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deathtothepixies -> RE: do you have the right to die? (3/13/2012 4:28:35 PM)
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thank you ftp. It is horrible to think that people might have to make decisions based on resources available, they probably already do sometimes.
I am slightly surprised that more religious questions haven't been posed here. Yes I am an atheist and I suppose the OP(?) didn't lean that way but deliberate killing usually raises some questions in that area
quote:
ORIGINAL: fucktoyprincess
I think we each, as individuals, deserve to have this right.
Although I think it should be restricted to certain types of circumstances. Final stages of a terminal disease regardless of one's age. The very aged (who might still be functioning, but are simply not interested in living anymore). I think those are the easy cases.
Separately, I think decisions around what level of medical intervention is appropriate is something that needs to be discussed more. Simply because medicine can do certain things, should it? If a life can be saved, but quality of life severely affected, whose decision is it to either medically intervene, or to not. I think this is where the difficult situations are and it is a lot harder to know what is right or wrong here.
All I know is that I would never criticize any family or person for whatever decision they made or make in this type of situation. I think it's complicated and people and their families need some freedom to make some tough choices. I don't think these are decisions that society should be making one way or the other (i.e., it is not helpful to have blanket statements like "every life is worth living", "every life is sacrosanct".) I think people need more freedom than that in order to sort through the tougher situations. And sometimes the decision ought to be that less (intervention) is more, rather than taking the attitude that every effort MUST be made every time for every life.
These are tough problems that require nuanced thinking, and I think the only way to achieve that is to give greater latitude to patients and families.
Also, separately, I do think that it is interesting to view some ancient practices in this regard. We've all heard about how many ancient peoples would leave extremely disabled newborns to die. While on the surface this may seem harsh, I think in ancient times, when survival was much more difficult, and everyone had to be able bodied to allow a community to thrive, you simply could not afford to have able bodied adults take their time to take care of the severely disabled or severely impaired because it meant others in the community would ultimately suffer. That was simply the reality. I don't think this makes ancient people unenlightened. They simply had to practice an extreme form of practicality given the way in which they lived. Imagine being a nomadic tribe. How many disabled people can you manage before it becomes too much of a burden on a family or on the community because part of your survival means moving around a lot?
My point is simply that our lifestyle today has allowed us the ability to take care of a wider range of physical (and even mental) issues than the ancients were able to do. But as the population increases, and resources become more scarce, at some point more nuanced decisions will have to be made. The families I know who have severely impaired children (whether as a result of genetics, disease, accidents, etc.) are able to manage through a combination of tremendous effort on the part of the parents and through a variety of assistance that they receive through insurance, and other sources. If something in our current structure changed, and these parents were no longer capable of taking care of these children themselves, I'm not sure what happens at that point.
And of course, what to do about an adult who has no surviving immediate family to take care of them? What responsibility does extended family have to take care of them? Are people obligated to take care of siblings, nephews/nieces, cousins, uncles, aunts? What if there are no extended family members? Whose responsibility does it become, particularly if the individual is not even interested in being alive any more?
I don't claim to have any answers to these. But I do think these sorts of questions will become more and more important going forward because resources are going to become more scarce. And families, of whatever structure, will have to confront these issues in a more stark way.
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