My expectation is that medically assisted dying in Canada will get more liberal over the next 30yrs+. I've got no intention of dragging things on and I don't see any benefit to living longer just for the sake of more time. My parents are in their 90's with no dementia so I hope to truck along until things start to get sad then end my life.
This. And in response to the poster below who says this viewpoint is because I haven't been close to people at the end of their lives, it's actually the opposite. I've watched all my grandparents die slow, painful, undignified deaths. DH and I care for MIL and are planning for her end of life care (she's staunchly in the "do everything to prolong my life regardless of how awful my QOL gets" camp).
After this close up examination of what really happens, I've decided I want no part of it for myself.
If you were referring to my post, you have a good point. Once people experience that kind of thing, it could affect their thinking in many different ways. I certainly have many times thought that I didn't want to end like one of my grandparents did.
However, I am not sure assisted suicide really addresses a lot of the potential pitfalls that are likely to occur in a lot of cases. Probably most people (certainly me) think that we would prefer assisted suicide to slow lingering death...it gives us a sense of dignity and control. But there are a million shades to the 'decline and death' scenario. There's becoming mentally disabled slowly, so that you aren't able to make the decision. There is fear of the unknown when actually faced with decision. There's the potential grief you might cause loved ones who themselves are not ready to let go. There's the raw instinct to just fight for life, which logic and reason cannot always overcome. There's the potential years spent in gradual decline where you need occasional assistance, but acclimate to that situation incrementally, and find that at each point where 'younger you' would have said, "enough", 'older you' in fact wakes up each morning and wants one more day.
How many times have you heard, "I would want to kill myself if [such and such accident, disability, emotional trauma] happened to me!" And yet most do not kill themselves when the worst happens. I think those who have the will AND the means (legally, functionally) to do it are probably rare.
I think of my own grandparents: 1 died young in an accident; 1 died after a few hospitalizations and relatively short stint in a nursing home (about a year, pretty typical); 1 was disabled in terms of mobility early on and lived that way for years with declining mental acuity, cared for at home. And 1 was immobile and blind and in a Medicaid nursing home for about 4 years, absolutely miserable. She had dealt with her OWN mother's long nursring home decline and had always insisted that she herself would never want to live that way, she'd rather be dead. Yet in the end, she lived an even more miserable last few years than her mother had, fighting to the end for every last breath and rejecting the idea of dying because even an occasional conversation or phone call, or an occasional bite of food that she enjoyed, etc., ended up being enough to fight for another day.
The will to survive is foundational, the product of millions of years of evolution. It's hard to logically fight against it. I certainly think everyone should plan for living wills and the conditions under which 'do not revive' should be implemented. But I also think this doesn't actually address the reality that many of us will experience, of many years of decline prior to reaching the point of clearly deciding 'enough'. Assuming we ever do reach that point, which I think most never do. I hope to be one that does, but I'm not confident, given what I've seen.