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.

That article is perfect and Sonia is a queen. I don't know why I bothered coming to my own conclusions - she has articulated my concerns so perfectly!!

Please don't use women's hard-won rights (women's free labour, if you like) to back your cause. Besides, abortion rights in the UK are still very ill defined. Although not really enforced, a woman still cannot legally have an abortion in the UK for no reason other than simply just because she wants one

Absolutely agree. Abortion rights are an essential part of human dignity. This mess of a safeguarding nightmare around the Bill for assisted dying is nothing like the issues involved in women’s inherent human rights to have safe, legal and accessible abortion as part of a broader set of right to control their fertility.

Dignity in dying advocates should never be co-opting the uniquely female struggle (still very much ongoing) for women’s basic human dignity like this. I’m sick of party political blokes implying that if you are a feminist you should support this Bill as a matter of being progressive. Fuck that. Nothing progressive about lack of safeguarding. And it shows how much they trivialise and misunderstand feminism. Feminism is about coalescing around women’s struggle. Not women being expected to fix everything for everyone else. That’s classic patriarchy.

Too many women have died (after millennia of forced maternity) and terrifyingly today’s politicians the world over, actively continue to ensure women will continue to die for want of a safe legal and accessible abortion.

Too many babies that women were forced to birth have died, or have been forced to grow up in terrible circumstances as victims of forced maternity; and these same politicians ensure they will continue to do so. False equivalency with end of life issues is so disrespectful of the suffering and death of women. It’s so disrespectful of the political struggle even just to get the limited legal rights women do have (just in the countries that do even allow abortion under some circumstances).

Only 60% of women globally live somewhere where abortion is broadly legal. That’s why in the UK we have an absolute moral duty to place our abortion laws beyond any doubt into the absolute basic right of human dignity category, which is not how they are framed in GB and NI law.
https://reproductiverights.org/maps/worlds-abortion-laws/

It is really galling to see all the forced teaming and the false parallels being drawn that if you support abortion rights you also have to support this mess of an assisted dying bill which you could drive a coach and horses through on safeguarding. Safe, legal, accessible abortion framed appropriately within the law is an active support to safeguarding women and girls.

It's an appalling advert on every level. I still can't get over the fact that they're plastered all over the tube. Dying isn't a Boden lifestyle ad.

It's possible to assume from that ad, and some of the others, that she's celebrating being able to get rid of her elderly parents.

Frankly I think that if society is going to do this, it shouldn't be doctors involved.

It's not a compatible service.

There should be a new career or stream of people whose specialty is administering death.

@Slothtoes I completely agree. And although they have linked them under 'bodily autonomy' the unspoken link is death which is what anti-abortion protestors want to swing the narrative towards.

IMO abortion is about a human right not to have to use your body to support another life. We don't force people who are genetically matched to donate organs. The Australian 'man with the golden arm' whose unique blood allowed an estimated 2 million babies to be born healthy was not compelled to continue donating.

It reminds me of the war of the currents (AC electricity vs DC electricity) and how one of the inventors refused to allow DC to be used for executions so his rival's current would be associated with death.

The drugs involved would require prescription, which could only be done by a doctor. The drugs are provided but must be self administered. If doctors feel this is unethical or against their principles, they should have the right not to have to sign off the prescription.

A new career or stream of people whose speciality is administering death. Not sinister at all. Nope.

(What the fuck have I just read? Do you know that when cigarettes were first mass produced there was no market for them. Advertisers created one.
It’s not a stretch to suggest that if there is no market for assisted dying, one will be created. Not only the new career stream of people but the drugs they use, their premises and the industries which will grow around it).

Yes Prof Jane Monkton Smith has done a lot of work on this area.

"Mercy killings" are nearly always a husband (one who often refuses help from outside carers, " oh what a loving husband" the outsiders say) that ends up violently killing his dependent wife/ partner because He couldn't bear to see Her suffer.

And the papers always paint them sympathetically.

Edit for different link

www.theguardian.com/society/2021/mar/07/end-femicide-278-dead-the-hidden-scandal-of-older-women-killed-by-men

If the Terminally Ill Adults Bill were to pass the first reading, it will go onto second reading, committee stage where it would be refined and then onto the HOL for further refinement. Many of the comments here consider that old people particularly woman will be coerced into ending their life. They have to be terminally ill within six months of death, just being old and frail doesn't qualify. As David Cameron commented, it's about shortening death.

I object to aspersions being cast on supporters of assisted dying as some kind of shadowy, suspiciously well-organised group that has popped up recently to sneakily push the issue on an unprepared people and parliament.

I am not familiar with the history of the campaign for assisted dying in the UK but if it is anything like the situation here in Ireland, this was a decades-long campaign by terminally ill people themselves, and their friends and partners, who continued the struggle on their behalf after their death.

It was 100% obvious that the call for the right to die was coming from the people directly involved: they themselves spoke to the media, to politicians, to anyone who would listen, until they could no longer speak - Marie Fleming and Tom Curran are two standout examples.

The passion with which Tom Curran has continued the campaign, when he has absolutely nothing to gain personally - his wife died almost a decade ago - reflects that this has been a brave, unfunded, selfless, passionate grassroots campaign that has been going on for decades, against massive odds.

The issue could have been 'properly debated' any time during the past few decades, and it's not the fault of campaigners that nobody would listen to them until recently. The idea of it all being rushed through without any chance for proper debate rings hollow to people who have been fighting desperately to be heard for years.

We didn't have loads of cash and we didn't have shadowy groups backing us. We had our heads and hearts and our humanity leading us to a sincerely held position - which opponents can disagree with all they want, that's fine.

Attacks on the sincerity of supporters of assisted dying, many of us of long long standing, and in my case GC to our fingertips, with comparisons to trans activism or Stonewall - Stonewall! - are very offensive.

If you oppose assisted dying - fine, that's your decision and you're entitled to it and I respect it. Just be honest and say it straightforwardly and respectfully.

We are equally entitled to hold the opposite opinion, and that opinion is as sincerely-held as yours, and deserves the same respect.

You do have to make an argument if you are trying to make an argument. That's the point.

I completely agree that not all issues of access are the same and there is a need for balance, but that is all the more reason you have to actually make the argument that there is some kind of right to access whatever it is, and that the balance is that society should step in to create access.

Sex is another are where exactly the same argument is made, almost word for word the same as what you said. Usually in conjunction with disability so very much about access and equality in the view of those who make such arguments.

Assisted suicide is not about autonomy, it involves asking another person to kill you.

I think the use of the word dignity is very deliberate.

Many people will deal discomfort, even serious discomfort, all the time. And mature adults know that discomfort is inevitable in life and often has to be put up with to avoid other problems.

Now, we are at the moment in an interesting place where a lot of people are abnormally in fear of discomfort - for example many younger people believing that mental discomfort is inevitable a sign of some kind of illness.

Nonetheless, it's not going to make people stop thinking straight to use words like comfort or even discomfort.

But many people are terrified of the idea of loss of dignity. And we are taught culturally that loss of dignity is a horrible bad thing society has a duty to prevent.

So it's much better for their optics if they present their case as preventing loss of dignity.

It would require a new and different way of operating the whole thing.

It's nothing to do with individual doctors and the right not to be involved. It's to do with the nature of the medical profession itself - it is inimitable to killing.

I also think that assisted death gains credibility by being associated with the medical profession. We naturally see doctors as reliable people with our best interests at heart. We might be less likely to trust a group of people who don't benefit from that association.

Well yes, it might well be sinister.

But if that's true, doesn't that suggests that doctors who do it are sinister too?

Sometimes it's best to see a thing for what it is.

It’s extremely poorly drafted Bill such that it doesn’t even allow for the conscientious objection of doctors to choose not to take part in it. There will be a lot of doctors who want nothing to do with assisted dying and that should be respected as their professional right. Whether you’re for or against this.

Also shows the utter naivety of those drafting- who on earth would wants such an important thing to be overseen by doctors with a huge religious or personal or medical objection to what the patient is asking them to do? What kind of calm and compassionate atmosphere would that create for the patient wishing to hasten their death? Assisted dying is far outside the training and job description of UK doctors.

It struck me that the name of the bill, Terminally Ill Adults Bill, is problematic. There is nothing inherent in being terminally ill which means that assisted dying is for you. And yet, instead of being called the Assisted Dying Bill or something which focuses on assisted dying, which is what it is about, it focuses on the group of people who can access it, and not even the limited number of these people in specific circumstances, the title implies all terminally ill adults. If I was a terminally ill adult, and luckily I am not, then it puts the idea in my head that assisted dying is something which is there for me. So then the thought becomes at which point in my journey am I supposed to decide to kill myself rather than let nature take its course. That changes how we view terminal illness.

And I am supposed to welcome this ‘choice’ so instead of thinking about treatment and end of life care and things like that, there is this element now of well, avoid all that and the costs by assisted dying.
How long before that becomes what you are supposed to do?

Why is it not called the Assisted Dying Bill? If its proponents believe in it so much, why can they not name it?

Pregnant women aren't seriously ill and relying on their relatives to advocate for them. Terminally-ill people are. That's a very important difference.

I think it is entirely sinister regardless of who does it. But it was the specific post that people could be trained up and have killing people as their career which I was responding to.

Assuming the status quo cannot be changed, which causes more harm? Being coerced or even abused into an assisted early death, or being a carer for someone who is near the end of life? I'd say the former.

I sympathise with your POV, @MarieDeGournay , and I certainly don't assume that campaigners for assisted dying are bad actors, but sadly, I just think the risks, on balance, are too great.

I'm watching A time to die on itv. There's a woman who's gone to Dignitas to commit suicide (they are calling it that) because she "feels she has to" BC she doesn't want her husband or anyone to help her on the toilet.

She's not actually bed bound. She used a wheelchair to fly to Zurich.

Her husband and child are clearly distraught but are standing by her, and have insisted she will not be a "burden"

@Juliagreeneyes 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).

Hmmm. I find it hard to imagine that any form of assisted dying could be anywhere as traumatic - for the patient or the family - as a desperate person blowing out their brains with a gun, or slitting their wrists in the bath.

And that's absolutely her right!

I would feel deeply depressed and quite likely suicidal if I had no prospect of being able to use the toilet without assistance again. I'm not a three-year-old and don't want to live like one. People have individual standards regarding what indignities they are able to tolerate.