The right to die shouldn’t depend on your income
Does having money mean we make better decisions? Or does making better decisions mean that we make more money? In part, it depends on how you define “better”: when I had very little money, I ate largely meat-free meals and I drank hardly any alcohol. From a physician’s perspective, these are much better decisions than the ones I make now. But I think it’s fair to say that the decisions I make now are more authentic. Being comfortably off allows you to make the choices you really want to make rather than those you have to make as a result of a lack of funds or other constraints.
The question of whether or not the rich make better decisions is vital in the debate happening across much of the democratic world over assisted dying.
In Canada, where a fierce debate is raging over the looming expansion of the country’s medical assistance in dying laws (Maid) beyond end-of-life cases, critics fear that it will drive up the number of people seeking Maid because of the costs of not doing so. Krista Carr, the vice-president of disabilities charity Inclusion Canada, has argued that Maid expansion is a poor alternative to increased funding for social housing and mobility assistance, saying that people with disabilities “don’t actually want to die, they want to live. But they want to live a life on par with other people, which is entirely possible with proper support.”
This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Stephen Bush
