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)….

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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.