Ladies and gentlemen another thread on ATS which included legalised suicide stirred me to make this thread. I am basically going to quote what i put in that one and start this as a separate subject.


Have you ever watched someone writhing in agony from liver cancer? Breathing with a horrible rattle? Have you ever had them look into your eyes and ask you to kill them? I have. I didn't do it because i couldn't bring myself to kill someone but i have seen the anguish, agony and indignity of someone in that situation. After seeing that i fully support legalised euthanasia.

I watched a man as his abdomen inflated wildly over months. I saw the veins at the surface of his skin stretched horribly in a dark blue, like someone has shoved a baloon down his throat and carried on inflating it. I saw him sob in agony as the morphine waned. I saw him vomiting as the morphine irritated his stomach and gave him further cramps whilst making him so out of it he could barely speak but still experience the pain.

Imagine if you were in terrible pain, pain like torture, even through the haze of morphine you couldn't shake this pain. Even when you resorted to marijuana at the risk of prosecution the pain just would not leave you. You had no life and were often soiling yourself and having to be treated like a baby. All the while having an adult mind and crying out of shame as someone wiped your backside. Are you telling me you would happily endure that situation? Or would you wish for death to come and take you? I know i would rather die than have this happen to me. I have often told family if i had such a condition and it was incurable i would kill myself while i still had the ability to do so.

Yes i support legalised suicide. It is the humane thing. Of course the patient has to decide this and not the family or doctors. If a patient cannot be cured, has no hope, is suffering, then i fully support suicide.

My reasons are simple. If someone is in terrible pain like this they often cannot take their own lives. They last as long as they can to spend time with family and by the time they want to die they have no ability to kill themselves. Some will realise this and try and take their lives beforehand but they often make a bad attempt and just overdose on paracetamol or ibuprofen or something silly like that. This results in more suffering.

Legalised suicide needs to exist in a society that considers itself humane.

I agree with everything that you said.

Doctors need to have the freedom to assist their terminal patients end their lives with grace and dignity when there is no other option than pain and suffering.

Originally posted by skeptic1
I agree with everything that you said.

Doctors need to have the freedom to assist their terminal patients end their lives with grace and dignity when there is no other option than pain and suffering.

Well just to be clear it needs to be the patients decision not the doctors. That is my position on this. Obviously if the patient wants to endure then they should be allowed to. Any program of euthanasia would require three doctors who are not biased. They would be needed to decide whether the illness was terminal or not and agree on it. After that legalised suicide should be allowed and the means given to the patient to carry it out.