Dod101 wrote:
I rather uncharacteristically opened my heart earlier but I cannot do so again, because for one, I am not sure what taken2often is saying.
He seems to think that people, just because they have dementia, are no longer people. That is simply an unacceptable premise. To follow that through as I said is following the tenets of Nazi Germany.
They cannot think like us and so are an inferior race. Let's eliminate them. That is sadly exactly how the holocaust came about, with just a modest extension in thinking.
I think it's important to understand what the OP is suggesting here.
Whilst it's clearly difficult to disagree with your thoughts above, the OP is trying to make it clear where he's coming from with the following -
With regards to Dementia my suggestion of pre-registration could eliminate many of the problems.https://www.lemonfool.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=85&t=27497#p381068He's suggesting a situation where a 'current you' might be able to pre-register into a scheme whereby you 'instruct' someone to terminate your life humanely where a specific level of severe dementia can be proven in the future...
It's clearly a very difficult subject to discuss, but it seems that he's trying to align severe cases of dementia with the more common 'termination of life' situations such as some vegetative states, etc., where early-terminations are carried out more commonly even at the current time, but I think the key thing that the OP is trying to suggest here is that it's not someone 'external' deciding about an early-termination of severe dementia cases, but an earlier 'version' of the
same person deciding, via the 'pre-registration' process...
At the current time, organs can be donated when we die. That used to be a 'pre-registration' process, and if someone had done that, then once they died, the medical profession were within their rights to use the organs of a body to help others if it was beneficial to do so.
I think the OP is trying to suggest a similar 'pre-registration' process for cases of severe future dementia, but where the result, once a certain 'dementia threshold' might be crossed, would be the humane termination of life...
Of course that doesn't fully explain how such a process might work in practice, or what 'test' might be carried out for someone else to then decide that any 'severe dementia' criteria might 'trigger' that pre-registered wish, or how it could be guaranteed that someone would not end up 'on the register' without them actually applying for the proposed scheme, and I don't think the OP has fully explained how such a pre-registration process might fully remove all the many other stark risks within that overall process which would clearly still remain, but I just wanted to point out that it's the '
pre-registration' part of the process that I think the OP is trying to specifically discuss here, and which, on the face of it, might clearly and distinctly allow the discussion to then step away (even if only
slightly...) from the more brutal historic path that you're describing above, where, as far as I'm aware, no 'pre-registration process' was ever part of those brutal schemes...
Cheers,
Itsallaguess