Disabled Paranoia
A disabled panelist on the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) argued that the terminally ill should be prevented from taking their lives, (or receiving assistance to), on two grounds:
- Everyone must be treated equally. She effectively asserts a teen wanting to kill herself because her boyfriend dumped her or a gay boy whom Christians have convinced has no right to life, whose whole lives are ahead of them, are no different from a terminally ill person with only weeks live in unbearable suffering.
- She claims that not blocking the suicides of the terminally ill is a form of discrimination against them. If you don’t interfere with their attempts to avoid unbearable suffering, it means you don’t care about them. This is madness. If you cared, you listen to what they are asking you. You should care more about their unbearable suffering and what they are asking you to do than imposing your backward religious superstitions or slippery slope paranoias on them.
I get so impatient with the disabled, who seem to think that granting others the right to die is equivalent to surrendering their own right to live. They are so selfish and so irrational.
When there is no formal procedure, the disabled are in much greater danger than they would be with review by multiple disinterested experts. Many of the disabled have been exposed to dishonest religious propaganda that tries to confuse them by claiming formally requested physician assisted suicide is the same as un-requested genocide, as Hitler promoted. They are extremely selfish people who put more weight on their paranoid imaginings than the unbearable suffering of others.
~ Roedy (1948-02-04 age:70)