In a non-clown world, this is something I would support. Terminal illness is rough and I would respect a patient's desire to go out on their own terms.
that said, seeing how laws like this are applied in Canada, I do not have any faith that this will be used appropriately.
It's more, in this case, about the fact that children, by definition, cannot consent. This is also why "gender affirming care" for minors is inherently immoral.
We, as a society, have determined that those below a certain age cannot (legally) consent to certain life-changing things, and I would argue that death is the most definitive of those.
Besides, even leaving aside the issue of childhood more broadly, an infant generally cannot even verbalise, let alone conceptualise the concept of their own mortality, so this becomes really, really fishy...
Unless we want to redefine euthanasia as eugenics, which this is much closer to, by that definition...
That's the thing, at what point does it go from "voluntary" euthanasia to state-sanctioned murder (e.g Zyklon B in the Nazi extermination camps)? Generally the line for that is drawn at consent, so if we're dealing with children who cannot legally consent (and unlike with say, dementia, cannot have consented earlier in life), then that opens a whole other can of worms...
And in a non-clown world, the parents should both be able to and trusted to consent on their behalf like they do with everything else in the child's life.
If a kid is born with horrific hydrocephalus or the like, it should be that everyone involved can be adult enough to make the decision to ends its misery rather than be forced to let it suffer just because the government says you have to.
But since we live in clown world, we cannot trust neither parents, nor hospitals or the government to even take a step in that direction.
Interestingly, there’s a “Judge John Deed” episode that covers this quite nicely (not sure of the title) where a boy needs to have an organ replacement from an animal, and refuses it on the grounds of being a vegan, but his parents want to force him to take the transplant against his will. Won’t spoil it except to say that it gets ethically… Messy.
But the fact that we’ve gone from that to actively discussing whether parents should be able to consent to actually killing their child (because that’s what it comes down to, in the end) is quite frightening, imho…
In a non-clown world, this is something I would support. Terminal illness is rough and I would respect a patient's desire to go out on their own terms.
that said, seeing how laws like this are applied in Canada, I do not have any faith that this will be used appropriately.
It's more, in this case, about the fact that children, by definition, cannot consent. This is also why "gender affirming care" for minors is inherently immoral.
We, as a society, have determined that those below a certain age cannot (legally) consent to certain life-changing things, and I would argue that death is the most definitive of those.
Besides, even leaving aside the issue of childhood more broadly, an infant generally cannot even verbalise, let alone conceptualise the concept of their own mortality, so this becomes really, really fishy...
Unless we want to redefine euthanasia as eugenics, which this is much closer to, by that definition...
That's the thing, at what point does it go from "voluntary" euthanasia to state-sanctioned murder (e.g Zyklon B in the Nazi extermination camps)? Generally the line for that is drawn at consent, so if we're dealing with children who cannot legally consent (and unlike with say, dementia, cannot have consented earlier in life), then that opens a whole other can of worms...
And in a non-clown world, the parents should both be able to and trusted to consent on their behalf like they do with everything else in the child's life.
If a kid is born with horrific hydrocephalus or the like, it should be that everyone involved can be adult enough to make the decision to ends its misery rather than be forced to let it suffer just because the government says you have to.
But since we live in clown world, we cannot trust neither parents, nor hospitals or the government to even take a step in that direction.
Interestingly, there’s a “Judge John Deed” episode that covers this quite nicely (not sure of the title) where a boy needs to have an organ replacement from an animal, and refuses it on the grounds of being a vegan, but his parents want to force him to take the transplant against his will. Won’t spoil it except to say that it gets ethically… Messy.
But the fact that we’ve gone from that to actively discussing whether parents should be able to consent to actually killing their child (because that’s what it comes down to, in the end) is quite frightening, imho…