It is reassuring to know, at least for me, that the ethics issues EA has been most adamant about continue to inspire the same analysis from me. On the topic of legal human euthanasia (assisted suicide), the position here hasn’t changed since the policy, now legal in Illinois, California, Colorado, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Montana, Maine, New Jersey,New York, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington first began to spread. Gee, I wonder what those states have in common? Oh…right. An ideology that devalues life: that’s today’s progressive movement and its Democratic Party.
This toxic and corrupting culture holds that individual life is not precious, but rather is subordinate to the needs of the many. Letting people kill themselves, or, if necessary, allowing their families and care-givers to let them be killed, costs a lot less than letting the old, sick, depressed and poor try to hold on to every last minute of existence. Masquerading as individual “choice,” the versatile word that encompasses letting mothers snuff out burgeoning young life in their wombs for their convenience and career advancement, the right to have the government kill you quickly metastasizes into a cultural norm where autonomy, courage, fortitude, individualism and reverence for life erodes in the interests of affording a nanny state.
Euthanasia is a straight violation of Kant’s Categorical Imperative; it also, in cases where the object of this kind of “palliative care” is forced on victims, as it frequently is in Canada, a Golden Rule breach. The only ethical system it can be squared with is Utilitarianism, but only of the most brutal kind that was used as the justification for the mass murders under Hitler, Stalin and Mao.
I personally authorized the hospital pulling the plug on my 89-year-old mother when she lapsed into a coma after unsuccessful surgery. My father, who always told us that he would not be a financial or other kind of burden on his family, managed to die during a nap, also at 89, apparently by force of will. My ethical assessment of the Left’s fondness for assisted suicide has been aired frequently on Ethics Alarms, most thoroughly in a series of posts in September of 2019: The Euthanasia Slippery Slope: A Case Study, Comment Of The Day: “The Euthanasia Slippery Slope: A Case Study”, and Addendum: To “The Euthanasia Slippery Slope: A Case Study,” Hypothetical And Poll.
In the first post, I wrote, “I believe that permitting an individual to kill another with the victim’s consent is so ripe for abuse—Dr. Kevorkian comes to mind—that it crosses an ethical line that should be thick, black, and forbidding. The alleged consent of the doomed can too easily be coerced or manufactured for the convenience of others.” That position hasn’t changed one whit.
Ethics Alarms 
Demographers talk about the “dependency ratio.” It is a measure of elderly, children, the disabled and otherwise not working, divided by the working adults. The world has seen a huge decline in the dependency ratio, because people in the developed world haven’t been having children. But we’re on the cusp of that radically reversing. Because of the one child policy, China is expected to be the worst in the world, reaching over 120%.
That fear is eliminated by “one simple trick”: Kill off the elderly. It looks like Canada is leading the way.
“That fear is eliminated by ‘one simple trick’: Kill off the elderly.” (bolds mine)
Was that China’s angle with Wuhan?
PWS
MAID seems to be fast becoming a euphemism for suicide like “gender affirming care”.
Next up, referring to MAID as suicide will be considered hate speech along the same path of reason of misgendering and get you thrown in jail like the dad in British Columbia.
What’s fun about cultural predictions now is that you only need to imagine a Babylon Bee headline and think “nahh that would never happen” and it probably will.
Canada had a case where they euthanized a woman against her and her husband’s wishes because the family wanted it. The couple wanted more home health care, but the state decided that the husband was suffering from caregiver burnout. The state denied extra home health care and decided that she needed to be euthanized immediately. They decided they couldn’t wait until the next morning for someone to hear the husband’s appeal of the decision.