The Euthanasia Debate | Politically Neutral

we all come into this world in fairly similar ways but we leave the world in very different ways the idea of euthanasia is to give patients that have grim end-of-life prospects an alternative that's designed to minimize pain and give a sense of control where that might otherwise be slipping away it's also a topic full of landmines where individual cases have a tendency to grab public attention and disproportionately shaped policy so today I'm going to try to talk about euthanasia from a zoomed out perspective trying to resist getting too much into any one particular case I'm personally someone that's interested in the topic but I don't have strong feelings to one side of the debate or the other I also noticed a lack of what to me were good overview videos on euthanasia so I thought it might be a good person to try to navigate it and maybe give some food for thought while I do it the first thing we should probably get out of the way is what the term euthanasia means what does it refer to when we're using that word in the broad sense and the annoying answer is it depends it can be referring to a few things so it's most often referring to voluntary euthanasia it's voluntary because the patient wants to die and request the procedure from the doctor then if the doctor approves the request the doctor administers some sort of lethal dose that ends the life of the patient there's also physician assisted suicide where again the patient wants to die and requests the procedure from the doctor and this time if the doctor approves it they prepare a dose and hand it over to the patient I'm sort of like a prescription for the patient to take or not take themselves many academics don't categorize assisted suicide as euthanasia because the doctor isn't performing the procedure they're handing the act over for the patient to do themselves so they prefer to keep the term separate so if they were to write say an article this topic they might say something like recent trends in voluntary euthanasia and physician assisted suicide instead of just saying recent trends in euthanasia as you can probably already sense using the full names and keeping them separate is a bit tedious especially if you're not in academic and the public tends to not care about the distinction so to facilitate conversation regular people tend to bundle the two words together under the blanket term euthanasia sometimes the term just refers to physician assisted suicide and not voluntary euthanasia I know it sounds confusing but the more familiar you become with all this the more obvious it becomes what they're referring to so if you hear on the news euthanasia legalized in California they're actually specifically talking about physician assisted suicide which was legalized recently in California while voluntary euthanasia as of this video isn't legal anywhere in the United States on that note it's become a very popular topic with a lot of court cases and legalities spreading around the world in the last 10 20 years the laws are changing so fast that I'm gonna mostly avoid making statements on where it's legal and where it's not because that'll will become out of date quickly for reference a law was just passed in Australia as I was preparing this video if you want to see an updated list on where euthanasia is legal I'd recommend checking out Wikipedia legalities of euthanasia page because they do update regularly to keep going on terms there's also non voluntary euthanasia non-voluntary is one the patient either can't or doesn't request a procedure usually because they're not able to so an example of that would be a person that say doesn't have the mental faculties to be able to legally represent themselves then if that person was euthanized it'd probably be categorized as non voluntary euthanasia as you can probably imagine non voluntary euthanasia is more controversial than voluntary euthanasia or a physician assisted suicide and usually when people want to refer to it they call it by its full name if I wasn't worried about boring you guys I could have probably done a full video on just the terms in euthanasia because there's a lot of them and there's not as much consensus on what they mean as you might think to make that point I'll do two more there's active euthanasia and passive euthanasia they're modifiers to describe the type of euthanasia that's happening so active euthanasia is when the doctor is doing things they're taking steps to expedite the death of the patient so that's what you normally think about when you think of euthanasia passive euthanasia refers to the omission of treatment or withholding otherwise life-saving treatment so that could be say removing a feeding tube or taking a patient off life support passive euthanasia is much more common than active euthanasia and not nearly as controversy some academics and physicians think it shouldn't be called the euthanasia at all because there's no intention to take life there's only a lack of intention to prolong it so I'm going to mostly disregard it and not include it in my blanket term euthanasia this isn't lined with typical medical definitions here's one from the Royal Dutch Medical Association euthanasia is defined as the active termination of life at a patient's voluntary and well-informed request all right definitions out of the way a lot of the debate centers around whether or not we should allow euthanasia at all the most common argument you'll probably hear for it is that it's a compassionate policy designed to alleviate pain and minimize suffering for those that are don't they don't feel like they should be obligated to go through it an argument against that might be that end-of-life care palliative care these days is so good that if you don't want to feel pain you kind of don't have to it's so good that we kind of don't really need euthanasia you might even push that further and say that legalizing euthanasia would pull efforts away from developing even better palliative care I think as of now that last argument is a mostly a speculative argument another common argument for euthanasia is that it allows respect for the patient's autonomy so the idea is to give them a choice in circumstances where they might not have many so try to imagine you've just been told you have months left to live and there's nothing you can do about it it might bring patience a sense of comfort if they know that there's something they can do that can let them actively take charge of how the rest of their life goes pretty much everyone wants to respect autonomy but disagrees on how much we should allow it to override circumstance so for example say we'll have a teenager and they hypothetically just got broken up with and they're despairing their anguish they're in a really dark place and maybe there's a moment in there where they could hypothetically feel like life from then on isn't worth living and ask for euthanasia so should we grant that teenager their request based on a respect for their autonomy pretty much everyone the world would say no to that they might empathize with what the teenager is going through but also say that they're not mature enough to realize their own situation as well as we can see from say are more mature standpoint so we might look at that person and say you'll get over it life's couldn't get better for you we're not gonna let you euthanize yourself and in that case we're not respecting that teenagers autonomy for the sake of their own protection correctly so so a blind respect for autonomy alone isn't enough to get through the debate so you have to factor in some amount of circumstance the three main circumstances that usually affected in our age the mental state of the patient and the nature of the suffering that makes the patient want to request euthanasia almost everywhere in the world that has some form of legal euthanasia requires you to be a terminally ill patient and also with an age requirement on top of that so more specifically to be able to qualify you have to be a legal adult and to have been professionally diagnosed with six months or less to live so if you're looking at legalizing euthanasia in your country or your state that's probably the first form it'll take some countries have passed that and then over time modified those laws to become less restrictive and more inclusive most notably the Netherlands and Belgium so those are currently the two countries with the loosest euthanasia legislation in the world with Belgium of the two being slightly less restrictive because it has no age requirement just remember that that type of legislation that removes age limits and is aiming to be more inclusive is not meant to be used very often it's really just passed for those very rare very severe scenarios so say have a child that's born with severe deformities and their day-to-day life is just very painful just full of suffering and there's no cure for it there's no prospects of a healthier future so you can argue in that case that euthanasia it might actually be in the best interest of the child and you can also just wholly reject that you know you can just take that argument and throw it out and say euthanasia and children shouldn't mix that's fine I'm just saying that that's why the law was passed is for that very rare case where some people might think it's a good idea so this brings us to the most popular argument to use against euthanasia and that's the slippery slope the slippery slope argument speaks to a fear of an unknown and the argument goes some point this say you pass euthanasia legislation but only for the cases of terminally ill senior citizens in that case your goal is to alleviate suffering and to grant and dignity now what if you have a case where someone has intense physiological pain but they're not terminally ill so say they're in so much pain where are you trying to put yourself in their shoes just for a day just trying to imagine it your brain just recoils from it you just won't let yourself even imagine it but it's not terminal and we'll say for the sake of the argument that it's also incurable so now because they're not legally included we've you can argue doomed them to having to live out their life with this intense physiological pain so you could argue maybe we should include that person and then if you do that you've now opened the window from being just terminally ill patients to will say unbearable physical pain but then what about mental pain psychiatric suffering they might see this going on and feel discriminated against that their pain isn't being recognized as valid in the way that people with physiological pain are so then if you legalize mental pain then what if you have a patient that's told they're going to develop say dementia and they say once I develop dementia I want you to euthanize me because I'm not gonna be myself anymore then they do develop dementia and you bring it back up to them and they say no don't euthanize me I want to live what do you do if you euthanize them then you've arguably slid from legalizing just terminally ill patients all the way to euthanizing people involuntarily against what they're expressly telling you not to do and that's the slippery slope argument that once you allow a little bit it widens and widens and widens until it involves things that we would never have agreed to in the first place in the slippery slope argument it's not a question of whether or not it'll slip it's a question of how much it'll slip there's also a wording problem so you could argue that as long as the law has to be interpreted to some extent by and patience you're not going to be able to completely prevent the slippery slope effect so no amount of safeguards will fully protect everybody in the Netherlands for example which is again a country with very loose euthanasia legislation there guideline words are untreatable and unbearable so we can go back to our lovesick teenager that we're talking about before and they might say that their suffering is unbearable untreatable is a little bit more concrete but there's still some amount of interpretation involved if you go looking for cases where euthanasia arguably wasn't used as a last resort there arguably were more treatment options available you'll find them if you try to find cases where the patient's suffering arguably wasn't unbearable you'll find those too so if you want to find cases where the doctors had elastic interpretations of untreatable and unbearable or whatever similar words might be in your area you'll find those but if you also want to find cases where patients desperately wanted euthanasia applied for it were denied and then died pretty terrible deaths and went through a lot of suffering because of it you'll find those two I should also say that in most places in the world that have legalized euthanasia or a physician assisted suicide haven't changed their law as much over time they've typically just legalized physician assisted suicide for terminally ill patients and haven't moved beyond that so I think for the most part the slippery slope argument hasn't materialized people on both sides of the argument like to point at the amount of euthanasia that's been performed the Netherlands Belgium and Oregon are the three places that are the most examined in all three places they saw minimal if not no growth in the amount of euthanasia patients using the law up until 2010 so people against the slippery slope like to point at those statistics but then since then this has happened you can partially explain away a lot of that you have rising overall deaths rising cancer deaths because most people that use euthanasia laws or cancer patients also I think more likely the bigger factors are the doctors becoming more comfortable with the procedures and patients becoming more aware that they exist you can say a certain amount of this is just a law working as intended and maybe in their earlier years patients weren't aware of it and we're maybe under utilizing it there's also some evidence that the charts are leveling off and might not continue to rise at that rate but for now they are a bit ominous to look at I should point out that the two places that are typically argued to have shown the most egregious effects of the slippery slope the Netherlands in Belgium both have an intense amount of attention on them both internationally and domestically for the tens of thousands of cases that have happened in those countries there's been relatively little scandal I should also point out that the legislation within both countries has immense public approval and around the 80 85 percent so we're not looking at countries that passed laws and then unhappy with how they evolved how they turned out tried to overturn them but when we're unable to that's not to say that there without protestors I think one of the most interesting arguments against euthanasia is also the most abstract it goes something like if we normalize ending our lives early it'll have a inebriating effect on how much we value say the sanctity of human life in that society the idea is that it makes people's problems worse because it authoritative ly legitimizes the idea of there being no way out no legitimate path to improvement you can push it further to say it would add a pessimistic cast overall of society because we might start valuing some human lives less the argument says that the people who might need euthanasia laws are kind of by definition the most vulnerable and society instead of trying to lift these people up might push them further in the direction of euthanasia and we're all worse off for it I think it's an interesting argument but it's hard to ground empirically you can look at suicide statistics in countries that have euthanasia laws but it's hard to find a strong correlation there I think weirdly the most concrete way to look at that problem this devaluing of human life would be through potential dilemmas that insurance companies might face in societies that have some sort of euthanasia legalization insurance companies are going to have to decide what they want to include in their coverage so the problem is that good end-of-life care and good palliative care is expensive and euthanasia in comparison is pretty cheap you can probably see where I'm going with this if insurance companies offer patients euthanasia but not the more expensive you know proper health care it might put pressure on people to take the euthanasia because it's the option that they can afford I've already found a few cases of that happening in Oregon and California but luckily in all the cases I saw once the patients went public the insurance companies reversed their decision to doctors credit they're not typically allowed to perform euthanasia if it's coming from a place of economic insecurity so they can't perform euthanasia if they feel their patients are being financially pressured to do so across the entire euthanasia debate there's some amount of collateral damage no matter where you place the law so if you outlaw euthanasia and assisted suicide entirely you'll find people that want access to those laws and have to go through unsavory end-of-life scenarios may be by their own hands because they don't have access to it and if you go in the opposite direction and have very inclusive euthanasia legislation that opens up the path for abuse and for cases where you might not agree with the ruling of the doctors if you adopt moderate euthanasia laws so more restrictive but still legal you'll still have people on both ends that are hurt by it some people will want their situation legally included and some people are just gonna be morally against any idea of euthanasia at all so it's an especially tricky topic to navigate I don't know about you guys but this feels like enough euthanasia talk for me in one day there's a lot of facets to the conversation and I wasn't able to include all them if I did this would have been a very long video that I think neither of us has the energy for so that's all I've got for today if you want to keep the conversation going I'm happy to talk in the comments if you have anything directly for me so yeah that's it thanks for listening I hope you got something out of it and we'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: Ryan Chapman

Views: 6,341

Rating: 4.9111109 out of 5

Keywords: euthanasia, euthanasia debate, euthanasia explained, what is euthanasia, euthanasia meaning, euthanasia overview, voluntary euthanasia, euthanasia statistics, politically neutral, euthanasia arguments, arguments for euthanasia, ryan chapman, political blog, assisted suicide, end of life care, euthanasia debate topics, euthanasia debate against, euthanasia debate cons, euthanasia debate pro, euthanasia debate pros and cons

Id: 1ZOGUNsSOVc

Length: 17min 27sec (1047 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 28 2019