Even as we speak, "right to die" advocates are lobbying to loosen the "onerous" restrictions against euthanasia in the Netherlands, to include people who never consented.
I am aware of that movement. Please don't confuse that with "right to die."
One of the problems we have with our politics these days is that people hype and demonize and conflate what someone is advocating with whatever slippery slope they imagine potentially resulting from it or even with unrelated dark fears they have in their heart. Thus you get gays being assumed to be pedophiles and pro-choicers called baby killers.
The right to die is no more than the right to self-determination, the right to be protected from the very end-of-life treatment you seek in a Catholic country. If you want to linger endlessly in pain and hopelessness when your time comes, I fully support your right to do that, although it would pain me too much to stop by your hospital bed and watch you do it. I would hope you would, in turn, support my right to bail out.
In your utopian Catholic country, there is no right to self-determination, only God's will. Please consider that in this country we have a right not to be subordinated to the religious beliefs of others. Please consider also that in this country those who think that there are things worse than death have rights, too.
There seem to be several people advocating that position on this thread. If it's a "private decision" by the family members, there's no need to ascertain whether it was the patient's wishes.
I questioned earlier your assertion that folks here were advocating involuntary euthanasia. You replied only that you didn't want to name names, which I appreciated, but only now do I find your basis for that assessment. Unfortunately I wasn't looking for that contemporaneously and after-the-fact can't recall enough of the discussions to evaluate their intentions. I understand that private decisions could go either way--they could respect the wishes of the patient or they could frustrate them. I have been under the impression that the intent of those advocating making decisions in the family was to have them made by the best qualified, which would include the patient, the family, the doctors, and the hospital's medical ethics board. But there might have been something more sinister in there that I didn't pick up on because I wasn't looking for it.
Re my friend who was paranoid about her organs being harvested prematurely, don't you find that rather nutty? Nutty or not, she has a right to have her life protected, but should we stop our practices on organ transplant, which save many lives, over it? I don't think you would want that. What we do to accommodate both is give people, and their families, the option to donate or not. Does that result in some anomalies, maybe so. But you wouldn't want to stop organ donation over it just to prevent anyone ever dying prematurely to get their organs? It seems to me that the same balance can be achieved with the right to die.
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