The critique of Canada’s plan to authorize euthanasia and assisted suicide for mental health disabilities, “Is euthanasia for everyone?” [Editorial, Jan. 28], should be lauded. A young man with clinical depression and partial blindness was approved for hastened death. Canadians in poverty are requesting assisted suicide and are, in some cases, being approved. A Canadian woman with disabilities could not afford accessible housing on her monthly benefit and is approved for euthanasia. Disabled Canadians who cannot afford long-term services and supports, pain care or food are opting for euthanasia. The Canadian safety net and medical systems are underfunded and overburdened. Adding easy access to euthanasia is a deadly mix for vulnerable people.
The aid-in-dying question
The situation is not substantially different here. Doctors in the United States are prescribing lethal drugs to young women with anorexia whose cases they subjectively deem hopeless and therefore “terminal.” If anorexia, why not other mental health disabilities with high lethality rates, such as opioid use disorder? The editorial admitted that “no procedural protections are perfect” and noted that offering euthanasia “to those with psychiatric illness is especially unwise in a country whose mental health system struggles to provide treatment to all who need it.” The United States’ profit-driven health-care system is abysmally broken, and disparities in care are rampant.
Where assisted suicide is legal here, vulnerable people are at grave risk of discrimination and deadly harm, and we’ve begun to fight back.
Matt Vallière, New York
The writer, an emergency medical worker, is executive director of the Institute for Patients’ Rights and the Patients’ Rights Action Fund.
As medical aid in dying is becoming legal in more states in this country, the terms “euthanasia” and “assisted suicide” are inaccurate, each in its own way. Where medical aid in dying, or MAID, is legal in the United States, the medication must be self-administered, whereas euthanasia involves a physician or other person being the agent of death. The term “suicide” and, hence, assisted suicide, should refer to a situation where the individual is not facing a terminal prognosis. Aid in dying is what it says: It is helping someone who is already dying and has no hope of recovery.
The Jan. 28 editorial, “Is euthanasia for everyone?,” didn’t mention the special case of aid in dying for advanced dementia patients. Although I agree with the cautions raised about those with mental disorders, I strongly support MAID for dementia patients who request it in writing while they are still of sound mind. Unlike the mental disorders included in the editorial, Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia are terminal.
Because of the severe and long-drawn-out effects of the various forms of dementia, MAID should be available under well-regulated circumstances to dementia patients who seek it. Their loss of personhood, dignity and so much quality and enjoyment of life is a tragedy for them and all who love them. The option of shortening the ravaging progress of their disease should be available to them.
Susan M. Flanders, Washington
The writer is an Episcopal priest whose ministry is focused on end-of-life options.
I applaud The Post’s editorial opposing liberal euthanasia laws. Indeed, as someone with a terminal illness — I have early-stage Alzheimer’s disease — I strongly oppose assisted suicide. I want to be clear that this is different from the option of withholding care when death is otherwise imminent.
Every day since my diagnosis, I think about my choices. What should I do now? Especially when I know at some point, I will lose my ability to make my own decisions. The editorial was helpful and offered me another way to look at the process, and particularly the question of “informed consent.” In theory, this is always expected — required — from the person wishing to end his or her own life.
It occurs to me that informed consent is impossible. “Informed” presumes we know the choices or options. To my knowledge, there is no scientific, factual knowledge of the condition of death. We “assume” that the pain is gone. In fact, it is only gone from those who watch. We only have our beliefs about what post earthly existence is or is not.
And though that might sound silly to some, I have learned that the journey through this illness seems to be more painful for loved ones — the family and those who watch the declines and changes in the afflicted individual. My heart goes out to them, and yet I see over and over moments when the pain of the watcher is motivation for the desire to end.
We don’t know what happens, if anything, after our last breath. We should not be allowed to hasten that moment, except perhaps when death is known to be imminent.
Samuel A. Simon, McLean