This subject would have to be more overrated than the US economy.

Here's a few suggestions for those infatuated with killing themselves while, at the same time looking for sympathy.

These are all innovations that end in death, as I have observed through life.

1. Put a plastic bag over your head and tape it off around you neck.

2. Throw a rope over a strong object above you, stand on a chair, tie off the free end around your neck, and kick out the chair.
(That one seems to be a favourite).
If not quite braves enough, P* off the local drug lord, and he'll arrange it all for you, no cost.

3. This one is an innovatiion I've observed, but requires scuba gear:

Take down a length of chain and a padlock, find a suitable rock to securely chain yourself to, pad lock it off, and kick the key out of reach. Now wait for the air to run out.
Works like a treat.

I'd be interested to hear other posters additions to this brief list.

Dan

Voluntary euthanasia is suicide. Call it what it is.

No matter how much we dread loved ones exercising it, it is a natural right.
Causing the death of another is a different thing however and that's exactly the line VE advocates want erased.

If you want to reduce the phenomenon of suicide by driving into oncoming traffic, then advocate for the unfettered right to buy a gun.
It's disingenuous to argue for a persons right to choose when their life ends while denying them a means to effect their wish themselves.
This is where the VE advocates drive into oncoming contradiction. It's not about voluntary anything. Their argument's for when others get to choose the time and means of death.
Recognize this fact and the rest writes itself with gravitational momentum.

I'd put that way back on the back burner and just allow the coronavirus to do its worst! And empty out overcrowded nursing homes(gulags for old folks) Take out those with compromised immune systems, Most cancer patients etc.

Those with HIVaids are not going to be bumped off?

Because, most of them are already taking half a dozen to a dozen, hugely expensive antivirals daily, which some seem to have conscripted, Thailand? To successfully treat coronavirus.

Give them fourteen days supply and send them home to self isolate?

I mean logic would tell almost anyone except our do nothing real pollies. That a virus is a virus and an antiviral is an antiviral! And those used to treat HIV/aids are the strongest, most efficacious we have?

Too bad they're so damned expensive?

Well, what did one expect with big pharma's 500% plus/plus markups?

Well, no matter, just allow it, the virus to run its course and take out the old, the frail, the vulnerable, the dying. And save a bundle! Call this virus, assisted dying, because, that it's what it's doing, Everald!

Take care, old man.
Alan B.

jamo,

<<Voluntary euthanasia is suicide. Call it what it is. >>

I consider it to be murder as it is the deliberate taking of another's life, whether it is with their permission or not.

Look what is happening in The Netherlands, Belgium and Canada. It cannot be controlled.

+ 'A study conducted every five years to determine the causes of death in the Dutch population has revealed that more than 400 of its citizens lost their lives as a result of euthanasia without having given their consent', http://bioethicsobservatory.org/2017/11/involuntary-euthanasia-increases/23467/#iLightbox[gallery23467]/0

+ 'One in three Dutch doctors reported being willing to euthanize the mentally ill' (loc. cit.)

+ 'Belgium legalized euthanasia in 2002 for anyone age twelve and older. In 2014, it eliminated all age restrictions. A recent report published by Belgian authorities reveals that three children were euthanized legally in 2016–17 — the youngest at age nine — with the two others at ages eleven and 17, respectively. Their maladies? Cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, and a brain tumor', http://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/canada-euthanasia-assisted-suicide-children/

+ 'Serious discussions are now underway to expand that license to children' to be euthanised in Canada (ibid.)

Diver dan
Why should someone have to die by hanging,and have their family find them like that. Have to shoot themselves in the head and maybe ending up like a vegetable,
Same with driving your car into a truck. You could end up struggling with awful injuries for the rest of your life. Euthanasia is peaceful and non violent and you can die in the loving presence of your family. To die surrounded with love and kindness is so much more compassionate than having to die slowly hanging from a rope terrifyingly by yourself.

People shouldn’t be forced into these terrifying ways of dying when they are suffering with overwhelming terminal illness. Illnesses sometimes strike without warning and make people invalids in hospital beds, they then aren’t well enough to leave the hospital with a drip in their arm to seek out these means of suicide.The nurses will insist you stay if the doctor hasn’t discharged you.

Think of putting up with a bad toothache that is never going to go away, because it has become infected and imagine there is no cure.
If you’ve ever had bad toothache I think you might want to die after suffering from it
day and night non stop for a few months with no cure in sight. There is no cure from a lot of terminal and painful illness.

OzSpen, yep that's what I was getting at regarding "the line VE advocates want erased."

Very small step from availability of an option to recommendation of that option. The next small step after that is recommendation for the patient incapable of expressing their want for it.
Then it's Aktion T4 reborn.

OsSpen
Children die from terrible cruel diseases too. You really don’t have the experience or knowledge of what it’s like to die, while cancer slowly eats your brain away. Or as motor neurone disease slowly progresses and leaves you in a wheelchair unable
to move, like the famous Stephen Hawkins, who lived the life of a paraplegic in a wheel chair after once being a fit young man. Not easy having to have someone wipe your bum every time you go to the toilet and spoon feed you.

Until you have suffered, stomach cancer where you have been vomiting with nausea
several times a day for 6 months, and it is terminal, eventually.
I really don’t think you have the knowledge to make the decision for someone who is experiencing these kind of death experiences or illnesses.

In fact it is not your decision, it is solely their decision.
Or should be their decision. Their decision needs to be witnessed and signed by three doctors and legal documents drawn up and registered, to legally record the decision is made by the patient, with criminal penalties if anyone is euthanised without the proper legal procedure and documentation.

I think you really aren’t understanding that some things are worse than death.
You need to use more imagination about the terrible pain of dying. Maybe you should get someone to feed a needle down to one of your vital organs and slowly pick holes in it,until it’s destroyed, to get a bit of an idea of what being eaten alive by cancer is like.

As long as death is a voluntary solution, then other solutions will be less sought after.

After all, if palliative care is known to be lacking, and euthanization is an option then palatine care will continue to be lacking instead of fixing the issues there.

If you want an example of how death as an option becomes the only option considered, look at the abortion industry and it's influence on populations thinking they have no other solution.

Don't make the way for our population to not be served well because and to fix our issues, because the path for another death based industry gets it's hold on the people.

Cherful,

<<People shouldn’t be forced into these terrifying ways of dying when they are suffering with overwhelming terminal illness. Illnesses sometimes strike without warning and make people invalids in hospital beds, they then aren’t well enough to leave the hospital with a drip in their arm to seek out these means of suicide.>>

You presented only one option for these people - euthanasia, i.e. voluntary assisted dying. There is no other way to put it than call it what it is - murder.

The Netherlands’ medical doctor, Dr. Karel Gunning, on his 1992 visit to Australia said: “Holland has indeed become a very dangerous country, as patients may have their lives ended without their request and without knowledge of the authorities. The doctor thus has become a powerful man, able to decide on life or death”.
The New Scientist magazine (20 June 1992) confirmed this alarming situation in an article titled, “The Dutch way of death.” It stated that “doctors and nurses in the Netherlands can practise euthanasia if they stick to certain guidelines. Yet many patients receive lethal injections without giving their consent”, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13418264-800/

Gunning said “in some hospitals, doctors routinely approach patients who are terminally ill, offering to inject them with lethal doses of barbiturates and curare. But Dutch euthanasia has its sinister side, too. Involuntary euthanasia of sick and elderly people is commonplace in the Netherlands, and that when patients do opt for euthanasia, it is frequently out of fear of being a nuisance rather than to avoid unnecessary physical suffering”.

The journal, Current Oncology (April 2011), published 'Legalizing euthanasia or assisted suicide: the illusion of safeguards and control'. It stated:

"There are other examples that a “social slippery slope” phenomenon does indeed exist. In Switzerland in 2006, the university hospital in Geneva reduced its already limited palliative care staff (to 1.5 from 2 full-time physicians) after a hospital decision to allow assisted suicide; the community-based palliative care service was also closed (JP. Unpublished data)….

(continued)

(continued)

Cherful,

"Of physicians in the Netherlands, 15% have expressed concern that economic pressures may prompt them to consider euthanasia for some of their patients; a case has already been cited of a dying patient who was euthanized to free a hospital bed. There is evidence that attracting doctors to train in and provide palliative care was made more difficult because of access to euthanasia and pas, perceived by some to present easier solutions, because providing palliative care requires competencies and emotional and time commitments on the part of the clinician.

"At the United Kingdom’s parliamentary hearings on euthanasia a few years ago, one Dutch physician asserted that 'We don’t need palliative medicine, we practice euthanasia'", http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3070710/

The summary of this article includes:

"In 30 years, the Netherlands has moved from euthanasia of people who are terminally ill, to euthanasia of those who are chronically ill; from euthanasia for physical illness, to euthanasia for mental illness; from euthanasia for mental illness, to euthanasia for psychological distress or mental suffering—and now to euthanasia simply if a person is over the age of 70 and “tired of living.”

Dutch euthanasia protocols have also moved from conscious patients providing explicit consent, to unconscious patients unable to provide consent. Denying euthanasia or pas in the Netherlands is now considered a form of discrimination against people with chronic illness, whether the illness be physical or psychological, because those people will be forced to “suffer” longer than those who are terminally ill.

Non-voluntary euthanasia is now being justified by appealing to the social duty of citizens and the ethical pillar of beneficence. In the Netherlands, euthanasia has moved from being a measure of last resort to being one of early intervention. Belgium has followed suit, and troubling evidence is emerging from Oregon specifically with respect to the protection of people with depression and the objectivity of the process".

This history of VAD around the world casts a deep shadow over what Australia is doing in Vic, WA and Qld with legislation and proposed legislation.

jamo,

<<Very small step from availability of an option to recommendation of that option. The next small step after that is recommendation for the patient incapable of expressing their want for it.
Then it's Aktion T4 reborn.>>

I agree. However, we don't have to go back to the genocide of the Nazis in WW 2. It's happening right now in the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland and soon to be in Canada.

There is no way Australia can be exempt from this slippery slope. See my evidence in the 2 posts above.

I know of a few places where there is easy access to a few hundred foot drop straight off a straight road, where 160Km/H should be easily achieved by most cars. Choosing to drive off one of these is a much better idea than traumatising some poor truck driver to finish yourself CHERFUL.

The only disadvantage of this solution is the possibility of deciding half way down there is something you forgot to do before the drive.

Everald,

<<As a Church Elder, I am publicly supporting Voluntary Assisted Dying (VAD) when the Churches of Queensland have joined together to make a submission to the Inquiry opposing it. The key factor is that they believe that God decides who lives or dies. I have never ever believed that. God gives you and me the spiritual power to handle whatever life and death throw up at us. With death being an inevitable and unavoidable part of life, why let many people suffer agony to get there.>>

Don't you understand the contradiction in what you wrote there? I oppose VAD for these reasons:

1. I take Scripture seriously. The Bible states, 'The LORD gives both death and life; he brings some down to the grave but raises others up' (1 Sam 2:6). A nation that murders the vulnerable suffers God's judgment: 'Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin condemns any people' (Prov 14:34).

2. We cannot trust the medical profession to follow the criteria for VAD. In the Netherlands, 'The details are alarming. At least a third of the 5000 or so Dutch patients who each year receive lethal doses of drugs from their doctors do not give their unequivocal consent. About 400 of these patients never even raise the issue of euthanasia with their doctors' ('The Dutch Way of Death', 20 June 1992), http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13418264-800/

3. The case for euthanasia is based on:

• intentional murder or assisting in the murder of innocent human beings.
• repudiation of the doctor-patient relationship.
• It flies in the face of the medical advances made in the treatment of pain and is at odds with compassionate methods of care.
• It rests on presuppositions that do not respect human life.
• playing God.
• ethically, rests on self-defeating assertions.
• eliminating the sufferer, rather than reducing the suffering.
4. Therefore, as a Christian minister I support the promotion of life, care and compassion for the suffering, and am reminded: 'Just as each person is destined to die once and after that comes judgment' (Heb 9:27)

Hasbeen

That sounds pretty terrifying, driving off a cliff. A nice peaceful drug death is much less traumatic and violent.
You might be too sick to get out of your hospital bed, catch a bus home to get your car and drive to a big cliff somewhere.

Why should you have to?

OzSpen

You say I am only giving the terminally ill only one option. Their options are pretty few don’t you think?
All deaths are not the same and some may have an easier time of it than others.
But probably death is a very traumatic physical experience for most, After all vital organs have to shut down. to cause you to die.
That is why it has to be the sole choice of the dying person, only they understand the level of their pain and endurance.

What other options can you suggest for a person dying a cruel death.
Morphine seems to be the go to drug for relieving pain in the dying process. As the pain gets more and more intense , higher and higher doses of morphine are needed.
Morphine at a certain dosage, kills. I believe this happens already with the dying.
The only other option is to be drugged up to the eyeballs with Morphine, for weeks or months living in a constant vegetative Zombie state? That’s not really living is it.

Cherful,

<<That is why it has to be the sole choice of the dying person, only they understand the level of their pain and endurance. What other options can you suggest for a person dying a cruel death.>>

In its position statement, “the AMA (Australian Medical Association) maintains that doctors should not be involved in interventions that have as their primary intention the ending of a person’s life.“This does not include the discontinuation of treatments that are of no medical benefit to a dying patient. This is not euthanasia,” says AMA president Dr Michael Gannon,http://ajp.com.au/news/doctors-not-involved-euthanasia-ama/

We know from the experience of euthanasia in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg that criteria for VAD are violated by the medical profession and they cannot be trusted to get the patients' permission. Involuntary euthanasia happens too often.

As for reducing the level of pain for a suffering person, we have facilities in palliative care that are designed especially for this.

It should not be the 'sole choice' of one dying person as there are deleterious consequences. We know this from the horrendous example of the Nazis in World War 2.

OsPhen
“Doctors should not be involved in interventions resulting in death”

They don’t have to be. The patient themselves can swallow the medication surrounded by their loving families.
The doctors can be involved in the legal side only, certifying the terminal state of the patient. That then goes to a judious tribunal
who approve or not,of the patient being given the end of life medicine, based on the suffering of their illness.

There is one legal representative who witnesses the dying event and reports back to the tribunal. To avoid the slippery slope, Post-Mortems should be carried out on all people who die in nursing homes. If the person dies at home without the legal witness present, then a post Mortem should be held on them too.

There should be no need for the endless cruelty of people dying in agonising pain, when we are clever enough and have the legal means to put safeguards into the system.

Cherful,

You make it sound so easy: <<The patient themselves can swallow the medication surrounded by their loving families.
The doctors can be involved in the legal side only, certifying the terminal state of the patient.>>

This article on 'Euthanasia in the Netherlands' (2017) states:

"Under strictly specified circumstances, physicians in the Netherlands are allowed to perform euthanasia and assisted suicide at the request of a patient. Euthanasia is defined as the active termination of life at a patient’s voluntary and well-informed request. Physician-assisted suicide (PAS) also comes under this definition. Only physicians are allowed to perform euthanasia.

"In most cases the request for euthanasia comes from patients in the final stages of a malignant disease. A request for euthanasia can only be granted in cases in which the patient and physician have exhausted all options and the patient’s suffering cannot be remedied or alleviated by any other means. There is no right to euthanasia for patients in the Netherlands and physicians are not under any obligation to perform euthanasia", http://www.knmg.nl/actualiteit-opinie/nieuws/nieuwsbericht/euthanasia-in-the-netherlands.htm
What actually happens?

(continued)

Cherful,

(continued)

"In Dutch usage, the term euthanasia legally covers cases in which medical professionals administer lethal injection and those in which doctors provide drugs that patients ingest to end their life. The Dutch system gives deference to doctors’ expertise; it respects the relationship between an individual doctor and a patient; and it recognizes that mental illness can be painful and debilitating. Yet this system illustrates how priorities that appear logical on their own terms combine, in some cases, to produce disturbing results. A respected Dutch-language medical journal recently reported that an 18-year-old had died via medically assisted suicide for psychiatric problems", http://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/06/noa-pothoven-and-dutch-euthanasia-system/591262/

"Unlike in most other jurisdictions where medically facilitated deaths are legal, the euthanasia law in the Netherlands has no requirement that a patient be close to death. The law’s directives are few and broadly drawn. Aside from obtaining formal consent—a patient’s request must be “informed” and “voluntary and well considered”—the doctor must be “satisfied” that two conditions are met: The patient has “unbearable suffering, without prospect of improvement,” and there is “no reasonable alternative” to address it" (The Atlantic loc. cit.).

The New Scientist (June 1992) lifted the lid on the truth of what's happening in the Netherlands: "The details are alarming. At least a third of the 5000 or so Dutch patients who each year receive lethal doses of drugs from their doctors do not give their unequivocal consent. About 400 of these patients never even raise the issue of euthanasia with their doctors. Moreover, of those who willingly opt for euthanasia, only about 5 per cent do so solely because of unbearable pain”, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13418264-800/