Confronting MAID: Is it Autonomy?
by Ms. Boomer-ang
Referring to Medical Aid in Dying (MAID) as an individual’s autonomous action can divert discussions to when autonomy is desirable and away from whether MAID really gives the patient/victim autonomy.
MAID requires the cooperation of other people. Autonomy implies self-initiation. But how many fatal prescriptions are first suggested or initiated by the patient/victim’s family, friends, medical staff, social workers, caregivers, insurance companies, or Artificial Intelligence? How often are people who have not requested or agreed to MAID presented with a fatal prescription, with at least some of the necessary signatures, possibly including one made electronically on their behalf? Euthanasia policy scholar Wesley J. Smith has noted, “Studies show families rather than patients generally decide when the time has come for euthanasia.”1 When must an individual take active steps to avoid MAID?
Many terms that are used to degrade staying alive in certain conditions relate to the effect on other people. Concepts like “undignified” (implying shameful and disgraceful), “irresponsible, “selfish,” “immature,” “burdensome,” “occupying organs that could benefit someone else,” and “squandering heirs’ money” can pertain to responsibility. Is not submitting to death-hastening out of a sense of responsibility or duty the opposite of autonomy?
Unassisted suicide is an autonomous action. So is foregoing medical attention for months or years until one dies naturally. But actively speeding death is as interventionist as extraordinary efforts to prolong life. If the majority of non-sudden deaths are hastened, it will be living until one’s body dies naturally that will be the autonomous action.
Claims that laws against MAID laws are examples of government intrusion into personal lives can divert the discussion into the appropriateness of any government intrusion. Actually, the discussion should be about what intrusion by the government or equivalent is appropriate for.
Are not most of the people whom anti-MAID laws interfere with those who want an individual dead? Such laws protect the individual from these people, as well as from care facilities and insurers who find it more profitable and efficient to have them dead.
Don’t laws allowing MAID give free rein to these people to pressure, bully, and shame the individual into accepting death-hastening? Don’t they allow care facilities, caregivers, and insurers to set policies of killing, expelling, and/or overcharging anybody with certain conditions in certain circumstances? That these are private entities doesn’t make their policies any less intrusive or any less strict than government laws.
And in places where medical facilities are part of government services or heavily supported by the government, the facility’s deciding to kill a person is government intrusion to cause death.
Don’t pro-MAID laws give justification to claim that to live until one’s body dies naturally, or to stay alive in certain conditions, is unpatriotic, sinful, obscene, cowardly, the equivalent of not paying taxes, or “just not done”? That to want to stay alive in certain conditions is a clinical sign of “irrationality”?
Will many people, from policymakers to caregivers to the general public, think the only alternates to quick MAID are “slow” death-hastening, like terminal sedation and medication mini-overdoses? Will even many who reject quick MAID feel anything that smells of life-maintenance is “wrong” or “looks bad”?
Doesn’t the availability of MAID change people’s conception of what is appropriate and possible?
NOTES
1Wesley J. Smith, Forced Exit: The Slippery Slope from Assisted Suicide to Legalized Murder. Times Books (Random House), 1997, p. 103
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For more of our posts on euthanasia, see:
Figuring out Euthanasia: What Does it Really Mean?
Euthanasia by Poverty: Stories from Canada
How Euthanasia and Poverty Threaten the Disabled
What’s Cruel for the Incarcerated is Cruel for the Terminally Ill
Assisted Suicide as the Next Roe v. Wade: Time to Pay Attention
Assisted Suicide is Inequality, Just Like All Legal Violence



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