Killing the poor as a medical treatment

 NatReview reports:

two Canadian bioethicists just published a paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics — a prestigious British Medical Journal publication — arguing that “unjust social conditions” justify lethal jabs (euphemistically called MAiD, for “medical assistance in dying”). The argument claims that killing is a form of “harm reduction.”

The authors even admit such cases have already occurred legally in Canada. From “Choosing Death in Unjust Conditions: Hope, Autonomy, and Harm Reduction” (my emphasis):

In 2022, an individual in Canada, who had been diagnosed with multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS), received MAiD. However, by their own description, their decision to choose MAiD was driven primarily by the fact that they were unable to access affordable housing compatible with MCS. While it was true that they suffered from an illness, disease or disability that caused ‘enduring physical or psychological suffering that is intolerable to them and cannot be relieved under conditions that they consider acceptable’ as specified under the eligibility criteria of Bill C-14 [that recently expanded eligibility beyond death being “reasonably foreseeable], the primary source of their suffering was an inability to find appropriate housing, not the condition itself. Another person, also with MCS, writes: ‘I’ve applied for MAiD essentially because of abject poverty’.

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and in February, a Yale Professor from Japan said we should kill off the elderly:

A professor at Yale University has sparked outrage for suggesting that elderly Japanese residents should take part in a “mass suicide” by disembowelment to help the country deal with its rapidly aging population.

Yusuke Narita, 37, an assistant professor of economics at the Ivy League school, has gained hundreds of thousands of followers on social media as he touted the controversial solution in multiple interviews and publications — but he’s also drawn ire, the New York Times reported. “I feel like the only solution is pretty clear,”

Narita said during a news program in late 2021. “In the end, isn’t it mass suicide and mass ‘seppuku’ of the elderly?” he added, referring to the practice of disembowelment utilized by dishonored Samurai in the late 19th century. Last year, Narita answered a boy’s question about seppuku by telling a group of students about a scene from “Midsommar,” a 2019 flick in which a Swedish cult sends one of its oldest members to jump off a cliff.

“Whether that’s a good thing or not, that’s a more difficult question to answer,” he said. “So if you think that’s good, then maybe you can work hard toward creating a society like that.”

italics mine 

 

He also has discussed euthanasia, predicting that the “possibility of making it mandatory in the future” will become part of the public discourse.

actually, the practics was not unknown in ancient/medieval Japan and has a name: from Wikipedia; Ubasute 

Ubasute (姥捨て, "abandoning an old woman", also called obasute and sometimes oyasute 親捨て "abandoning a parent") is a mythical practice of senicide in Japan, whereby an infirm or elderly relative was carried to a mountain, or some other remote, desolate place, and left there to die.^[1]

the Wikipedia page has a list of western books/films etc that push the idea (ignoring the many more films/books that glamourize the killing of the handicapped, usually pushed as something they wanted to do).