"Canadian news outlets have also reported on cases where people with disabilities have considered assisted dying due to lack of housing or disability benefits."
Okay, they have considered assisted dying. People consider things all the time. That's a very far cry from getting anywhere close to approved for assisted dying.
What right do you have to say this woman shouldn't be allowed to end her life though?
She spoke to two different doctors and they both agreed to sign off on her death. Do you think the doctors are the ones pushing people to off themselves because they can't live a normal life?
Forcing someone who wants to take the state sanctioned approach to suicide (as opposed to a 9mm sandwich) to talk to two medical professionals seems fine to me. Maybe there's some infinitesimal chance both those two doctors want as many people to die as possible, but eh.
Or, you know, they agreed that she deserved the ability to end her life on her terms. Most people do not take a year to plan and carry out their suicide. Speaking to a doctor is usually the only intervention necessary to help someone looking to suicide for temporary reasons.
When I was suicidal, having to get paperwork done would have stopped me from seeking out this method. Why would I want to interact with a doctor, another doctor, some bureaucracy, and now the news, when instead I could go to Walmart and walk out with a helium cylinder, a plastic bag, a hose, and some tape for $50?
A government doesn't HAVE to legalize euthanasia to push sad, lonely, poor, hurting individuals to kill themselves, they just have to continue defunding medical care and saying "Nope, nothing we can do here, you just have to suffer, can't afford to do better than that".
> What right do you have to say this woman shouldn't be allowed to end her life though?
Read the article. She really wanted appropriate housing, which was the care she needed for her condition. She tried for years, and they wouldn't give it to her.
So she chose assisted suicide instead.
That contradicts the claim "there haven't been such cases."
Her approval was based on an untreatable medical condition, and the suffering that ensued. That medical condition was made worse by the housing she had, but was not the cause of it.
You can't apply for MAID due to social conditions on their own, it has to be medically justified first and foremost.
It is an interesting case, but at the end of the day it was a medical decision made by doctors, and a completely separate housing decision made by social services. Neither can talk about the case publicly. It is entirely possible that her chemical sensitivity was so non-specific that it wasn't feasible to provide her with any housing.
The flip side of this is you don't want people to be able to use MAID as some sort of weird blackmail. This woman's stance was "I want a better place to live, or my only other option is MAID".
