America Should Legalize Assisted Euthanasia
Over the last couple of decades, my opinion hasn’t changed on a lot of things, but there are a few areas where it has shifted.
After concluding that income inequality can actually be a threat to the stability of the country long-term, I have become significantly more concerned about that, although I reject the “Tear the people down at the top” approach to the issue liberals have.
Tariffs are another place I’ve changed my mind. Trump has not gotten the credit he deserves for it, but his tariffs are raking in a lot of money, bringing an enormous amount of investment to our country, and creating a strong incentive for people to “buy American.” It’s an open question whether they will politically survive long-term, but economically, at this early stage, they appear to be good for our nation.
There’s also a very controversial area I’ve changed my mind on that I would acknowledge is way out of the conservative mainstream. That is, I believe our country should legalize assisted euthanasia.
This is controversial for a number of reasons.
For one thing, a lot of people’s first exposure to it was creepy Jack Kevorkian killing over 100 people (albeit willingly) in his “Death Van.” Side note: Did you know I have actually seen that on display in Zak Bagan’s Haunted Museum in Las Vegas? CREEPY:
Of course, many people have also figured out that governments view killing sick people as a way to save money. There were claims, most famously by Sarah Palin, that a particular section of Obamacare would lead to “death panels” pressuring people to kill themselves. Of course, Democrats denied that, but that section also got dropped from the final bill.
In Canada, though, euthanasia is legal. The majority of uses are just what you’d expect: suffering people with incurable diseases at the end of their lives. However, there have also been some disturbing abuses:
Even worse, Canada is on track to legalize euthanasia for some mental health conditions, including PTSD, bipolar disorder, and people with severe depression who have tried “reasonable treatments,” whatever the hell that means, and still have problems.
The Netherlands, which has a similar policy, had a case where someone with Alzheimer’s was euthanized EVEN THOUGH THEY RESISTED and had to be HELD DOWN TO KILL THEM.
Of course, this is all part of exactly what you’d expect to see once you cheapen the value of life. Once the number of dead people starts helping the bottom line of a country – and it definitely does somewhere like Canada, where roughly 1 person in 20 is now dying via assisted suicide - the state has a tremendous incentive to get costs down by getting the number of assisted suicides up.
So, why would anyone think a policy similar to this one could be a good idea?
Well, I can tell you two things that changed the way I think of assisted suicide.
The first was putting down two of my dogs. At the end of his life, my good boy, Patton, still had an appetite, still liked walks, and still seemed semi-normal… until he would lie down. He had what the vet told me was incurable cancer in his nose, and although he didn’t seem to be in pain, every time he would lie down, within a couple of minutes, he couldn’t breathe very well. As a practical matter, this made it nearly impossible for him to sleep more than a few minutes at a time. He was getting weaker and weaker. In fact, by the end, he couldn’t get up on the bed himself without me lifting him there.
My good boy, Jackson, got lymphoma, and it hit him like a hurricane. He went from happy and normal to having a little limp to barely being able to move in less than a week. He got very sick, very fast, and there was no long-term cure for his illness either.
In both cases, I made the decision to put them down. It was genuinely hard to do, but they no longer had good lives, and it would have felt selfish for me to put my reluctance to lose them ahead of their quality of life. Because I put their well-being first, I chose to euthanize them.
The other thing that had a big impact on me was getting sepsis, having emergency surgery, and nearly dying in late 2024. Afterward, I was in the ICU for 4 days and in a regular room for another 4. Believe it or not, I really wasn’t in a lot of pain. I also liked most of the nurses and found everyone to be competent, but it was still hellish.
I BLED EVERYWHERE. I had a catheter in me, which was HORRIBLE. I constantly had people examining and cleaning areas around my… let’s say intimate parts, which was demeaning. The sepsis, which absolutely can kill you, was causing my body to go haywire in all sorts of ways, which meant they were CONSTANTLY sticking me with needles to drip in anti-biotics or other drugs, testing my blood, or seeing what my blood glucose was at. This was particularly bad in my case because when I get dehydrated (and I lost a lot of blood), my veins just deflate, and it’s hard to find a good spot to stick. By the end, they even ran a long needle THROUGH MY BICEPT to get to a vein. I still remember a nurse telling me, “You don’t have good veins, do you?” and I said, “I do, you’ve just stuck me more than 50 times in the last few days.” Incidentally, that could happen at any time of the day and night, which was particularly rough because I HAD TO sleep on my back and I hate doing that.
So just imagine, lying around, bored, uncomfortable, getting stuck all day, then you finally fall asleep, only to have someone come in and wake you up to stick a needle in you. Then, you FINALLY fall asleep again, and two hours later, it happens again. There were also always beeping machines, sweat and blood in the bed, and I still remember some poor lady only by her screams of agony as they did something or another to her on my last day in the hospital.
Does that sound like a treat to anyone? Now, imagine it, but with a lot of pain, stretched over a few months, and ending with death instead of going back to your life, and you probably have a pretty good idea of what a lot of people’s last few months on earth are like.
Why should we put people in a position where they have to suffer through that or choose to kill themselves, which a lot of people quite understandably have big moral objections to doing?
What’s wrong with saying, “You have an incurable disease that’s going to kill you painfully over an extended period of time, so we’re going to make it legal for you to hire someone to give you an injection and put you out of your misery rather than making you go through excruciating agony for months in return for… what exactly?” Most people in that situation are in pain, hooked up to IVs, constantly in discomfort – you’re pretty unlikely to finish your great American novel or finally take that bucket list trip to Bangkok in that condition.
At the end of the day, there are strong arguments to be made for both positions, but I come down on the side of at least giving people THE OPTION to alleviate their suffering without having to do something that violates their moral principles.
If, let’s say, I have terminal cancer, life is nightmarish, and I want to pay a company, let’s say $5,000 to inject me with a chemical that puts me out of my misery in a pleasant environment, why shouldn’t I legally be allowed to do that? Why shouldn’t they be able to provide that service?
There are already a number of states that condone people self-administering a lethal medication prescribed by their doctor after all the I’s are dotted and t’s crossed, so why not allow them to also hire someone to administer it to the patient? That would mean no long-term suffering or moral dilemmas for the patient. It would just be avoiding a lot of unnecessary agony and closing out their life at a time of their choosing. If we’re willing to do that for our dogs, why wouldn’t we give the people we care about the same courtesy?
Love your stuff but not this. No. Society cannot go down this road.
The majority of poor that I encounter daily are poor because they refuse to work and would rather sit at home and do nothing and let the government support them. The dems promote this because these become democratic voters who want more free stuff.
For well over.a Century, tariffs were the only way for the government to raise money. Then the income tax was passed. It was supposed to be just enough to run the government. Then the government got drunk on spending to get more votes so taxes have to be raised. The California Teacher's Association is now collecting signatures to make permanent a temporary tax on those earning over 750,000 a year. It is set to expire in 2030. There have been so many temporary taxes that have become permanent in CA and yet voters still vote for them.
Trump leveled the playing field with tariffs. Many countries imposed tariffs on imported American goods but we had no tariffs on their goods. This made foreign made goods cheaper than American goods here and abroad. It has made us dependent on China and India for pharmaceuticals. There is a medication I take to manage my diabetes that is only made in China now because it is so cheap. For 6 months during the pandemic, I could not get this medication because China quit shipping it to the US. Then when shipments resumed, they were recalled a few months later because the were contaminated with toxic substances. After it was all cleared up, they resumed shipping non-contaminated meds and we have not learned the lesson, we need to make our own pharmaceuticals. It would be painful, but a tariff on pharmaceuticals would promote their manufacturing in the US
As for assisted suicide, that is a slippery slope. For too long governments have been able to offer generous social benefits because there were more younger working people paying to care for a small aging population. Now it is reversing with a larger aging population and fewer workers supporting them. So assisted suicide makes financial sense.
My mother married a Canadian and moved there. She kept her US citizenship because she was proud to be an American. She worked as an RN and was allowed to work past the mandatory retirement age because there is a severe shortage of nurses in Canada. She negotiated the hospital to pay for a private insurance plan because the government plan was terrible. When her husband turned 65, the government stopped paying for the heart medication he needed because he was past retirement age even though he was self-employed. She simply took him to Buffalo NY to see the American doctors that she trusted more than the Canadian doctors. They prescribed the medication and he was able to buy it cheaper than in Canada because her private insurance paid for it.
Canada and other countries with socialized medicine have been doing this for a very long, get past the age where you contribute to the government, you no longer get the meds you need to live a longer, healthier life.
Assisted suicide just sped up the process of getting the ones who no longer contributed but were a financial burden to die faster.
As a Christian, suicide is immoral. Assisted suicide is just dressing it up a bit to sound like a good idea. Once it becomes acceptable, then it will progress to forced assisted suicides.
Now, my father passed away from liver cancer. When he got to the point of the intense pain, we placed him in hospice care. By then he was going into a coma and my sister, who had the power of attorney for his medical treatment was able to sign off on hospice care, something he was against. He feared dying and wanted treatment even though no treatment could save his very weakened body. They could not even put him under anesthesia for any procedure because it would result in death.
Hospice did what they do best. Under the premise of pain management, they started a morphine drip. They assessed his pain and every day increased the dosage. The reality is they eventually got to the lethal dose of morphine and he passed. The last two weeks of his life, he was not feeling anything.
My mother was an oncology nurse. When she first started in the 70s, over 80% of cancer patients died within a year of diagnosis . During her career that dropped to 25% and many of those went on to have a long cancer free life as long as they kept up with their check ups every 6 months.
If you are a Christian, the difference between humans and animals is we have an internal soul. Life is sacred and our eventual death is in the hands of God. With modern medicine, we can allow terminal patients to die peacefully and relatively pain free. Some refuse that path because they want all life saving efforts to be used. Sometimes, the family wants assisted suicide because it is an emotionally painful process to watch a loved one die. Organisms do not easily die. There are so many internal processes to maintain life under bad situations.
This hit home with my father. His pulse dropped to 15 and respiration rate was between 4 and 6 for 5 days. When that point is reached, the person is no longer aware of anything, they are not getting enough oxygen for higher order thought processes. His heart and lungs should have stopped functioning with the amount of morphine he was given, it was well over the typical overdose level that often causes death.
My mother has had patients who had no detectable pulse and would only take a breathe once or twice a minute last a day or more. Death is a long process, not something that has a definite boundary. Electrical activity can go on for some time after the heart has stopped. Cells take time to die and stop functioning. She also said that even when she first started, many passed away peacefully and not in pain because they changed to pain management with morphine which often sped up the death process.
Our society wants to kill the unborn and the elderly but does everything possible to allow the worst of the worst criminals live a very long life in comfort. These are the ones that can never be trusted to roam free in society because they will harm others.
Finally, having been in the hospital for a few weeks from a stroke and then more recently with a difficult to diagnose heart issue, I can say that many times those you hear screaming out or in emotional distress are the ones that have refused to take care of their health and still eat all the wrong foods, refuse to follow treatments for chronic health issues because they just have to have all the foods they want to eat and it is too hard to get out of the chair to exercise. They want the magic pill that fixes everything so they do not have to change their behavior.
When I was in the hospital the last time, I had two different roommates that were grossly obese and had undergone multiple heart surgeries because they refused to change their diets and stop smoking and alcohol. Both were demanding foods that they could no longer have because they were in kidney failure and heart failure. One could not even swallow food without choking on it but he had to have his cheeseburger, fries and shake. The family refused to step up when the person was no longer competent to make their own decisions and authorize sedatives, morphine for the pain, or hospice care. The daughter of one was angry that the hospital would not release her father to her care that she called the police to file a report. When the officers told her there was no way he could be moved safely she went ballistic. Her father passed away screaming a few hours later and she was upset that when his heart stopped, they did not perform CPR. He was 50 and had been wheelchair bound for over 10 years due to uncontrolled diabetes and an ever worsening heart condition. The kidney failure put him over and dialysis was no longer working. He weighed over 500 pounds.