Some people are uninterested in suffering for the sake of it.<p>Why the article felt the need to give voice to a self-righteous religious organization[0] funded by the Koch Foundation, while calling them "non-partisan" is not mentioned.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardus" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardus</a>
Less disturbing than the raw percentage is the context in which some of these suicides have reportedly been carried out. People who are simply lonely, who have addictions, who don't have money, who feel they simply don't have options. In sum, not the kind of people who have a truly terminal illness and will pass away in a few weeks or months, but people who could potentially live well and flourish if resources existed to support them.<p>IMO, a society that reaches for suicide as a solution is going to be a society that consistently fails its most vulnerable.
There's no dignity in suffering. Not allowing people to die with dignity and forcing them to suffer till the very end is the infliction of Judeo-Christian values on the populace.<p>We claim to have religious freedom yet we don't when the religious are able to use the force of law to impose their religion on us at the time of our death - the time we need freedom from their religious nonsense <i>the most.</i>
This appears to be the same for the Netherlands which is around 5%. Although like Canada, the Netherlands is seeing an increase in a yearly basis. It isn’t clear when this plateaus.<p>I am not an expert in end of life care but I think it is messy for a lot of people (eg dementia) so it may become quite a high number eventually.
>To access MAID, an individual must have a serious illness, disease or disability which causes irreversible decline and unbearable suffering that "cannot be relieved under conditions [the patient considers] acceptable," says the federal government.<p>>"We should be ensuring that we never get to that point because we have better care available," Vachon said.<p>This seems like wishful thinking. Ultimately until we have regenerative medicine (SENS etc.) people are gonna get old and die. Trying to keep them alive even when they have terrible quality of life is not necessarily a humane option: <a href="https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/07/17/who-by-very-slow-decay...</a><p>Sometimes I fantasize about replacing end-of-life care with a cryopreservation option. Given how expensive medicine is, with economies of scale, I could imagine cryonics being cheaper than current end-of-life care. And it actually delivers on the promise of possibly giving people a meaningful extension on life, depending how medical technology develops in the future.<p>I'd be especially excited about replacing my current health insurance with a cheaper health insurance option that aggressively cryopreserves me (instead of taking care of me 'til the end) if I get a terminal illness.