Brittany Maynard ended her life today. She had terminal brain cancer that would kill her in 6 months in a painful way.

She wanted to be able to die with dignity.
http://www.nbcnews.com/health/health...oregon-n235091

I am of the opinion that death with dignity is something that should be available in all states.

Some are saying she is a coward for having done this. I think these people should be throat punched (like foldn needs to be throat punched for unrelated issues).

discuss.

People calling her cowardly are projecting. They are so afraid of the unknown that they would rather spend months being tortured than face it.

I would take an eternity of throat punches if it meant I didn't have to die.

lol there are people calling this girl a coward?

I honestly don't know or can even fathom a single person being against voluntary suicide.

I'd probably say I'm against 'voluntary suicide' if you meant it in a very general way.

I support what this woman chose but it seems like a special subset of voluntary suicide.

Did you mean it in a general way?

Edit: Just read the linked article and liked the part where she says she doesn't consider this suicide. She died from cancer.

My grandmother's last several weeks of her life were so awful. If it had gone on much longer my whole family was about to have serious conversations about some form of assisted suicide. There was no compelling reason to force her to live the way she was. (old + strokes + complications from a broken hip as a result of being dropped during a transfer to her wheelchair + other bad stuff).

Death with dignity is so different from like young kids shooting themselves type suicide. Just not the same conversation at all. Allowing a terminally ill person to end the pain is not the same as not helping a mentally ill person who could get better.

Many people seem to believe life must be preserved for the maximum amount of time regardless of it's quality. I find this view totally baffling and strongly support the right of this lady to make her own decision.

NPR had a piece this morning about this. they talked about how there are a few states trying to pass death with dignity legislation and how her advocacy will have lasting effects on America.

They also talked about how Denmark (I think it was) allows children to participate in their death with dignity programs. Some European country also allows those who are depressed to participate. Interested in others feelings about this.

Should death with dignity be limited to only those who are terminal?

I think death with dignity should start with only those who are terminal.

The more you expand the class of people that can participate the more ethical/legal issues you need to tackle. Seems reasonable to start with something most people can get on board with and see how it goes.

Sounds like it was Belgium, not Denmark.:

I support the right of any adult of sound mind to make their own decisions if they want to end their life, for any reason. However I can see problems in evaluating applicants mental health, so as a practical matter I can understand the desire to restrict it to people with serious long term or terminal illnesses.

So working in the ICU I see a lot of people who are sick with no hopes of surviving with any amount of "quality of life". Usually these are people who are also noncompliant with their care, this winds them up in their position in the ICU more often than not.

But like people with chronic worsening conditions, like emphysema or COPD. They can linger for long amounts of time and never be considered "terminal" in the sense a lot of people think about them being terminal. There'd be an obviously easy way to establish who could qualify for death with dignity - using hospice criteria.

The conversation to withdraw care is always one that is incredibly difficult to have and many of the residents are just super ****ty at it. That and asking about code status. They hardly ever have the balls to portray a patient's status in the most accurate of ways. There are also patients who lack the ability to understand their status and, for them, there is no amount of ability to truly understand the depths of their diseases.

I wish more of them could be made comfortable, at least. A few oncology nurses I know have knowingly given lethal doses of morphine or other respiratory depressing drugs after a physician orders it. I think this is a kindness, and for a lot of the families and patient's I wish it didn't even have to get to this point. Usually in this scenario, the patient is actively dying. But to get to this point? Months of pain. Families watching their loved one in agony.

My mother had lung cancer that ended up with bone mets. She was in excruciating pain at the end because she had tumors in her pelvis. She was lucky, though. She was in relative pain for awhile, but it was only truly horrific for about 3 days before she went into the hospice house. Once there, she wasn't very lucid. Occasionally she'd yell out "help me", for a few days she was muttering under her breath, she would say things about her pain. But she wasn't there.

Uh, anyway, I wish she didn't have to lay in the bed while her organs shut down. At that point, it would have been the supreme kindness for both my mother and me to give her a lethal dose.

Preaching to the choir here, I know. But I wish this country had a better narrative about death. Especially with those with chronic conditions.

...

By the letter of the law, is this murder? I admit my ignorance.

Yeah, 'terminal' probably isn't the right metric for me. It's more like somebody that is suffering from a steady and irreversible loss of quality of life while still maintaining the mental facilities to make a conscious and informed decision about their life.

Its tough though because I had a neighbour that fell off his house and became paralyzed at the age of 50. I know there was a rough period early in his 'recovery' where he seriously contemplated suicide, but now (years later) he's accepted his condition and leads a very full life. It might have seemed to him at the time that his condition wasn't going to get better - and physically it hasn't - but he's also learned to live with it in a way that he didn't think was possible.

I mean paraplegia or quadriplegia aren't terminal. Certainly in modern times people with these conditions can lead very fulfilling lives. But, and this is an example of a patient I had, say they end up with wounds that are nonhealing and are in and out of the hospital constantly. Become septic, get better. The wounds themselves aren't painful because the paralysis, but they're infected. The patient I'm thinking of ended up with an infection so bad that they had to disarticulate the hip, which they put the survival of the procedure at 15%. Regardless of if he survived the procedure, he probably wouldn't have left the hospital.

Ending your life in the hospital is something I don't wish for pretty much anyone. Especially the ICU.

It's a fine balance in hospice care. People are in, as best can be told, excruciating pain. And extreme anxiety. Air hunger is no joke. So you give them narcotics (for the pain) and benzos (for the anxiety) both of which depress your respiratory drive. So which becomes more important for a dying person? To protect their respirations? Or to ensure as much comfort as possible.

Practitioners in these areas of care don't talk about this much. But it happens. Especially in hospice, because you can have the same patient's and get to know them and their family over a couple of months. And probably longer if they were on palliative care before hospice. You form a bond. You don't want them to be in pain, and the pain becomes more important than their ability to breath.

But that's what I mean, I have a hard time figuring out where suicide/assisted-suicide is appropriate and where its not appropriate. It's some combination of "terminal" and "****ty standard of living" that's hard to nail down - which is important when it comes to the laws that we need to enact.

But that gets back to my, let's make this happen for the cases where we can all (or most of us) agree its appropriate and go from there.

This is...virtually all of humanity once they hit 40 or so.

Yes, obviously in there is some magic line of severity. I don't know what it is though.

Ethically I 100% get it.

I'm more wondering about the legal aspect. A nurse knowingly/deliberately giving a patient a lethal dose of meds...that's murder in all 50 states, right?

This kind of reminds me of the "angel of death" serial killer.

In the UK they go by the doctrine of double effect:


(Off topic digression: The doctrine of double effect was established at the trial of Dr John Bodkin Adams. A very well known case in the UK, Adams was a well respected doctor with establishment connections accused of murdering scores of his patients after persuading them to change their wills in his favour. He was controversially acquitted amid accusations of corruption. Really interesting stuff, the wiki article linked is worth a read.)

The best argument against suicide is that if you don't do it you may later on be glad you didn't. And it is a strong argument. Only in cases where it obviously doesn't apply is it a slam dunk that one should favor the option.

I guess from an angle of morality this makes sense, but is this a valid reason for the state to prohibit me from deciding if/when I want to end my own life? That I might change my mind later? Seems intrusive.

The nurse is just giving the dose the doctor tells them to afaik.
If a doctor says 50 grams of morphine, well, that patient is going out in style, relatively speaking.

Shared responsibility then, but the nurse isn't off the hook, in my mind at least.

So is this murder?