Reply #35: The two senses I think about this in.

[Banazir]

There's a sense in which I don't have a problem with it provided there's legal documentation.

There's also a sense in which I've seen so much abuse of that kind of legal documentation that I know how even that isn't a guarantee that it's the person's wishes, nor is it a choice made in a vacuum. There's also the fact that people can and sometimes do change their minds only to be overruled by their appointed guardians, and that the nature of 'heroic measures' can be taken to mean things the signer never meant it to mean. And the fact that decisions and particularly ways of describing said decisions don't always only affect the person making them, but can sometimes affect large numbers of other people in similar medical situations.

So the point I'd been trying to make above (not sure how well I did so) is that reality, however neat and tidy it may be to package everything into pre-defined legal categories and however much we'd like to say "This is just me speaking as an individual, this choice will only affect me, and nothing in the way of untoward prejudice has influenced this choice", is messy and doesn't work that way. Every person who says it's better to die than have a certain condition does affect what happens to those with that condition, including in extreme cases whether others with that condition live or die. The fact that some of my disabilities have been viewed as a fate worse than death has directly affected sentencing of people who premeditatedly murder us, for instance. However much it'd be convenient to say that people who say they'd rather be dead than like me are only affecting themselves, I've already seen what that attitude does to judges and juries and the public outcries always somehow supporting the killers of children with my labels. They're unfortunately not unconnected.