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by htag 1279 days ago
> The Canadian Association of MAID Assessors and Providers, the leading organization of Canadian euthanasia providers, has sat on credible evidence by its own members that people are being driven to euthanasia by credit card debt, poor housing, and difficulties getting medical care.

Did I miss the actual concrete evidence this is being purposefully being used to reduce certain populations?

3 comments

Not sure if I understand, but the article gives a number of examples, such as:

> Mary knows that she could control her pain if she could take vitamin pills, eat a special diet, and go to physiotherapy. She can’t afford it. “Mary identifies poverty as the driver of her MAID request,” Gibb-Carsley writes on a slide accompanying her talk, emphasizing the. “She does not want to die, but she’s suffering terribly and she’s been maxing out her credit cards. She has no other options.”

I'm wondering, does this example work as anti-euthanasia instead of pro-UBI to anyone reading it (or the rest of the article)?

It seems excessively cruel to me to try and force people to live in misery big enough to make the want to kill themselves instead of alleviating the misery. Like, the article seems to frame the argument that MAID can be used to lobby for better welfare as a ridiculous idea, but that's really it: if the only thing keeping people in your society from killing themselves that it's hard and scary, what the fuck is your society doing to these people.

Absolutely.

Eliminate MAID and these people will still suffer… because MAID isn’t the problem. They need better care and support in the first place.

I'm wondering, does this example work as anti-euthanasia instead of pro-UBI to anyone reading it (or the rest of the article)?

This is a perverse sort of argument. I'm in favor of social services (UBI or otherwise) sufficient to prevent homelessness. There are a lot problematic things situations in this society. But these aren't going away tomorrow - in our world homeless will be with us for a while and you shouldn't add to the problem of homelessness the problem of social services making it easy to just end your life if you're threatened with homelessness.

So what is the benefit of making it painful to end your life? They'll drown themselves out of sight and hopefully wash into the ocean? What is the solution to the suffering that making killing yourself harder brings?
The question I was trying to ask is.

1. Are people in poverty or with mental illness more likely to choose MAID on their own.

or

2. Are there people actively trying to encourage vulnerable populations to choose MAID?

Extreme poverty is a chronic condition for the vast majority of people and is a undisputed cause of suffering. It's curable, theoretically, but not in practice.
I suspect the author has an agenda and a slant, given the read of his twitter account and some of the slippery logic he's using in this article.
It doesn't really matter what the intent of the government and medical establishment is; In fact, it may not even be coherent to attribute intent to such an entity. What matters is what the system does, and the evidence clearly indicates that the MAiD system is resulting in the deaths of the socially marginalised.
> the evidence clearly indicates that the MAiD system is resulting in the deaths of the socially marginalised

The enter point of the MAiD system is to result in deaths. I think the intent matters a lot. I don't think it's a cause for alarm if we find some subpopulations that use a medical service more than others. I do think it's alarming if people are scheming to kill poor people.

What practical utility does that perspective have? The precise intention of the creators of a scheme does not have any distinct impact on anyone else, and is incredibly difficult to verify.
The utility is to identify criminal activity