Delaware Passes Death With Dignity Law

to end their lives on their own terms. Critics of the bill, using what the article's author calls opposite day logic, lament that the new law provides quote no hope, no compassion, and no help end quote, preferring instead that the terminally ill continue to suffer needlessly, regardless of their own wishes.

The bill allows preclusions for morally opposed doctors to opt out of performing the procedure, and it also protects unsuspecting and non non consenting patients from having the procedure chosen for them. And most fittingly, I think the law was named after Ron Silverio and Heather Block to Delaware patients who suffered to the end of their lives while waiting for this bill to become law. This story is from The Friendly Atheist by him and Meta on May twenty ninth,

twenty twenty five. So Eli, I'm going to come back to me. How well informed are you on this? Eli? Well, I'm far from well informed on this, but I have lost friends who have chosen to end their own lives before, and not in a medically assisted way. And as hard as it is to, you know, to process sudden losses like that, mostly they're almost always unexpected, I think, but just by the nature. There's also something I think I want to say, like cosmically altruistic about allowing people to

end their lives on their own terms. I think, generally speaking, people should have the right to choose when and how their life ends if that is what they want to do, and for all practical purposes, we do have that choice. I'm only aware of one conviction in the United States for an attempted suicide, and that was in Maryland in twenty eighteen. Now, even though that person was convicted, they were given a deferred sentence and probation instead of serving

jail time. But I still think that that's kind of disgusting thing to do, because you have people who are either you know, suffering physically or you know, however it may be, that have decided that not being allied was a better option, and even I think there are plenty of cases in which that is a temporary feeling in which people can come away from that feeling, and I think should be encouraged to seek that sort of treatment to help them feel better about wanting to live, rather

than making ultimate, you know, extremely definite choices like this. But this person in particular was dragged back into the world that they had chosen to leave and then punished for making that choice, and I think that that violates autonomy. But then all being said, I've been talking for a while, so Kelly, do you have any ideas about why there

is such opposition to things like this? Like I mentioned in the intro, why is it such a big deal to any person if a completely different person wants to end their own life.

for now. I was thinking of back in the nineteen seventies. I'm so fucking old. Back in the nineteen seventies, there was a movie called I Will Fight No More Forever, and it was about the Nez Pierce Indian War. And there's a scene where, you know, the whole tribe is

trying to get away from the the US military. It's based on a true story, and they're just marching to crowd hundreds of miles and there's an older woman and she realizes she's slowing up her family, she's slowing everybody up, and she just walks off by herself, out into the woods, you know, away from everybody else, and you know why she's doing it, you know, and you look at you you watch the scene and you and it's sad, but it's also like this noble sacrifice she's making, you know,

and it's that's but that's not the way Christians think, that's not the way Muslims think. You know that it's a sin to take your own life, because that's one more person that can't give glory to God. Right, So I think that's that's really where this opposition comes from. It's religious, it's not anything else. It's and it's really sad that people have to suffer. I mean, at my age, I've seen a lot of people suffer when they really didn't need to. Most of the polls show that everybody

agrees with these kind of laws. Why because nobody wants to suffer except the Catholics of course. But yeah, I mean that's a seventy one percent. That's a huge amount of people, you know, I mean that's I don't I don't think we've gotten that many people all together for one thing in a long time.

You're you know, you're not reducing harm. But aj, I want to become to you, now, do you I think we kind of would all be in agreement, But like, do you think that there's a strong argument here to be made that this does reduce harm?

But Cindy Plaster, who's a fellow non profits, recently has begun the process and it's a very lengthy process, but ultimately I've never seen a Christian who has agreed with it. And I think the reason is that us as atheist, we embrace humanism, and humanism is all about the reduction of harm. I wanted to mention that right now, there's currently more than ten states that allow assisted that generally, and you know this work in similar ways similar ways

around the world. There are requirements that someone has to meet in order to qualify for the assisted that process, and that's the case on what they're doing. In Delaware, for example, patients are required to have first mental health evaluations. Sometimes there's more than one. There is a waiting period between that and doctor appointments. Then they have to have physicians diagnosed and repeated diagnosed for this specific thing. Then

they also have to self administer the medication. I know that in some places they also have to have, like I said, you know, more than one doctor that that actually gives them not just a diagnosis, but the mental health UH to say, hey, you know, this is a terminal illness. This is going to cost you unbearable suffering. There's no reasonable treatment, we don't have any hope for you to recover. And so that's what they have to

go through. And that's what people don't understand. They think it's just a super quick process and you know that's it. Then then your doctor is going to inject you with something and you're gonna die. But it's not even like that. Like I said, you have to administer that otherwise it's considered murder.

You know, it's a hard topic to talk about, but I think that the more we bring awareness to it, the more people will understand why we support it.

it isn't. And that's where I think a lot of confusion comes in for people about like what what does the Hippocratic oaths mean? And what does it not mean? And what is it really And I think it probably does have you know, just as much of a factor and the opposition to this as as you know some of like the religious beliefs that we've talked about. There

was language. It's in the original like oath in the original Greek that says, you know, I have it written down here, I will use diets for the benefit of the sick according to my ability and judgment, I will keep them from harm and injustice. And so that is included in the original version. But most medical schools anymore, they're not They're using versions of it that don't include that.

There's not a standard, you know, universal version. It's more ceremonial and you know, optical rather than actually ethically or more exactly, and many physicians choose to just forego the oath altogether. As I understand it, So the now there's language as well, and it's because of the specific language that the original both has regarding euthanasia, because it does

discuss that in some small part. But now, Kelly, you you mentioned earlier that there was seventy one percent of people polled were in favor of physicians assisting with end

of life via painless means. And what I really enjoyed about this study that was cited in this article is that the researchers were like, well, because there is some phenomenon to be accounted for here that if you say things like end of life with painless means versus assisted suicide, that's going to change the way that the recipient interprets

the question and that might change their answer. So they did it both ways, and they said, how do you feel about doctors being allowed to assist a patient with suicide? And the number only dropped by like seven percent from seventy one to sixty six, which means that even when you use a word like suicide that invokes so much negativity and repulse, there's still two thirds of those polled that are in support of medically as a dying. So

people don't want to suffer exactly. But now with that being the case, we seem to have a majority without a consensus. How do you think that's the case, Kelly? Do you do you have any thoughts on that?

This is the way that things should be able to be done on. But our forefathers, in their infinite ignorance, decided to follow Christian morality on this and made and created these really archaic laws. And once you put along in the books, it's really hard to get it back off. I mean, look how hard it was to get rid of the the the buggery laws that were so prevalent in that restate, and some of them are still on the books. I think Texas is if I'm not mistaken.

You know, it can't be upheld. The Supreme Court has knocked them down, but the laws are still there. And that's what's going on with this one, except that we're still in forcing this one.

important to distinguish between like the fail safes. I guess, so the safeguards that you mentioned earlier, age that like this isn't intended for somebody to like call up their doctor and say, hey, i'd like to die on Tuesday. Do you have an opening? It doesn't hepen like that. And I think that's that's.

and then that there. It may not always be necessary to end of the life to end of the suffering, and that's that's a really important distinction to make, but it does, ultimately, I think, come down to autonomy, and we haven't really touched super we haven't gotten really in depth about autonomy in this discussion. I think that's kind

of a central focus of the law. I think that with like recent sort of changes in like autonomy and like medical autonomy, especially for like especially for women or people who are capable of getting pregnant, I should say it seems like this is a little bit of a shift I think in that sort of autonomy war or autonomy like atmosphere, AJ did you have more like did you have thoughts about that? Yeah?

extensive surgeries to have firmed their gender. You know, do things like slow down their aging surgeries like breast augmentation implants, go with Tommy Jack's life perception, get those jobs, they get netlifts, whatever feeling of the outer layer of the skin. Like I know someone who actually had that done recently. It was like they look like a completely different person.

So we do the same for trans people, right, we advocate for them to have the same kind of dignity to be able to choose what kind of badding modifications they do, and justifiably they should have that right. And as I mentioned earlier, including abortion as a bodily autonomy issue, you know, things like my buddy might choose as a woman, like we don't want to be forced to sustain another

life against a will. That would be like against the allowed to do that, you know, if they sustained life was that of an adult or like even a child, that not not an onborne like because it's a human right, and so we have to give that same dignity to people at the end of their lives, their liberty to choose.

So if they are when we talk about end of life, I'm not talking about somebody who is older, because if it is somebody who is younger and has a terminal illness, then you can call that the end of their lives.

Right if they have something that is untreatable that they cannot their doctors don't see any way for them to recover, So to be able to end their life with the same considerations regarding the freedoms of what they get to do with their bodies, even if that means choosing to permanently cease to exist, they should have that ability to do that.

that should also apply to their own life. And I can't stress enough, you know, I I don't always think that end of life is the best option in all circumstances, but the other people, everybody has the right to choose that for their for their own I don't think it should be punishable or shit.

speculate wildly. I think probably like nine out of ten times, when you're talking about psychological suffering, you you're talking about someone who there are some options for at least helping that person feel better or live a more satisfying life. And it doesn't require, like imaged earlier, the end of life to end the suffering. I think. So that's I just you go ahead.

all types of different medications, different therapies. So there it isn't just like hey, you know, I'm feeling the rest today like you said earlier, and you call your doctor and you tell them you want to you want to end your life next week or something like that. You know, it can sometimes it can take more more than just a few months, So it can take like up to a year or more than that. So it really depends

on case by case. And what I'm thinking is we are thinking of the people that actually go through with it, but we are not thinking of the ones that are denied because they do not qualify. Ultimately that they do apply, but to not qualify because you know, like we're saying, Okay, no you haven't tried this, so you haven't tried that, or you know, your diagnosis while bleak is not completely you know, untreatable or terminal or.