Whenever assisted dying is discussed, there’s always someone – usually a well-meaning ethicist, a priest, or a politician who’s never had bedsores – who says, “Ah, but what if they feel like a burden?” And from that single feeling they construct a whole edifice of prohibition. Suddenly, your pain, your exhaustion, your dignity – all must be indefinitely postponed, just in case someone else might misuse the same right you’re asking for.
This is the velvet glove of control: protective paternalism. You see, they don’t actually trust you. They don’t trust you to distinguish a genuine, lucid decision from social pressure, or depression, or grief. Never mind if you've lived 70 or 80 years, made complex moral choices, raised children, paid taxes, and faced down your own mortality – now, when you ask for the right to die on your own terms, you're treated like a child trying to play with matches.
They say the feeling of being a burden could be the result of coercion – but where’s the evidence? And even if it could be, why should the default response be a blanket ban on autonomy rather than better safeguards, better mental health screening, or better care? We don’t ban marriage just because some people are coerced into it. We regulate. We support. We legislate sensibly. Except, it seems, when death is involved – then we clutch our pearls and declare all bets off.
They fret about the “slippery slope”, as though terminally ill people asking for the right to a peaceful death are really the thin end of some dystopian wedge – the vanguard of an ableist death cult. This is nonsense. The only thing that’s actually slippery is the logic: they conflate supporting choice with imposing it, confuse individual rights with societal pressure, and invent straw-man futures where the disabled are herded off cliffs to save money on social care.
But here’s what they never confront: whose life is it? If the feeling of being a burden is mine, why does your hypothetical fear override my concrete suffering? Why should a terminally ill person be forced to endure months or years of degradation so that you can feel morally tidy?
Let’s not pretend this is about compassion. It's about control. It’s about discomfort – their discomfort – at the idea that someone might want out before the final round of agony. And it’s cloaked in concern because saying “I don’t like the idea of assisted dying” doesn’t sound quite as righteous as “we must protect the vulnerable.”
Well, here's a thought: maybe I am the vulnerable one. And maybe real compassion is letting me go with dignity, instead of forcing me to play out your philosophical anxieties while hooked up to a machine.
Because in the end, the argument that “some people might feel pressured” is only persuasive if you believe the default position is to deny choice. But if you believe in autonomy – properly, seriously, even when it's uncomfortable – then the answer isn’t prohibition. It’s respect. It's trust. And above all, it’s getting out of the bloody way.
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