On a brisk day at a restaurant outside Chicago, Deb Robertson sat with her teenage grandson to talk about her death.
She’ll probably miss his high school graduation. She declined the extended warranty on her car. Sometimes she wonders who will be at her funeral.
Those things don’t frighten her much. The 65-year-old didn’t cry when she learned two months ago that the cancerous tumors in her liver were spreading, portending a tormented death.
But later, she received a call. A bill moving through the Illinois Legislature to allow certain terminally ill patients to end their own lives with a doctor’s help had made progress.
Then she cried.
“Medical-aid in dying is not me choosing to die,” she says she told her 17-year-old grandson. “I am going to die. But it is my way of having a little bit more control over what it looks like in the end.”
That same conversation is happening beside hospital beds and around dinner tables across the country, as Americans who are nearing life’s end negotiate the terms with themselves, their families and, now, state lawmakers.
We need a federal constitutional amendment of bodily autonomy. Abortions, tattoos, personal drug use, gender reassignment, plastic surgery, suicide, neuralink, etc. All the same issue: My body, fuck off. You can make it more complicated than that but it’s not.
It doesn’t matter whether you agree with face tattoos or not. Nobody is making you get one. It’s not your concern. An artist can choose not to give face tattoos, as a doctor can choose whether they want to give a vasectomy to a young child-free man. But the government should have no say about what a person is allowed to do or have done to their own body. The government can regulate to make it safer, but not disallow.
Absolutely.
Though I mostly agree with you, I think its a more complicated issue than the picture you’re painting.
If I want to kill myself, it’s my life right? Only many times people get suicidal due to mental illness or hardship and don’t really want to does it’s more an “temporary issue”, if you will, that can pass with time, or can be cured with medication, therapy, or resolving the situation that caused the suicidal thoughts. So government steps in and outright stop you. Euthanasia laws exist to make sure that people only end their lives when there is no way for the person to continue living without suffering, and it requires some bureaucracy.
Facial tattoos? Sure, do what you want but I think many people underestimate the issues that will enter their lives if they get them. It might cost you a great job, you ready for that? I’d say regulations for that should require like 30 days for you to think about what you are about to do…
Gender reassignments? Sure, but… At what age are we going to allow that? I’ve seen way too many people saying it’s okay for any kid at 5 years old. I’ve seen some kids where at 5, it’s pretty clear that yeah, this kid is different. I’ve also personally seen 10 year olds where it was clear that the parents were pushing it on the child and then the school and everything around the child jumped on the bandwagon and kept supporting the parents decision z not the child’s decision.
Persona drug use, sure. There are more than enough drugs, however that WILL destroy your life. There is no good outcome for someone using meth, for example l, outside a medical treatment, perhaps. So you do outright forbid that. Same for opioids, or are you going to tell me that free availability of opioids is a good idea?
Vaccines, anyone? Thanks to anti scientific and illiterate conspiracy idiots, measles are back and brace yourself for polio. Those fuckers that spread this bullshit should be locked up for murder, IMHO. There is no personal choice with vaccines, you fucking take them, or you will cause the suffering of others around you so shut up and take them.
Hell, even things like seatbelts can, should, and must be forced by government because if you don’t, you get the idiots believing that seatbelts are dangerous because “insert stupid story here” so I let my 5 year old in the front seat right next to me, both without seat belt going 120kmh down the freeway. People like that should have their kids taken away, honestly, because they can’t be responsible for a cat, let alone a child.
Bodily autonomy is not as easy as it seems, a lot of idiots need to be protected from themselves, and the rest of us must be protected from those idiots too. By law.
Doctors and medical professionals should decide whether they want to perform gender reassignments, not the government. The medical professionals all seems to agree that they won’t perform a full gender reassignment until the patient is at least in their later teens. Anybody too young for gender reassignment is just being prescribed puberty blockers to give them more time to decide.
I don’t see any problem with just leaving it in the hands of medical professionals. Yea, some people may say it’s okay for 5 year olds to get a full gender reassignment, but those people aren’t doctors, and the process can’t really happen without a doctor involved.
The problem is there’s always some crackpot doctor who will make a poor, non-medically influenced decision and without regulation there’s no way to prevent it.
The “vaccines cause autism” guy was a licensed doctor, and I think we all agree he wasn’t making medically sound decisions.
Yeah, and that also got reversed and if you google the guy it shows “British disgraced former surgeon and medical research falsifier and antivaxxers”
You can’t always stop cheaters before they cause damaged, that is life, but you can punish him, learn, and move on.
your entire life is temporary.
Yeah and I think you perfectly understand what I meant by that.
Drugs can be regulated by availability, not by illegality of ingestion. It can be illegal to sell.
If circumcision is legal, gender reassignment should be as well. Both are voluntary genital surgeries that are medically unnecessary. I don’t agree with it, but it’s none of my business. That’s a decision for kids and their parents and doctors to make.
Seatbelts can be a condition of using public roads, same as the minimum drinking age of 21 is actually a condition for federal highway funding. Same for vaccines, you don’t have to but you can’t go to public school, get into stadiums, or fly in airplanes. And they should expect quarantine procedures in hospitals and higher health insurance, Do I think people should be vaccinated, absolutely, but if they don’t want to they should just face whatever repercussions are reasonable - but it doesn’t need to be illegal to be unvaccinated.
Like I said, you can make it more complicated, but I don’t think it is. Just because it’s legal, doesn’t mean it’s unregulated. The government can impose regs to make us safer and slow us down from trying to hurt ourselves, but they have no business imposing laws that limit a basic and fundamental human right, to decide what to do to their own body.
For suicide I would imagine a compassionate therapy rehab-like system. You get checked in and go through a few weeks, they try psychedelics or whatever might help you, and if you still want to when it’s through you get a permit and a lethal injection. Better than having people leap off bridges because they’re out of options. Or overdose on painkillers and burden the healthcare system. Or traumatize their family. By the way the government spends a lot of money on suicide barrier rails on bridges that could be better spent on treatment facilities like the one I’m describing.
I generally don’t disagree with you, but just want to point out that killing legal ways to get drugs usually doesn’t stop people from getting them, instead it just makes the black market flourish and makes it harder to make sure you’re getting clean stuff. When it comes to drugs, efforts need to be on education, prevention and rehabilitation, rather than criminalizing any part of the process
Agreed. I was thinking about prescriptions, not illegal drugs. But it’s clear with fentanyl and other prescription drugs that even that is not working. I think the government should be focused on purity, safety, and non-religious rehab. I don’t think the education part is really helping, except for websites like erowid.
But bodily autonomy only really covers ingesting. Perhaps that could make drug tests unconstitutional.
Heavily depends on the context, I’d say? Being drunk while driving should absolutely stay illegal, and having drug tests for that would be a necessity I guess
That’s like seatbelts, a condition for a privilege. We also condition that drivers have good enough vision, but that doesn’t violate any rights. I was thinking of drug tests for employment.
Ah, yeah, for employment that’s different, sure. That doesn’t really seem to be a thing here in Germany (might even be illegal?), so didn’t think of that
Circumcision is definitely not comparable with gender reassignments. Having said that, circumcisions should be illegal (unless for medical requirements) under 18. Let’s see how many people want to circumcise after 18 for their religion, won’t be many I can assure you
Seatbelts are required because of physics and sometimes we simply don’t allow people to be THAT stupid. Also, if you ever want to have a normal medical system, you can’t have people play Russian roulette because a Facebook post told them to.
Vaccines are not about your they are about your community. We either all vaccinate and live with less suffering or we allow “freedom” and invite more suffering because again some idiots read Facebook posts that told them… Vaccines should be mandatory.
We live in the 21st century, we live in a rather awesome world thanks to science and technology. You can’t pick and choose “oh but this science I don’t like so we’re not doing it”. If you don’t like science and technology, that’s fine, go back to a cave in the forrest and when you’re dead within the year, the problem has been resolved. So yes, you take your vaccine so others won’t have to suffer and no, you don’t get to learn “intelligent design” because it’s stone age bullcrap that will turn you into an idiot that will fight against scientific progress.
I wear seatbelts and I’m vaccinated but I believe in freedom for others. I wish I hadn’t been circumcised, and I think it should be illegal too. It was a violation of my bodily autonomy because I was incapable of consent. An overarching constitutional amendment is what is needed to clarify why circumcision has a different legal standing than other forms of genital mutilation of minors. But I think it shouldn’t be thought of as different. I don’t think 18 is a magical age of bodily autonomy. Abortion, or other bodily choices can be made independently at younger ages.
We don’t need these endless fights over corner-cases of freedom. You spend the time all at once to determine what bodily autonomy means, and what the government’s responsibility is in protecting that fundamental human right, and under what rare circumstances one’s autonomy can be limited. You can make conditions for privileges (seatbelts for roads, vaccines for travel/crowds), but you cannot force vaccinations or brain chips, or RFID implant tags, or anything on people.
I’ve been on opiates for the past decade and a half due to two failed surgeries. I’m not saying my life is perfect by any means, but I can guarantee that I’d be a worse parent and a lot less social without said opiates.
I do take tolerance breaks and I’m (usually) somewhat strict with my dosage, but still, it doesn’t necessarily “ruin your life” even if you don’t do all that.
Not arguing that it can’t be addictive, however. It absolutely can, but it is also possible to live with it.
It would also be a lot easier if it wasn’t completely bound to the current doctor you have to go through. Since my second surgery I’ve had ~12 different doctors, all with their own ideas about how things should be treated, and almost none of them have paid any attention to the fact that changing medication or dosages arbitrarily messes up my daily life every goddamn time. If I could just take care of it myself it’d be way less of a hassle.
Punishing people because they try to avoid pain is such a bad idea in the first place, as we’ll do almost anything if it’s bad enough.
I wonder if you could grow your own papaver somniferum? It’s the same species as poppy seeds for bagels or baking. It’s grown ornamentally so I think it only “becomes” illegal when you milk the pods. Maybe it’s too fun, I don’t know I have no experience with opiates.
If I lived somewhere suitable I’d probably (eventually) try as I have some previous knowledge of growing …stuff.
With that said though, due to the local climate and amount of poppies you’d need even for a limited personal supply it’d be very suboptimal at best.
It’s also a lot harder to properly dose and keep your tolerance low with poppies unless you really know what you’re doing.
I have no problem with people taking opioids as medication with the support of a doctor. Opioids have been used extremely irresponsible by doctors due to lack oversight and laws in the US, cussing a shit show, but there we get into legal and regulatory territories.
As long as it’s done responsible, any drug might be useful. Ive read great stuff about LSD in mental health treatment, and would love to see more.
You can probably imagine how it was to live through that time with chronic pain. I live in northern Europe and even here doctors went from reasonable to outright hostile at the mere mention of opiates. I had one doctor write angry letters to another doctor because she had written me a 3 month prescription instead of the usual one month at a time.
It’s taken them almost 15 years to trust me with a 6 month prescription at a time.
I can understand the reaction, you can’t deny the suffering that the abuse of opioids has caused in the world, I fully believe they might be a bit over protective with it, which sucks for you.
Either way, I have no problem with opioids, or any medication (hell, even meth) being used responsibily by doctors to ease suffering and cure illnesses.
I just think that those that are addicted (to anything, really) should be treated (forcibly if needed) and where possible cured from their addictions.
Prohibiting drugs indeed is not a good way to go, though I would not allow substances like meth or opioids readily available over the counter either.
I’d probably be okay with over-the-counter availability of opiates in regulated doses, but otherwise I agree with you. Meth in particular afaik doesn’t have any medical uses that other amphetamines wouldn’t do better, so I’m with you there.
It’s borderline impossible to cure someone from an addiction they’re not ready to fight themselves. You can lock them in, but then it’s simply prison with another name. Give someone a reason and the means to live a better life and they have a better chance of making it, in my opinion.
CONCERN TROLL DETECTED!
The universally agreed age is 18 at the youngest for the thing you call “Gender Reassignment”, typically that refers to the surgery to turn one’s “Outtie” into an “Innie”, the youngest person ever to have this operation was 16 and had to go to Germany to accomplish it.
Personally seen 10 year olds having it pushed on them by the parents? First off, anecdotal evidence, second, this situation has never been confirmed to exist outside of one of those scam e-mails they send to old people… These “Wacky liberals forcing their kids to wear panties!” are a right wing boogeyman… judging on how you say Kilometers instead of Miles I’m guessing you’re from the UK, a lot of anti-trans propaganda there
The only medical transition options for a child are medications to delay puberty, which are of course, reversible.
We use miles in the UK.
Let me clarify the reassignment statement: I’ve seen a ten year old girl who always was the girliest girl in class over the period of a month suddenly do a 180, then claim that as of now she’s a boy. She did not transition yet, but as told, will be receiving puberty blockers.
On your point 3: I’ve found a lot of studies in support AND a lot of studies that do not support it. British NHS quite recently stopped prescribing those blockers as there is not enough evidence that they are safe or effective. I’d say the “of course” in your phrasing is not warranted.
On the "concern troll " nonsense, just because you read something you disagree with doesn’t mean the other person is trying to troll anyone. You’d get a lot more out of discussions if you wouldn’t start screeching right away
How about shutting the fuck up and minding your own business and letting people live and die their own stories?
How about you calm down and don’t screech whenever you hear an opinion that doesn’t align with yours?
From your response I think it’s fair to assume that you’re an anti social ego centric asshole as you apparently don’t care about people around me. Either that, or, you didn’t read what I wrote and jut decided to screech because “opinion I don’t agree with in the first sentence so no need to actually read”
What I wrote is when people are a danger to mothers or themselves. You apparently are okay with people offing themselves by jumping off a bridge when they have a hard time in life whereas I would stop them and try to help them as I understand that people sometimes make the wrong decision and well, terminally wrong decisions is something I would like to prevent, unlike you.
If a person really is suffering permanently and there is no solution, then that is a whole different story. There too, though, you can help by allowing someone to die with dignity instead of splattering themselves on the pavement accidentally taking an innocent bystander with him.
Like it or not, you are not the only person on this world, there are people around you. You live in a society, so we need rules to ensure everyone can live as free and happy as possible without causing harm to others. You may not always like all the rules but they’re there because YOU ARE NOT THE ONLY PERSON ON THIS WORLD.
So stop being so anti social and yelling insults when you see an opinion you disagree with. Talk, or better yet LISTEN.
Bro, I’m not reading that 😂
Of course you don’t, twitter TikTok and Facebook taught you that the real truth can be done in under 140 characters and 20 seconds. Long attention spans and thoughtful reasoning is bad for your health!
There’s already a job related to this - Bioethics. It’s complicated and also has to do with consent and state of mind for nearly every medical procedure, not just death.
In an actually decent society so long as it’s not offensive it shouldn’t matter what is on your face. Why does this stop you from getting a job? That’s the issue right there. Then again in my ideal society at least capitalism and private businesses wouldn’t exist in the first place.
Chances are you are a hypocrite here anyway even if you don’t realise it but ignoring that for now. Legalising even relatively dangerous things like opioids is necessary because ultimately people will do it anyway. By making it illegal or you are changing it where they get it from (clean, well regulated supply causing less damage vs buying stuff from criminal gangs), what effects it has on society (criminal gangs and lots of convicts), and how much you can actually help people.
People are going to hate this but I am not convinced about forcing treatment on people. Maybe if they have a recognized mental illness that makes them demonstrably irrational then I can understand it. I think COVID demonstrated that the concept of vaccine induced hurd immunity doesn’t always hold up as even after mass vaccinations in countries where the vast majority got the vaccine you still see infections and sometimes deaths. It’s better as an individual to have the vaccine, but as for benefiting other people? Seems pretty marginal now to be honest. I say this as someone who used to believe the whole concept of hurd immunity through vaccines. Maybe if we had more effective vaccines for covid…
Seatbelts aren’t a bodily autonomy issue, no one is entitled to a car or to drive. To think otherwise is terrible Americanism. Driving is a privilege not a right. Get it through your damn head!
I partially agree on the drugs point. It shouldn’t be forbidden, but users of said drugs should be regarded as patients in need of medical care, forcibly if needed. There comes a point where these types of drug users can no longer care or decide for themselves, long before somebody must make the decision to steer them away from that end point. What is that based on? The hundreds of homeless drug users that are using in front of kids that i see every day. Somebody has to force their hands before it gets to that point.
And on forced medical treatment and vaccines it shows that you too don’t understand how vaccines work. No, vaccines don’t give 100% protection but it’s like wearing a bullet proof vest and get shot at. You still get injured but a shit load less than without. Some people get shot and still die (Bullets hitting US vests were allowed to push up to 2 inches into the chest, which CAN be lethal). Same with vaccines. You have to start thinking in %. Instead of 90% getting sick, now only 5% gets sick and instead of millions dying, only hundreds die.
The issue with vaccines is though that you need herd immunity. You need at least 90% vaccinated, better 95. Add in people that cannot be vaccinated (immuno compromised, people who are already very I’ll from something else, etc) and you have basically no space for healthy individuals to refuse vaccinations. If they do, vaccines will work less well.
See Covid for this, where loads of anti social illiterate fuckers, fueled by conspiracy nonsense form the internet, decided they knew better than doctors and medical professionals. We didn’t get enough people vaccinated, Covid went on, mutated, requiring more vaccines, which too were ignored and now Covid is here to stay. The good thing is that it severity has lowered to mostly being like the flu, but it is still out there and still kills (small amounts of) people. It didn’t have to go that far had we forced people to take the jab. Vaccines is not about freedom, it’s about responsibility. I don’t want to risk slowly dying while gasping for air just because you want to have the freedom to believe in conspiracy theories.
This " but muh freedom, I love conspiracies!" behavior is the reason that measles are back with a vengeance, and polio, FUCKING POLIO, is rearing it’s head again after being almost eradicated… It’s tiring and sad to see how self destructive we can be.
When your actions make you a (possibly lethal) danger to yourself or to others, you should be forcibly treated, absolutely.
Also COVID started mutating before the vaccines were even approved. YOU don’t understand vaccines or COVID. Not to mention you couldn’t even get a vaccine in time in some countries because of vaccines companies, copyright, and capitalism more broadly.
Because capital got injected like crazy (and improved technology) pharmaceutical companies managed to create a vaccine in record time. Claiming that capitalism caused delays is beyond short sighted.
Covid, like all life, mutates all the time, though few mutations make it big. Covid did manage to slowly mutatie due to the amount of people getting sick which was mainly caused by idiot politicians (hello Trump!) That didn’t wanted to isolate, or thought that Covid was a scam or something.
I do understand the basics of vaccines and Covid, because i read medical journals. It doesn’t matter though, because more importantly, I listen to the experts and I don’t read Facebook conspiracy posts or the “lone wolf’s doctors who know better than all experts who says that they want to enslave you!!”
If everyone had listened to the experts, Covid would have caused a lot less casualties, especially in the US where the orange retard caused so much death and suffering that he might as well get a nice place ect to hitler in hell.
I am not talking about the development of the vaccine, I am talking about deploying it worldwide. Some countries couldn’t afford it. Others didn’t have the right infrastructure and personnel to use it even if they could Because of that and some political issues some countries took to making their own including Cuba and Russia.
I don’t follow conspiracy theorists. I don’t understand why you keep bringing them up.
I know what hurd immunity is and I said as much. Maybe try reading before you jump to conclusions.
Hurd immunity works really well for things like smallpox or measles because you have vaccines that prevent transmission effectively (not just symptoms, actual transmission and infection), and they don’t mutate very quickly so as to overcome the vaccines. It never worked perfectly against influenza because of antigenic shift meaning the virus mutates faster than you can make new vaccines to treat it. There are also too many varieties for a single vaccine to treat. HIV is the same problem on steroids, that’s partly why there are no vaccines for it. COVID vaccines face the same issue. This doesn’t mean that the vaccines are useless, or that they don’t help reduce hospitalisation - I never claimed this at all. Rather it means that by themselves they won’t eliminate the disease in their current state.
You specifically talk about hitting 90% of people vaccinated in order to create hurd immunity. That’s exactly what we have in the UK, yet still we see infections and deaths.
What makes you think I don’t understand vaccines? I probably understand them better than you do. Be honest did you know what antigenic shift was before I brought it up? Do you know what the difference between a killer CF8+ T cell and a CD4+ helper T cell is and what roles they play in the adaptive immune response? What’s the difference between a complement protein and an antibody?
I am not claiming vaccines do nothing. I myself have had three of them. What I am saying is this:
a) you can’t ethically force any treatment including a vaccine on someone outside of very specific circumstances like a mental health crisis
b) that the effectiveness of COVID vaccines were oversold to the public
c) that said overselling combined with other lies, exaggerations, bad policy and bad research created public distrust that has set back vaccine advocy and science advocacy for a decade or more
d) labelling anyone who has any concerns at all about COVID policy or vaccines as anti-vaxxer or anti-science only hurts advocacy, encourages misinformation, and discourages critical thinking
e) that we need more than just vaccines to fix COVID. That’s why we have other treatments and prophylactics like antiviral medicine. This is already used against other diseases like Influenza and HIV that show resistance to vaccination via antigenic shift.
Like it’s actually no wonder we have antivaxxers after everything your average pro vaccine person has done, on top of all the government scaremongering, hypocrisy and plain incompetence shown in the pandemic. If you want an example of what that looks like look no further than the UK, where I live. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partygate
The way you’re name dropping suggests you have a Wikipedia level knowledge of these things. The way you talk about Covid and how it was handled suggests you have a Facebook conspiracy theory level knowledge of the events that transpired.
Yes, ooohhh, a lot of mistakes were made. Yes, some government officials were huge irresponsible assholes.
None of that changes the fact that vaccines are not only important, they are vital in ensuring people won’t have to suffer from preventable illnesses. We NEED vaccines, like it or not.
What we as human beings also must do is start listening again to the experts, not to companies, not to politicians with their own agendas, and especially not to Facebook posts and YouTube or TikTok videos of self subscribed “lone wolf scientists”
I don’t dislike vaccines though. You haven’t actually listened to anything I am saying.
I am telling you it’s not ethical to force treatment on people. You can’t make people responsible for the actions of a virus. Forcing people can only lead to violence and even more anti-vaxxers.
Vaccines alone also are not sufficient or applicable for all situations. People claiming they are aren’t listening to the experts as you put it. They are a useful tool not a perfect one.
I hate to tell you this but listening to experts isn’t enough. They have to get funding somewhere. Individual systematic biases exist. Whenever reading scientific studies you should be looking for the conflict of interest section, for peer review, as well as the reputation of the publisher and the people writing the study. You also have to consider things like sexism, rascism and ableism and how it’s affected the scientific process in the past.