Dai Henwood has cancer

[Oh_hunnihunni]

We can make Donor decisions on our drivers licences. We can complete Advance Care Directives (Min of Health website), we can write our wills, appoint executors and give EPOA's ,assign guardians for our children, decide inheritances, determine DNR status -  why the hell can we not specify how we want to end our lives?

Because some people have the idea THEY should say how WE should live or die, usually based on their religion...

It is sickeningly selfish of them. Not to mention arrogant, entitled, and authoritarian...

The caution I see in this proposition is that a person's death can be assigned to someone else who may well stand to gain from the event. My mother died early last year after over 15 years of mental decline. Sure she had a DNR in place (a prerequisite of the resthome) and I held EPOA for both financial and medical matters. I had no knowledge of her will contents until after her death but if that had been the case and I also held her life in my hands by way of an end of life ruling do you not see a potential conflict of interest?

No, I don't. Because part of taking responsibility for our own lives and endings is accepting someone might harm us. We know when we have children, and we give them authority over us, that that could be misused. And it is, often. But as adults we have the right to accept that risk and the consequences, and no one else has the right to block us from taking it. It is like choosing a partner. No one should do that for us, or stop us doing it for ourselves. Our right to choose. Our right to choose the wrong one...

We are not children. We are adults, we should be granted the right to be adults.