Ludwig Minelli died yesterday at the age of 93. He had long promoted the idea that people facing death should have the option of choosing when and how they died and the organization he founded in 1998 called Dignitas helped people to do just that. It was announced that that was how he died.
Ludwig Minelli, who founded the group in 1998, died on Saturday, days before his 93rd birthday, Dignitas said. It added: “Right up to the end of his life, he continued to search for further ways to help people to exercise their right to freedom of choice and self-determination in their ‘final matters’ – and he often found them.”
…Minelli, a journalist turned lawyer, faced many legal challenges and made several successful appeals to the Swiss supreme court and the European court of human rights (ECHR).
Internationally there has been a significant shift in attitudes towards assisted dying in the nearly three decades since Dignitas was founded. France recently voted to allow some people in the last stages of a terminal illness the right to assisted dying. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Spain and Austria have all introduced assisted dying laws since 2015. In the US, assisted dying is legal in 10 states.
…Paying tribute to Minelli on Sunday, Dignitas said his work had had a lasting influence on Swiss law, pointing to a 2011 ECHR ruling that recognised the right of a person to decide the manner and time of their own end of life.
Swiss law does not allow for euthanasia, where a doctor or other person administers a lethal injection, for example. But assisted dying – when a person who articulates a wish to die commits the lethal act themselves – has been legal for decades.
Unlike some similar organisations in Switzerland, Dignitas, which says it has more than 10,000 members, also offers its services to people living outside the country.
I am aware of the pitfalls associated with this practice, the main one being that some people may be unduly pressured by others to exercise this option simply because they have become seen as a burden to others or to society.
But I for one would like to have this option. I have reached an age where friends and relatives my age (and even younger) are going through very difficult times involving their health, and even dealing with various forms of dementia. Seeing them struggle, and the thought of facing a similarly protracted end of life, is something I wish to to avoid.
Assisted dying is not available everywhere in the US. It is currently available in 11 states and the District of Columbia (of which fortunately California is one) though that right is under threat in two of those places, New Jersey and DC.
A bill to allow assisted dying (in very restricted circumstances) in England and Wales is currently being debated in the UK House of Lords, where the Anglican bishops who sit there by right of their office -- alongside those there by right of birth, and those there through political patronage -- are trying to derail it, by extending the proceedings as long as they can and proposing wrecking amendments.So, any idea that the UK is a secular state, or a democracy, is clearly risible. In Scotland, a similar bill has passed the first of three votes. I think it’s better drafted than the England and Wales bill: it doesn’t demand that the person wanting an assisted death must have less than six months to live -- which is often medically impossible to judge. A possibly amusing wrinkle is that Westminster (i.e. UK) MPs sitting for Scottish and northern Irish constituencies get to vote on laws that only apply to England and Wales, while their own laws in those legislative areas are passed by devolved bodies. However, as we discovered when the Scottish Parliament passed legislation allowing self-identification for trans people, the UK government can overrule it when it likes, even on supposedly “devolved matters”.
Oh -- and I’m glad Ludwig Minelli died as he wished. Millions owe this pioneer a great debt.
A risk that I happen to think is overstated and should in no way be considered a barrier to assisted dying or even euthanasia to the terminally ill or those with non-terminal but severe health concerns.
It’s a right that was enshrined into law here in Canada, albeit with significant and obvious restrictions, with the main one being that the person requesting it has to be of sound mind and there’s no appearance of being pressured.
A friend of mine who had cancer that had metastasized admitted to us once that he had deliberately chosen the hospital for hospice care because this one allowed for MAID (medical aid in dying) programs. The Catholic hospital closer to downtown, obviously, didn’t. He also ended up going for it after he’d had a bad infection that had left him delirious for a few days, and he realized that another infection like that could leave him unable to grant informed consent to the process. And by that point he’d been seeing a number of other people in hospice care well past the point of being in anything resembling a sound state of mind, and really didn’t want to go that route.
It is a scandal, in my opinion, how assisted death is treated. You are required to be, basically, in the middle of being tortured to death by something -- and prove it -- before you can get release. That’s obscene; I don’t think that governments are doing anyone any favors by letting them skip ahead to the part where they don’t suffer as much. The governments still require that you be sane, and suffering and doomed, and they force you to confront that and choose.
What about that is anything but selfishness and control? If I am bored -- extremely bored -- and decide I want to stop living on friday, it’s nobody’s business but mine. I should not have to prove that I am “sane” to some government -- especially if I can serve in their military without proving I’m insane first. None of this is respect of a person’s desire to choose. If I want to end it because I can’t bear the thought of wednesday, tell me whose business that is?
There are two reasons why we can argue that society has an case for involvement in the time and place of someone’s choice to die: 1) they may be crazy, and 2) they may temporarily be wrong. Well, if they’re crazy, require a short cool-off period but, seriously, even if they’re just feeling unbalanced that particular day it’s their business not society’s. And if they’re temporarily wrong: too bad. Temporarily wrong also covers deciding to free dive on wrecks, climb K-2, or shoot up a bunch of heroin. Society has less business saying, “no, I don’t think you are serious about wanting to die” than it does “no, I don’t think you seriously like heroin.” Or gin. If just forces someone who’s tired of being around from taking another chance of suffering terribly.
Oh, that’s another reason: “your relatives want you to stick around so they can love your suffering.” That’s some seriously sick christian shit and I wish we could discard it someday soon. But, seriously, the current state of affairs -- thanks to stupid variations of christianity and selfish families -- is that the only peaceful death you can get is by provoking kidney failure and dying in a coma. Note that your brain is offline, in that case, but what about your body’s alarm systems, which are freaking out the whole time?
When I thought I was going to have an up close and personal encounter with dementia right about now, I did a lot of research and talked to a lot of doctors and discovered that the idea of “death with dignity” is you have to go PROVE that you are a drooling hulk with a severely compromised brain, who wanted to die if you wound up in that condition. What about that is “dignity”? I think “death with dignity” would look something like dinner and a show, a pill taken in a limo on the way to the mortuary, and arriving dead. Maybe some loud Joy Division on the headphones and a few friends who give me a kiss on the forehead and a thumbs up.
This is an aspect of civilization that really needs to be fixed and soon because we’ve got a few billion semi-voluntary deaths inbound (death with dignity: better than starvation) good grief, is this just a scheme by big firearm to sell lots of guns?*
(* killing yourself can be hard. I know someone who shot herself with a .38 and wound up with a big medical bill and a lobe missing from their lung. whups. now, I have a DNR but the doctors said, when I went to get my colonoscopy, that if I stopped breathing they would try a few basic non-invasive interventions. I was horrified. I can’t imagine a better way to go than to take some versed and fentanyl and die somewhere in there, even if someone is rooting around in my ass with a grabber-arm.)
There is no law that forces one to eat. That gives the option of Voluntarily Stopping Eating and Drinking (VSED). It still needs monitoring but is said to lead to a peaceful end.
https://compassionandchoices.org/vsed/