Right to Die

[SteelCurtain]

I mean, how many moody teens would kill themselves after the "love of their life" broke their heart? I'm being 100% serious here.

That's the thing, though: they do it anyway. In fact, in the eighth grade, a boy broke up with his gf of a few months because he wanted to go with me, and she killed herself the next day.

I do, however, think there should be rules and guidelines for recognized right-to-die for anyone under consenting age.

Oh, I know they do. This would normalize it and make it easier, no?

My point here is that we can't treat the right to die with help from a medical facility as a bodily autonomy issue. Otherwise we have to start arguing that children don't have bodily autonomy sometimes, or that mentally challenged people don't have bodily autonomy, or that people with mental illness don't have bodily autonomy.

I support the right to death with dignity, I just don't think at this time I can get behind medically induced suicide as a right. There's so much room for unintended consequences. Shitty parents who don't want to take care of an autistic kid pressuring them into agreeing to something they couldn't understand. People dealing with loss choosing an easy out. Religious people thinking they'll be with loved ones again if they join them in the afterlife. Elderly folks with dementia and a lot of money willed to greedy children being convinced to end it.

I sat in rooms with soldiers coming back from war and literally feeling like aliens. They longed to go back to the streets of Fallujah and the chaos of war, because that's where they felt a sense of belonging. Many of them turned to drugs and alcohol to cope, most felt suicidal at times. We would use other words because I had a duty to report, but I know what they were talking about. I guarantee you we would needlessly lose a lot of those young men and women because they didn't have adequate coping skills for dealing with the brain trauma that is a wartime firefight. Skills they would learn if the military spent a millionth of what they spend on turning these kids into killing machines on turning them back into people.