French law is based on 2 ideas, palliative care, and cessation of useless care, particularly life sustaining cares, when they are useless, when the patient suffers and when his dignity is damaged.
I sum up as law is very complex.
The present system has defaults.
Palliative care units are lacking in numbers and staff members. The communication with the families is non existant in too many cases. (I have known a first hand exemple with my father-in-law last year).
The cessation of life sustaining cares supposes a decision and these decisions are sometimes contested in front of courts, never successfully, for religious reasons sometimes.
People who suffer from incurable diseases ask the right to die.
The debate is mainly for or against euthanasia, medically assisted death or suicide pills.
Personally, when feasible, suicide pill or medically assisted death if needed, are the best solution. and they are needed.
Are you asking if it’s a good idea?
Or are you curious about opinions?
My wife and I have made legal living wills, that stipulate extreme measures are not to be taken to keep me/us alive. I’m 67, still get around pretty, though I can certainly feel the diminishing like never before. These days four, five hours of moderately heavy (I no longer do “heavy”) physical work has me taking a nap.
When I get to the point I’m bed ridden and my mind no longer remembers and my lofty musings and desire get it written down as well as I can muster, fade into a sea of confusion, I’ll be ready to die and enter the sanctuary of eternal deep dark sleep.
I don’t want to keep hospital machines pumping some artificial life into me, when there are young accident victims who can be saved and brought back to health to continue their lives with those resources being squandered on my old and spent body - I want them to have the benefit diminishing resources. (I’ve even had this discussion with my daughters: I’ve lived my life, and beat some big odds, I’m content, heck amazed with my life, even within my frustration with so much around me, when I’m gone, it’s okay miss me, but don’t mourn me.)
My life has been all about activity, engaging with living and families and experiencing the range of emotions our sensual bodies possess.
I was not born to be a vegetable, if I become one, please, please, please, let my spirit go!
Not sure how it is in France, but there are very few places where you can go and just say you want to die and take something to make it happen.
It’s not that different from an abortion, it should be between you and your doctor. The problem with requiring a life threatening disease is that there are some really bad diseases that don’t have a “death date” that can be predicted. Compounding that, a disease like dementia takes away your ability to express any kind of logic and reason. Or, even if one day you feel like starting a program of starving yourself, you’ll probably forget it once you get hungry. So, people around you would have to take on the responsibility, and that gets into deep legal waters.
The best advice I know of currently is to record your wishes while you are of sound mind. Let as many people you know as possible, that you don’t want to live that way. There is no legal document that covers this.
I agree that suffering too much is a legitimate reason to die.
If i was affected with senile dementia, or something like that, i would finish my life as son as possible. I have seen people affected by this disease, unable to recognize children and so .
My brother is a doctor, an expert in geriatric psychiatry and he has convinced me.
Euthanasia, i am much more reserved as abuses are possible and have been observed.
Side note: during the lock-down caused by the COVID, the French government has decided to forbid any visit to mentally disabled people in institutions.
Many of them deprived of visits and human warmth have died, some by not eating.
Perhaps slightly overstated, though I agree with you and Morgan for the most part.
And yes, it’s important your family and significant others are aware of your wishes. My wife saw a nifty thing a few years ago and bought us each a organizational book: “I’m Dead, now what” where we’ve recorded important information and copies of important documents, to make things easier for those we leave behind.
That sucks, so why not roll over and die, if that’s all that’s left.
But why let it get that far.
Of course, given the pandemic panic, I can understand why people in charge may have felt the need to do what they did and that there wasn’t anything malicious about it.
But it reminds me of an fascinating heart warming story of a sensible way to deal with the mentally ill.
This is a moral debate rather than a scientific debate. Euthanasia is rarely necessary as all of the diseases humans die from will eventually finish the job and it is not difficult for a person to create a living will, as Citzenschallenge noted. People are rarely kept alive beyond all hope.
The issue is really about the individual having control over when and how they die – e.g. avoiding suffering or humiliation – and if that is the right thing to do.
End of life care doesn’t necessarily mean keeping “vegetables” alive. And we spend a lot of money on that care because there are far more elderly people than ever before.
Well I provided some links to resources that are available before the dementia sets in.
A living will is like any other legal document, you get to address specifics, if you’re thoughtful enough to think of them ahead of time.
And I didn’t say you were wrong wrong wrong, I said it’s more nuanced than that, and with a bit of forth thought and planning and lawyerly advice, doors can be opened that weren’t before.
One google search came up with:
I’ll admit I don’t have the time or interest to get into the weeds, but it looks people are working on that problem and finding ways of dealing with it.
To be clear, that’s not what I was implying. It was a personal musing.
A missing element today is the ability to have conversation at all. The legal problems of letting a dementia patient starve are bad enough, and if there is no record of the person desiring such actions, it’s not possible to do it openly.
“End of life” is currently defined as having 6 months, maybe a year, to live, with physical pain. There are a lot ways to be alive that none of us would wish to be in, that don’t fit that.
Yeah, one of those topics that’s gets devilishly complex the moment one gets serious about detail and cascading consequences.
And so easy to take out of context. One size, fits all, don’t exist.
We have different lives within very different communities.
The French constitutional court is going to judge a very interesting case.
A patient had written a living will, saying that in any case, he should be maintained artificially, whatever be is condition.
He has been victim of an accident and is maintained artificially, his brain being no functional.
Paragraph 3 of Article L. 1111-11 of the Public Health Code provides that advance directives are binding on doctors except when they “appear manifestly inappropriate or not in accordance with the medical situation”.
The family argues that this exception is unconstitutional.
I received this email from “Compassion & Choices” this morning, figured it’s timely and valuable information to add this collection.
"We did it, Peter! After three years of working tirelessly (even during a pandemic!) alongside terminally ill advocates and our partners at End of Life Washington, we have succeeded in improving access to medical aid in dying for eligible Washingtonians.
Governor Jay Inslee just signed a series of amendments (bill ESSB 5179) to the Death with Dignity Act. Mentally competent, terminally ill adults in Washington who seek medical aid in dying will no longer have to face daunting — and for many, insurmountable — hurdles to achieving an end of life that is peaceful and pain free. Most notably, we have made it much easier for interested eligible patients to access the law by:
Authorizing two clinician groups known as leaders in patient-directed care – advanced practice registered nurses and physician assistants – to serve as both the consulting and providing physician under the law, thereby expanding the pool of qualified providers to support patients.
Reducing the waiting period from 15 days to 7 days, halving the time a patient may needlessly suffer.
Requiring health systems to post their medical aid-in-dying policies so patients will get honest and transparent information.
We could not have done this without our incredible community of supporters: all of you who emailed and called your legislators, submitted testimony, and showed up and spoke up over the last three years.
Thank you for everything you’ve done to ensure that terminally ill adults in the Evergreen State have the option to choose end-of-life care that reflects their values, priorities and beliefs.
Not all elderly people are brain dead. Granted, there are many, but not all who have dementia or Alzheimer’s. Still, you can’t say we are spending a lot of money on elderly people who are brain dead, because we aren’t.
So people should let their disease cause them painful deaths, when ending one’s life, if they so choose, before it gets that far would prevent that? That doesn’t sound like something everyone would want to do.
It can be a tough call. When dying in hospice or in hospital, the patient is usually drugged so pain is not a problem. But I suspect the euthanasia advocates want to avoid the active dying stage altogether, which brings even more hard questions.