In a first, an American woman used a suicide pod to take her own life. The process took place in Switzerland. It’s done by pumping in only nitrogen gas, so the person will lose goes dizzy, loses consciousness and eventually dies. Enter futurama memes.
As sad as this topic is, this is a much better way to go than a prolonged miserable painful death where you suffer the last months of a terminal disease.
Terminal or not this is a human way of accepting death.
Imagine your an old 70+/ 80+ couple that are ready to go but together. You can hold your spouses hand, spend time with family, and say your final goodbyes while you are still mentally functioning. Not a burden on anyone or heart broken after losing your partner.
To me, this is a great alternative to dying alone in a cold “retirement home.” I know it is not for everyone but, my partner and I have talked about as an option.
I would rather do this than suffer through dementia, if it comes to that.
Ship me off to Hogeweyk
Its such a difficult topic to write about. You shouldnt glorify it but you also have to respect peoples wish to die. Putting that sort of sincerity into text is hard imo, but the article did a good job at it. Weird that they arrested the photographer tho :/
I cant imagine a much more peaceful way to go under her conditions.
It’s a techbro solution for something that didn’t need a techbro solution. The current way of doing it is trough chemicals that induce loss of consciousness, pain relief, and eventually death.
Active euthanasia is legal in a few countries for terminally ill patients. They have to submit to psychological tests and must be deemed fully understanding of the situation. My grandfather passed away like this a few weeks ago. He organized his own funeral and had some time with my mother and his other children.
To try and push this “invention” and just go for it without going trough the legal processes is just bad and shows not much care by the creators.
That doesn’t seem an accurate description of the situation. Yes, doctors and nurses sometimes ‘help people along’ in their final hours or even days, that is not the same thing as the euthanasia being described here.
No I am talking about “active euthanasia”. Look it up. You are talking about “passive euthanasia”.
You’re so very wrong about that. The chemicals used right now for lethal injection fail often, cause undue pain and distress, and often will paralyze you instead of killing you quickly while you slowly suffocate, unable to call for help. Nitrogen has no downsides. This isn’t a “techbro” solution. It’s a humane one. A guillotine was kinder to the one dying than the current method.
The current method prioritizes minimizing violence and maximizing comfort for spectators over being humane to the one dying. The only reason there is a paralytic in the chemical slurry is because the sleep and lethal chemicals sometimes fail spectacularly and the patient spasms painfully as they die. Their solution wasn’t to change the method to be more humane, it was to paralyze them so they don’t spasm. They’re still in pain. They’re still dying slowly. They’re still scared. But we don’t have to see it, so it’s okay.
Nitrogen euthanasia is safe and humane, killing entirely painlessly. For some reason the fact that it’s a gas, even an inert one, makes people crazy.
but this is not eutanasia since there’s no terminal disease, this is just murder.
I think most people can understand her desire to no longer be in constant pain.
It’s also a way for an ableist and ageist society to drive vulnerable people to take matters in to our own hands, instead of “forcing” it to act more directly (as opposed to “only” slightly less directly systemically financially and socially oppressing and excluding us), in a kind of “guilt free” eugenics.
Should people have the right to die, and are there some situations where self euthanasia would be the best way to go? Sure. But lets not pretend that sick, disabled, and or old people have nothing to give and are suffering simply for existing as such, and not because society does very little to accommodate, integrate or even accept us. Capitalism frames us as lazy burdens on the system, and if/once we can’t contribute to the machine, we (and you, if you become ill, have an accident, or just age) get violently tossed to the margins, our lives made impossible to survive without pain and trauma external to our condition/s.
From what I can find, this capsule costs $20 to use, while existing as an old and or disabled person can cost hundreds to tens of thousands more a year. Making society accessible and inclusive would require a lot of work from people who don’t want or care to do it, providing us with this “out” gives them their own.
Be very wary of promoting this as a good solution to people’s suffering without taking in to account just how much of that suffering is created by society and its refusal to be inclusive.
I know you mean well, but you don’t provide solutions of any kind. Simply saying the equivalent of “we should be better to fellow humans” isn’t going to change the world. It’s a platitude.
How do you propose we help the people currently suffering? We just let them suffer until society figures out how to help them? Unite arms and block suicide machines because “they are an easy way out and we should be helping them instead”? Sure, you’re absolutely right, we should be helping them all now, but that’s not how change works. It’s not immediate. While we figure this stuff out, a bunch of people are going to suffer and die painfully.
Also, even if the cynical ending is “the government promotes suicide to get rid of the weak”, I’d argue it’s better than suffering until death.
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