What right does the law have to say when people can die? Do they have the right to say when precisely someone can impregnate someone and create a life? So how did they get this right to prevent people from taking their own life – or criminalise them if they do?
I think this ill judged right stems from a purely financial incentive, as do most of the worst crimes. A person is acting outside of the law if he takes his (or her) own life because he deprives the state of a tax payer. It is less about protecting citizens from being murdered and more about financial control.
After all, we all know that many countries have an ageing community and some have low birth rates. Some countries have incentive schemes to encourage hard-working, skilled, educated families to relocate there, in order that they might pay into the local coffers and become a valued resource. So why not also make sure that these workers cannot kill themselves and gift all their hard earned dollars, rupees or euros to their descendants – if they die, their government wants to recoup its loss through more taxes. And taxes cannot be applied when people are acting outside of the law.
Instead of depriving terminally ill or severely incapacitated people of a meaningful death, can the government not get its head around providing clear unambiguous guidelines for this procedure? If they set up state sponsored services to do so, they would surely recoup some of their lost taxpayer’s earnings? Is that not preferable to inflicting more distress on people whose lives have been devastated by inoperable cancer, or whose car accident has left them with no quality of life (- this is a subjective phrase, but crucial).
I say this from a reasoned perspective, knowing far too many families whose parents are ill, terminal or living through pain. I watched my mother die from ovarian cancer, aged 52. She was previously in good health, played badminton, ate tons of vegetables and enjoyed life until a virulent cancer took hold. In the final months she could eat no more than a teaspoon of food or drink a day, because stomach tumours had distended her stomach to the size of my belly at 6 months pregnant. Every week the doctor removed fluid from between the tumours to give some relief, but this process itself triggered more tumours and she had become allergic to chemotherapy. In effect she had no choice but to slowly die in front of us. When she could bear it no longer, she took a large quantity of morphine to end it all.
Don’t tell me she was breaking the law. She could have struggled on until we would have had to hospitalize her for 24 hour care, at which point she may have lingered horribly in a state that is neither alive nor dead, sometimes this can last for months or years. The psychological fall-out that this causes families stretches people to breaking point.
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