Euthanasia

Privatize assisted dying?

Assisted dying would be provided by private companies under plans to stop a flood of requests hampering efforts to bring down NHS waiting lists.
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Options to contract out assisted death to the private sector are being considered in government in an effort to ease pressure on NHS clinics while dealing with doctors’ insistence that a separate service is needed to help patients to end their own lives.
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https://www.thetimes.com/uk/healthc...sources-provision-private-companies-0whj0bc5b
 
Old study but worth posting.
A Kingston University study found several people with learning disabilities and autism in the Netherlands chose to die legally through euthanasia and assisted suicide due to feeling unable to cope with the world, changes around them or because they struggled to form friendships.

There were almost 60,000 cases of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide between 2012 and 2021 in the Netherlands. More than 900 case reports were recorded on an online, searchable database. This form of dying is legal in the country provided six due care criteria are met, one of which is that the patient's suffering is unbearable, with no prospect of improvement.

Study lead and Professor of Intellectual Disability and Palliative Care at Kingston University Irene Tuffrey-Wijne and colleagues examined the database to understand the situations where people with learning disabilities or autism spectrum disorders had been granted requests for euthanasia or assisted suicide, and the main causes of suffering that led to the request.

They found 39 cases that involved people with either learning disabilities or autism spectrum disorder, or in some cases, both. Of these, 19 were male and 20 were female, with 18 of the 39 under the age of 50.

Published in the BJPsych Open Journal, the study found a majority, around two-thirds, chose that path solely, or mostly, due to characteristics associated with their condition, such as anxiety, loneliness and not feeling they had a place in society. In eight of the 39 cases the reasons for the individual's suffering were exclusively related to the learning disability or autism, with people feeling unable to cope with the world, changes around them and a struggle to make friendships and connections.

The research team said the findings highlighted a need for an international philosophical and ethical debate around criteria for euthanasia and assisted suicide and how to deal with such requests from vulnerable patient groups.

Within the study, a further eight said their autism or learning disability made it hard to cope with non-life-threatening physical illness or decline, while the same number stated their condition combined with psychiatric problems like anxiety and loneliness was their reason for wanting to die. Of the 39 cases, causes of suffering that led people to asked for help to die included loneliness (77 per cent of cases), a dependence on others (62 per cent), a lack of resilience or coping strategies (56 per cent) and a lack of flexibility and difficulty adapting to change (44 per cent).

Finally, in a third of the cases, doctors noted explicitly that the individual's learning disabilities or autism were not treatable and that this was a key consideration in their assessment that there was no prospect of improvement and therefore an assisted death was the only remaining option for the patient.

Commenting on the findings, Professor Tuffrey-Wijne said that alongside the need for a wider debate on the ethics of dealing with requests from vulnerable groups, the research also highlighted the importance of investing in highly individualised support services around the world. "What these individuals needed was a society where they felt they belonged, with people around them who not just accept and accommodate, but welcome their unique ways of being," she said.

"There is no doubt some people feel helpless, suffer deeply and profoundly and the support needed is complex but hopefully there can be a culture shift and a big investment in services that are significantly under-resourced."

In addition to this work, Professor Tuffrey-Wijne gave oral evidence at a government health and social care select committee about an assisted dying and suicide inquiry earlier this month.

https://www.kingston.ac.uk/news/art...requests-for-euthanasia-and-assisted-suicide/
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I see the strawmen arguments and anti-euthanasia propogandists are out in force.
 


An assisted dying bill fit for the 21st century must break with its dangerous historic roots.
If enacted, the Terminally Ill Adults Bill will be one of the most consequential legislative changes in a generation. However, rather than resulting from an appraisal of options to address a clearly defined problem, it revives a nearly century-old proposal devised by medical eugenicist Dr Killick Millard. MPs must understand this history and its implications to develop a law that is fit for the 21st century.

When Millard proposed his Voluntary Euthanasia (Legalisation) Bill in 1931, he claimed it would prevent painful protracted deaths. Aligned with his eugenic beliefs, he also “applauded” the prospect of people ending their lives to alleviate the burden on others, calling this “heroic”, “courageous” and “highly altruistic”. Privately, Millard was open to eventual involuntary euthanasia and lobbied for the release of Nazi doctor Siegbert Ramsauer, whose killings he deemed justifiable.

Like the eugenicist policies of his day, Millard's proposal was centred around the medical profession. Access required a terminal medical diagnosis, with assessment conducted by two doctors and a doctor providing the lethal substance used to end life. Although decisively rejected by Parliament in 1936, this proposal has returned repeatedly since, championed by Millard’s Voluntary Euthanasia Society – renamed Dignity in Dying. It has also been promoted worldwide by an organised network of “right-to-die” societies.

The Terminally Ill Adults Bill adopts Millard’s approach unquestioningly, revising only the rationale to align with current values. As a result, the Bill fails to address the rhetorical claims made for it.

It would not stop people travelling abroad for an assisted death (most people who do so would not meet the eligibility criteria), nor prevent non-assisted suicides (which have not decreased in countries with similar laws), and suffering is not mentioned once, despite supposedly being the key concern. Moreover, instead of offering ‘choice', the Bill would deny patients with a terminal illness who express a desire to end their lives the healthcare response everyone else receives — support aimed at affirming their worth, alleviating their distress, and preventing suicide. Given that terminally ill patients respond to such interventions as well as anyone else, this amounts to an unprecedented legal infringement on the equitable provision of healthcare.

Millard’s medical approach to assisted dying brings additional consequences.

If framed as a medical treatment for the terminally ill, everyone with a terminal illness has to consider it, and to justify their decision to themselves and others. In turn, doctors are permitted to proactively offer it, despite the inevitable pressure this exerts. Pressure and indirect coercion are inherent to this approach, not risks to mitigate with safeguards. This was recognised by Keir Starmer, when, as Director of Public Prosecutions, he rejected terminal illness or disability as mitigating factors in assisted suicide cases and made medical involvement a factor favouring prosecution. Predictably, in line with Millard's original intentions, significant proportions of people receiving a medically-assisted death worldwide cite concerns about being a burden on others — 59 per cent in Washington State in 2022.

In addition, if classed as a medical procedure, arbitrary eligibility criteria cannot limit access. As a result, every jurisdiction that has introduced assisted dying into an equity-based healthcare system has had to expand eligibility over time. In Belgium and the Netherlands, which have the longest such experience, this has eventually included those unable to consent, including children and people with advanced dementia — who have the same right to healthcare as everyone else.

However, there is nothing inevitable about Millard’s approach. Ending a life is not a medical procedure and providing standard lethal doses of toxic substances requires no medical expertise. As with the death penalty, doctors should have no role in administering assisted deaths. Instead, MPs should explore options for training and regulating a new professional group to deliver this entirely novel service.

Regarding eligibility, MPs must first clarify what legalising assisted dying aims to achieve.

If the goal is to address intractable suffering, access should be limited to people whose suffering is intractable. Assisted dying would, then, be a measure of last resort, used only if every other effort to address someone’s suffering and support them to feel valued had been exhausted. The courts would be best placed to judge these exceptional cases.

If the goal is autonomy – the ‘right to choose how and when to die’ – then proponents must show they have objective evidence-based criteria that differentiate a ‘valid’ desire to end life from one that requires intervention to address suffering and prevent suicide. If autonomy is truly the goal, these criteria could clearly not depend on a person’s medical condition or life expectancy or on any other discriminatory judgement about what makes a life worth living.

Discriminatory attitudes rooted in our eugenicist past must not be allowed to underpin such a crucial piece of legislation. MPs must completely dissociate themselves from Millard’s legacy if they are to create a law that is safe, compassionate and fit for the 21st century.

https://www.politicshome.com/thehouse/article/mps-understand-history-assisted-dying-bill
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I once read of a dutch girl who had sadly been sexually abused who was euthanised in Switzerland. Can't remember her exact age but it was very young.

In other news, did you know euthanasia is from the Greek where 'eu' means good/well, and 'thanasia' comes from 'thanatos' (meaning death)?
 

‘Hospices are in retreat’: funding crisis squeezing UK palliative care providers​

St Catherine’s hospice in West Sussex says it has been forced to leave beds empty despite the demand for end-of-life care

https://www.theguardian.com/society...crisis-squeezing-uk-palliative-care-providers

“The NHS is looking to hospices, which are charities, to provide essential end-of-life care. Yet by underfunding palliative care, we are forced to cut back on services and get involved at a later stage.” In the end, it costs the NHS more.

“Few hospices will actually close, but many will provide fewer and smaller services. And this is at a time our ageing population needs us more than ever. Baby boomers are about to swamp the whole of the NHS, hospice and palliative care system.”
 

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https://www.thetimes.com/article/16...0?shareToken=5ee5c0254718c6a74d7fda60b6706d9a
 
Sweet Square said:
Unhinged

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Why is that in any way unhinged? That you can't 100% dismiss a criminal use of something doesn't mean you should do it.

Vaccines have a cost but the benefits vastly outweigh them. Swimming pools are of great public benefit but people drown in them occasionally. Planes, cars etc etc.
 
Wibble said:
Why is that in any way unhinged? That you can't 100% dismiss a criminal use of something doesn't mean you should do it.

Vaccines have a cost but the benefits vastly outweigh them. Swimming pools are of great public benefit but people drown in them occasionally. Planes, cars etc etc.
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Accidentally drowning in a pool isn’t the same as state or private assisted suicide. I would suggest you look at the history of euthanasia rather than shrugging your shoulders and saying well accidents happen everywhere in life.
 
Sweet Square said:
Accidentally drowning in a pool isn’t the same as state or private assisted suicide. I would suggest you look at the history of euthanasia rather than shrugging your shoulders and saying well accidents happen everywhere in life.
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The point is that anything has positives and negatives. In this context you are just looking at the minor and very rare negatives and ignoring the huge positives.
 
Wibble said:
The point is that anything has positives and negatives. In this context you are just looking at the minor and very rare negatives and ignoring the huge positives.
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The negative here is people getting murdered by the government or a private corporations.
 
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Assisted dying bill is ‘flawed and dangerous’ after changes, says group of Labour MPs​

Bill, which passed committee scrutiny on Tuesday, has ‘insufficient protections’ for most vulnerable

Jessica Elgot Deputy political editor
Wed 26 Mar 2025 11.20 GMT
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Labour MPs opposed to assisted dying have called the bill “irredeemably flawed and not fit to become law” in a letter to their parliamentary colleagues, saying “significant new risks” emerged during the scrutiny process.
The letter from six critics, circulated to all Labour MPs, including two select committee chairs, came as the scrutiny committee finalised changes to the bill, which will now return to the Commons in April for its final stages.

Major changes have been made to the bill since it was last voted on by MPs – the signoff by a high court judge has been removed and replaced by a panel of experts, including a psychiatrist and a social worker.
On Tuesday night, in changes that angered some of the bill’s proponents, the bill’s sponsor, Kim Leadbeater, changed the implementation period from two to four years – meaning that should the bill pass, no assisted deaths are likely to take place before 2029.

In the letter from MPs including select committee chairs Meg Hillier and Florence Eshalomi as well as Antonia Bance, Jess Asato, James Frith and Melanie Ward, the MPs said that the promise the bill would be strengthened in committee “had not been kept”.

The bill was finalised after midnight on Tuesday night after a marathon sitting when MPs examined hundreds of amendments. The MPs on the bill who do not support assisted dying have frequently claimed that their suggestions to make the bill safer were outvoted.

Announcing the end of the committee process, Leadbeater said it had made “already the strongest assisted dying legislation anywhere in the world even safer and more robust”, citing changes made including mandatory training for doctors and panel members to detect coercion and a guarantee that anybody considering an assisted death would be made fully aware of all end-of-life care options.

But the bill’s critics, in their letter to MPs, said there was “reckless and loose language in the bill” that undermined the founding principles of the NHS. They said there were insufficient protections for children, people with anorexia, people with mental health conditions, those with learning difficulties or victims of domestic and financial abuse.

They also criticised ministers involved in the process for giving no impact assessments or indications of the costs of the service and no guarantee of improvements to palliative care to ensure a real choice.

Among the other concerns raised by MPs was the prospect that doctors would still be allowed to proactively suggest assisted dying to patients who had not raised it themselves and the potential for the private sector to make a profit from the legislation.

“Our efforts have not succeeded in improving the bill and we cannot recommend a vote in favour of it,” the MPs said. “It is our hope that the bill will not progress in its current form, and that a better way can be found to take forward the vital conversation about choice at the end of life.

“But a flawed and dangerous bill that places the most vulnerable people in society at unacceptable risk is no choice at all, and we urge MPs to vote against it.”

Leadbeater said in her statement that the “status quo is failing dying people and their families”. She said there was “particular care to protect the disabled and the vulnerable and to ensure that only those with a genuine, settled and informed wish to be assisted to die in the manner of their choosing are able to do so”.

She said she hoped that there would be confidence in her plan for a multi-disciplinary panel to replace high court judges. “We are not removing judges from this process. Rather, we are adding the expertise and experience of psychiatrists and social workers to provide extra protections in the areas of assessing mental capacity and detecting coercion while retaining judicial oversight,” she said.

https://www.theguardian.com/society...gerous-after-changes-says-group-of-labour-mps
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Revan said:
While we are at it, close also the suicide help lines. If you don't like to suicide, just don't suicide.
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That is an odd analogy. Like saying that if you are in favour of skydiving we don't need nets on bridges. If you don't want to jump then don't.

It’s a lazy analogy/false equivalency. Assisted dying is a rational, medically evaluated choice with legal safeguards and procedures. If you don't think the safeguards are good enough then make them better. Suicidal people are usually in crisis and unable to make informed rational choices, which is why they need help. Context is important.

Ironically, the main time suicidal people are making a rational choice it is because they have been denied access to euthanasia services.
 
4 weeks ago my brother found his wife on the floor in the bathroom unresponsive. She had a stroke, brain bleeding all that shit.
She's currently still in hospital with a huge chunk of her skull missing. Has some movement on her right side, nothing on the left side.
She can squeeze fingers and had progressed to thumbs up and down. I went to school with her, she's 57 and one of the strongest women I've ever known.
She's never smoked, rarely drinks, eats well and keeps herself fit.
I know she definitely would not want to be a burden on anyone and if she had the choice right now she would want to go. It's turned her little bubble of family upside down. A stroke is worse then death in my opinion.
 
77 said:
4 weeks ago my brother found his wife on the floor in the bathroom unresponsive. She had a stroke, brain bleeding all that shit.
She's currently still in hospital with a huge chunk of her skull missing. Has some movement on her right side, nothing on the left side.
She can squeeze fingers and had progressed to thumbs up and down. I went to school with her, she's 57 and one of the strongest women I've ever known.
She's never smoked, rarely drinks, eats well and keeps herself fit.
I know she definitely would not want to be a burden on anyone and if she had the choice right now she would want to go. It's turned her little bubble of family upside down. A stroke is worse then death in my opinion.
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We are our brain, everything else is just meat and bone. Alzheimer's is another one that removes the actual person gradually until there is only a vague facimilie left.
 
77 said:
4 weeks ago my brother found his wife on the floor in the bathroom unresponsive. She had a stroke, brain bleeding all that shit.
She's currently still in hospital with a huge chunk of her skull missing. Has some movement on her right side, nothing on the left side.
She can squeeze fingers and had progressed to thumbs up and down. I went to school with her, she's 57 and one of the strongest women I've ever known.
She's never smoked, rarely drinks, eats well and keeps herself fit.
I know she definitely would not want to be a burden on anyone and if she had the choice right now she would want to go. It's turned her little bubble of family upside down. A stroke is worse then death in my opinion.
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Jesus, awful. Sorry to hear that.

I think everyone over 40 should be taking an aspirin a day to reduce the risk of blood clots
 
Wibble said:
That is an odd analogy. Like saying that if you are in favour of skydiving we don't need nets on bridges. If you don't want to jump then don't.

It’s a lazy analogy/false equivalency. Assisted dying is a rational, medically evaluated choice with legal safeguards and procedures. If you don't think the safeguards are good enough then make them better. Suicidal people are usually in crisis and unable to make informed rational choices, which is why they need help. Context is important.

Ironically, the main time suicidal people are making a rational choice it is because they have been denied access to euthanasia services.
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I agree with the idea of euthanasia. I just do not think that it is as simple as if you do not agree with it, do not do it, as the poster I quoted said.

There are suicide lines for a reason, and euthanasia being heavy regulated is a good thing. I do not have anything against it when it comes to physical diseases (advanced terminal cancer, advanced Alzheimer), while I think it is much more subtle when it comes to depression, especially when it comes to kids and young adults (Holland). Not necessarily against it in those cases though but I think it is a very gray topic.
 
Revan said:
I agree with the idea of euthanasia. I just do not think that it is as simple as if you do not agree with it, do not do it, as the poster I quoted said.

There are suicide lines for a reason, and euthanasia being heavy regulated is a good thing. I do not have anything against it when it comes to physical diseases (advanced terminal cancer, advanced Alzheimer), while I think it is much more subtle when it comes to depression, especially when it comes to kids and young adults (Holland). Not necessarily against it in those cases though but I think it is a very gray topic.
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It's it a bit like abortion, where ultimately even if you think the act is immoral, it's ultimately not your choice and people will go through with it anyway so better to do it in a safe and clinical setting.
 
Wibble said:
That is an odd analogy. Like saying that if you are in favour of skydiving we don't need nets on bridges. If you don't want to jump then don't.

It’s a lazy analogy/false equivalency. Assisted dying is a rational, medically evaluated choice with legal safeguards and procedures. If you don't think the safeguards are good enough then make them better. Suicidal people are usually in crisis and unable to make informed rational choices, which is why they need help. Context is important.

Ironically, the main time suicidal people are making a rational choice it is because they have been denied access to euthanasia services.
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The original post saying "just don't get one" was also overly simplistic too, to be fair.

Drainy said:
It's it a bit like abortion, where ultimately even if you think the act is immoral, it's ultimately not your choice and people will go through with it anyway so better to do it in a safe and clinical setting.
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But some people truly believe abortion to be equivalent to murder, so this argument doesn't hold up at all for them.
 
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