FTL.Wanderer
Enlightened
- May 31, 2018
- 1,782
Instead of an age cap, I'd vote for a basic reasoning test. If someone can demonstrate they understand what they're asking for and they have passed through some minimally intrusive assessment but consistently expressed the desire to die, then they should be free to do so. I'd be fine with some higher threshold (more cognitive and social assessments...) for those who are not of legal age, but unless society is willing and able to guarantee every child has the resources, including emotional ones, to be safe and to develop holistically healthfully according to our best global evidence, then we shouldn't even be entitled to consign a minor to the countless terrors of life.
Looking back on my own life, I recall my first serious suicidal impulse at the age of nine after multiple several-years-long rapes by family members and family acquaintances. Constant bullying in school was only followed by even worse, life threatening, brutal attacks on my way home from school every single day for years. And the incessant challenges of poverty and an emotionally and physically absent parent who struggled to provide what she could... Only to end up a care-taker for a terminally ill single parent who left before I started college as a pre-adult. What was the point of all that? Not that I presume to know the point of life at all (I happen to think there isn't one), but why should the government or any professional organization or "concerned" adults have been entitled to command that I endure nearly two decades of hell despite the fact that they were either disinterested in helping or unable to help? And where are these sages now that I live with the fall-out of my early-life hell?
The scholars who study these phenomena largely conclude these early childhood traumas have enduring physiological, cognitive, and personal-social effects that can last an entire lifetime and which predispose sufferers to statistically significant health risks and negative socialization patterns. If we can't prevent people from suffering the initial or subsequent traumas, who are we to decide they must endure both?
Looking back on my own life, I recall my first serious suicidal impulse at the age of nine after multiple several-years-long rapes by family members and family acquaintances. Constant bullying in school was only followed by even worse, life threatening, brutal attacks on my way home from school every single day for years. And the incessant challenges of poverty and an emotionally and physically absent parent who struggled to provide what she could... Only to end up a care-taker for a terminally ill single parent who left before I started college as a pre-adult. What was the point of all that? Not that I presume to know the point of life at all (I happen to think there isn't one), but why should the government or any professional organization or "concerned" adults have been entitled to command that I endure nearly two decades of hell despite the fact that they were either disinterested in helping or unable to help? And where are these sages now that I live with the fall-out of my early-life hell?
The scholars who study these phenomena largely conclude these early childhood traumas have enduring physiological, cognitive, and personal-social effects that can last an entire lifetime and which predispose sufferers to statistically significant health risks and negative socialization patterns. If we can't prevent people from suffering the initial or subsequent traumas, who are we to decide they must endure both?
