X-Message-Number: 8394
From:  (Thomas Donaldson)
Subject: Re: CryoNet #8367, posting AGAINST euthanasia
Date: Sat, 19 Jul 1997 00:25:59 -0700 (PDT)

Hi!

The basic problem which cryonicists have is that our notions of life and
death differ from the standard ones, sometimes almost invisibly, sometimes
radically.

All the talk about the value of life often ignores the fact that the life
of some people has ceased to be of any value at all. Consider: what of 
someone so far gone in Alzheimer's Disease that they cannot recognize their
own relatives? Or someone who has lost even the ability to speak, not to 
mention any ability to move. Unthinking people believe that only those who
are depressed want suicide, and thus they should instead receive careful
psychiatric counselling rather than the suicide they ask for. If I knew
that my mind was going, yes I would be depressed, but I would want 
immediate cryonic suspension. Depression can come not from failing to 
understand one's situation but from quite fully understanding it... and 
that understanding cannot be helped by any counselling or pain-relieving
drugs. 

Moreover, if we look at such patients, we see that this presumed care
for them by all the moralists and ethicists consists instead of an 
exquisite form of torture, all the more so because it's done under the guise
of preserving life. We treat such patients worse than we would treat a 
dog or a horse, all under that guise of preserving life.

I would very much want to be suspended BEFORE I got into such a state. As
cryonicists, we are preserving life when we suspend someone.
It may be that the only thing we will be able to do, for some time, is
to make use of laws that allow euthanasia. Such laws, if written just right,
would allow us to do a suspension. True, that is not immediately obvious,
but generally they will.

Not only that, but cryonic suspension even now is a far superior means
toward preserving life. Too many think of this problem in the very short
term, without being able to consider it strategically. Almost all current
medicine aims only at tactical victories against death. And so, keeping
someone alive until his or her brain has deteriorated to nothing is 
such tactics, gone mad. Suspending them MIGHT preserve their life; keeping
them alive now by force is merely killing them in a long drawn out, slow
way, while they themselves get to watch their own slow degeneration.

As for the "sliding slope", it is up to those who draft such laws to guard
against it. Given the condition of those who should be subject to euthanasia,
that should not be difficult.
   

			Long long life,

				Thomas Donaldson
:wq

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=8394