e. repeatedly being asked if they want to sign. I can see the diagnosis becoming more common. 6 months isn't long to get the process done.

This article sums up how poor this legislation is.

www.thetimes.com/article/16a7c2f6-d81b-4b33-bc14-7831027488be?shareToken=5b3c41a8602602343d9fe6cdf2afb50b

I appreciate your comment, but we do not give nobody a choice just because some can't choose.

That's like saying we should make abortion illegal because some women are pressured into it by men or even forced.

It also hasn’t occurred to me but there was a post on here a few years ago which totally opened my eyes about how quickly

“It’s okay mum… you carry on pottering around in this house you can’t manage until it gets swallowed in care home fees and we will just break it to the kids we can’t afford to send them to uni and there’s no deposit help so they will never get on the property ladder”
<pregnant pause and meaningful look>

will become normalised if it’s legalised….

It's women who do the caring though, we know this. Caring for spouses, parents and in laws. The burden of care on women's shoulders may ease somewhat if end of life doesn't have to often last for years.

This bill applies to the terminally ill I.e. 6 months to live. That means less than 6 months respite for carers. Elderly people can need care for years.
It's the lack of proper support for carers and the appalling state of palliative care.

There's no medicine that can relieve a huge amount of bodily discomforts. Have you had the flu? Nausea? Serious constipation? Galloping heart rate? Dry mouth? On and on and on. Morphine does not alleviate any of these horrible feelings. Think of the pain, fear and loss of control so many women feel in childbirth. Has medicine cured that yet? No, and it never will. Tablets and injections can only do so much. I personally don't want any form of extended 'palliative care' when it's my time to die, and I consider that judgement to be entirely my own.

There is always a small risk of abuse with anything.

Would people like to see abortion banned because there's a risk the woman may have been coerced? No of course not it a silly argument.

What you're saying is that thousands of terminally ill people should be forced to live in pain and misery because there's a small chance that some people may possibly be coerced into assisted dying.

The idea that palliative care means there's no suffering is nonsense too. My uncle had cirrhosis of the liver and went through absolute hell. Most people know someone who went through a horrible time and terrible death with cancer, I certainly do. There's also often a complete loss of dignity. It's just cruel that people are forced to go through that when you wouldn't put your dog through it.

Completely agree.

Tbh I don't know what parallels can be drawn between mercy killings and assisted suicide, but I do agree this is an issue that should be looked at through the lens of feminism.

Outside of feminism, I'm just shocked that we've taken yet another complex, nuanced issue and reduced it into a binary yes/no.

It feels like we've skipped a step, and that step would include things many health professionals are doing anyway but having to justify within a life-preserving framework or save until the last few days of end of life care. To use the examples of flu and childbirth, we could 100% alleviate all suffering from these if we were not concerned with preserving life and health. A family member spent years in a care home for people with dementia. Many with advanced dementia tried to refuse food and water but were cajoled into eating/drinking. Antibiotics were prescribed for chest infections for people who could not reasonably consent to another 6 months of suffering and confusion. There is a massive grey area between actively euthanising people and actively keeping people alive against their wishes or best interests. Allowing and even encouraging doctors to prioritise comfort above all else would be a good start. Yes, it could be understood as euthanasia just under a different name, but I think the distinction is important.

Outside of feminism, I'm just shocked that we've taken yet another complex, nuanced issue and reduced it into a binary yes/no.

indeed. I’m not against assisted dying per se, I am against poorly thought out rushed legislation on crucial issues when there’s no need for it to be done like this

So many excellent points made on this thread. Sonia Sodha article was excellent.

I am actively pro choice on abortion, atheist and feel really strongly against this bill. I’m starting to see this cause as one that seeks to creates choice and control for people who already have social capital and privilege (and who naively assume the rest of the population shares their level of privilege) ,at the expense of creating a huge risk of premature death, and fear and guilt for the majority of vastly more vulnerable people. People who lack those same privileges and therefore lack the same safeguards.

Before I knew multiple disabled and elderly people, when younger I would have said I support assisted dying in principle because I believe in bodily autonomy. But now I know in practice that the life of many elderly people is chaotic and unsupported, social support and public services are so stretched, house prices are so high, paid work and high cost of living demands that paid time takes preference over informal unpaid caring time for many people, many families live scattered far apart.

This bill is being rushed through in a brand new Parliament which isn’t used to conscience voting in a social media environment. There have been opinion polls not impact assessments. I’m frightened that it would open the door to horrendous abuses and a frightening future for increasing numbers of elderly and disabled people as the boundaries on allowing legal assisted dying are inevitably widened by future legal challenge.

Agree with PP who said that we won’t do this any better than other countries do. I am grateful to health minister Wes Streeting and the justice minister for speaking up against this Bill. They are very well placed to understand how risky and expensive and complex it will be to implement this.

Very helpful article from legal perspective. Note that ‘the Equality and Human Rights Commission has said, the sponsors of the legislation have provided “insufficiently detailed analysis of the human rights considerations relevant to this bill”.

Also reports that Liberty are also opposed to the bill because it lacks sufficient safeguards

I have lived in great pain for many years, but would not qualify under 6 month rule . I am saving upfor help abroad, as there will come a time when I cannot go on.I would prefer to go in my own bed or garden, with loved ones here. Why should only those with large funds have the option?
I have seen too many terrible care home and nhs horrible deaths and I will not tolerate lose of independence and the lack of dignity of being washed and fed or being hauled around on one of those horrible lift things. So it will be a Swiss death or at my own hand. I will not suffer for ever to suit someone else’s belief, when they have not lived my life of pain for 30 years.

That’s a rather provocative interpretation of that post. To make it clear, I do not think the solution to the carer issue is that more old people or disabled people die.

It is a demonstrable fact that on a societal level women do the bulk of familial caring, whether that is children, elderly, ill and/or disabled people. “Making men step up” at a society level is an issue that I doubt will be fixed in my lifetime because caring in either a familial role or as a job is massively under valued, especially in terms of the impact on the economy.

I’m against this bill for all of the reasons others have stated above: it’s really poorly thought through and drafted, with little sense of the potential impacts - this issue really needs huge care and attention, and a great deal of consultation and thinking around how it should be drafted before any attempt to put it into law/practice, and that just hasn’t been there.

I fear that there’s a great deal of simplification going on in the recourse to emotive anecdotes about suffering. Law shouldn’t be made in anecdotes, but proper consultation. I agree with @Slothtoes that this issue is seen as one of bodily autonomy and choice by those who are disproportionately privileged (white, middle class, higher income) and who are underinformed about the realities of life for those who aren’t. And who also imagine assisted dying as a “dignified” option (it isn’t, necessarily: and I have relatives in the Netherlands who suffer from lasting guilt and trauma over the assisted suicides/euthanasia of family members there where they have long had forms of assisted dying — it’s very easy to think of assisted dying as the less traumatic, less medically complex option, but that isn’t always the case, either emotionally or physically).

So much of our society has been dominated now for decades with the mantra of consumer choice and bodily autonomy as being an unalloyed good. That is itself is a cultural assumption of the present time. “Choice” has not always been thought of as a moral good, and it’s also never a morally neutral act or decision - it’s always influenced by external factors. We might believe that few people could be coerced into such a choice because we think we wouldn’t be. But advertising and social media and culture keep proving that so many of our “choices”, from buying clothes to voting to political opinions to which film to see are not really autonomous.

Women do bear the burden of caring. The time, the money and the heartbreak of seeing their loved ones dwindle away, their own lives and other relationships dwindle away, perhaps the love they had dwindle by the sheer grind and indignity of caring. That's not an argument for 'assisted dying' (which is outside the scope of this legislation...for now). It's an argument for something else.

Totally agree. We can't fix the issue of end of life suffering by manifesting a fit for purpose medical and social care model, not one government of any stripe has ever achieved this. We can't wait until men 'step up', because there is little impetus for change and any progress at all will be glacial, while people suffer horrifically today. None of these 'what we should focus on instead' answers are even slightly based in achievable reality.

I see your point but the title of the thread is that the whole topic of assisted dying is sexist, and I think there are more feminism angles than just women being coerced to die. In fact, it could be argued from the article in your OP, that it is because men don’t want to do the caring that they encourage women to die instead.

I also think that I am looking at this from the perspective of the principle of assisted dying and how we handle the end of life in general, and some posters are instead discussing their concerns about this particular legislation itself, so there is probably a degree of cross talk going on.

If assisted dying is a feminist issue because statistics show that more men are likely to be coercive, then that's an issue for men to solve by not being coercive, surely? Or do you think we should solve social care, and get men to step up as carers but not get men to stop being coercive, because that would be unrealistic?

I’m starting to see this cause as one that seeks to creates choice and control for people who already have social capital and privilege (and who naively assume the rest of the population shares their level of privilege) ,at the expense of creating a huge risk of premature death, and fear and guilt for the majority of vastly more vulnerable people. People who lack those same privileges and therefore lack the same safeguards.

Yes. It's legislation based on best possible scenarios, which is why it fails in safeguarding. Because unfortunately we have to include the worst case scenarios, too.

Abusers exist, coercion exists, societal pressure exist.

All legislation needs tested against worst case possibilities and rigorously risk assessed.

People should be able to make a living will which should be upheld in that medication be withdrawn, save for palliative meds and uphold their wish for no treatments such as antibiotics etc to prolong life when that person no longer wants to be here. It's just the humane thing to do. We don't treat animals this way, why human beings. I worked in a home once, albeit many many years ago. This poor lady was skeletal. Rotting from the inside out with tumours. Every sip of water she took, you could hear it going into her stomach. This was 30+ years ago and I will never forget her face and the crys she made. If I could have legally ended her suffering, I would have.

In contrast, a friend of mines mother who lived in Canada was told she had terminal cancer. She refused treatment. Instead choosing assisted dying. Her whole family were with her at the end. Her final words were, 'well, we've had a lot of fun, haven't we?'. Still very hard but a very peaceful pain free and dignified death for her. That's how it should be.

As I said before, unless youve seen the unbearable suffering of some people, you wouldn't be able to truly understand how horrific it can be 😔

All of these groups that are lobbying for this are extremely dodgy, IMO.

They seem to have a ton of money, they seem to have no discernment around cases they advocate for, and the thing I find most disturbing is the degree to which they seem to be a well oiled machine. They are not responding to issues as they come up from a grass roots perspective. They know what legislation they want, without safeguards, and they have multi-step plans to get there. As soon as these laws get passed they will have court cases and such to move the laws in the direction they want.

A lot of these organizations receive significant government funding for their lobbying. They also seem to be almost identical in their tactics and goals across many countries.

If we still had investigative journalists I would say someone needs to do a deep dive around these groups.

What do you mean they will make you stretch your existence.

You can refuse treatment.

I was chatting with one of my clients a few weeks ago, she told me she'd just had a chat with her doctor and made it clear that she wasn't interested in treating anything any more, other than comfort issues. She is 89, but in good health, still gets around on her own etc. So nothing is immanent. But she knows that once things like antibiotics etc are started it subverts the process of the body winding down.

She was a nurse for many years, in my experience that is a huge advantage, nurses and doctors understand this. They are not the ones pushing the interventions. They will not, however, not present them, or tell people they shouldn't be treated. Patients have to take some responsibility here.

If this was reliably the case I'd agree with you. If a patient could be 100% sure that all necessary pain medication would definitely be provided with no possibility of problems with this then that would be great. In reality this isn't always what happens. Hospice places are limited and usually reliant on charities rather than government funding so there's no statutory right to their services. There are limits on what can be prescribed and the medications available often have a limited term of usefulness as the body becomes acclimatised to them. If the pain level is currently such that it can be relieved by a dose of X per day but after using it at that level for more than 5 days it's going to become ineffective, and death is likely within 10-15 days, there's a pressure to tolerate the pain for now in order to save the pain relief for when it gets worse next week. People at the end of their lives are still being expected to bear pain and suffering. The perfect pain relief that works reliably without these resistancs effects doesn't exist.