Yes, this has been my experience with a family friend who died of a brain tumor. Basically, once you're in hospice (in this case it was home hospice) and it's clear you're going to die, they just hook you up to the morphine drip that you can press yourself.

Obviously for many people it's still very scary - it is death after all. But the self-administered morphine drip has been around for ages and is relatively uncontroversial.

It’s not the death that is scary, it’s the Judgement Day that’ll come after. Because you don’t know whether you did enough good stuff to go straight to heaven, or first have to suffer in hell to account for your sins. Not all of us believe in a religion that says you are already forgiven and you’ll go to heaven, because God sent himself down to Earth to become His own son to sacrifice Himself to Himself to convince Himself to forgive you.

I was raised with a particularly idiotic strain where you cannot repent or be forgiven; one mistake (however tiny) will be hell and that’s it. It is what made me an atheist at a young age (I think I was not even 10 when I decided it’s a bag of bull): it particularly exposes how weird religion is.

That's really a fringe belief indeed. Luckily there's no such thing in my religion.

Only on HN do we have to explain why death may be scary to some people. Sometimes I wonder if this place is populated by actual humans.

as an atheist who has been suicidal from around age 12, I'm not afraid of being dead, but actually causing my own death has been very difficult - it's not so much a logical fear as a mental block, it's like you're moving through very thick syrup trying to get the thing done, you're fighting a mental force that's holding you back, and eventually all the commitment and energy that you had invested in getting it done just seems to have dissipated and you just feel empty. I'm my case at least, the survival instinct has won every battle. unless of course we have quantum immortality, it would explain why I keep failing.

Because it's hard to fully comprehend or feel complete certainty of what is going to happen.

You know that government doesn’t care about you.

They care about your relatives who are burdened not “accidentally” holding that button for you when somehow you would still like to live.

That has nothing to do with it. Society in general is just uncomfortable with the idea of euthanasia and politicians don’t want to be labeled as promoting “suicide”

It’s just not a great hill to die on since most people that actually care strongly about the issue are the ones bed ridden in the hospital.

In the US, the big reason is religious groups that want to force their religion onto others.

There’s an interesting case right now in Vancouver against the largest hospital downtown which is affiliated with Catholics (I think, St Paul’s is the facility in any case).

Several in-patients that opted for medical assistance in dying were refused that treatment by administrators of the hospital on religious grounds, and their families are sueing based on the additional suffering inflicted by having to transfer to other facilities.

Catholic hospitals are a big problem in the US too.

If your job duties might go against your religious beliefs, you are responsible for finding other work. Not doing so should be grounds for termination.

There are anti-euthanasia atheists (E.g. Kevin Yuell).

There are pro assisted suicide religions too.

Neither of those matter because they don’t hold massive, disproportional influence over a huge part of the US political establishment.

In general in the US only White Evangelical Protestants and Black Protestants have less than a majority who believe assisted suicide / euthanasia should be available for "great pain and no hope of improvement", and those two groups still have over 40% who believe it should be available.

And that's as of 2015, so the trend may be higher by now. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/10/05/californi...

My bad, it's Yuill.

> who are burdened not “accidentally” holding that button

That’s almost always a financial incentive though; if you remove that you can see who really cares. I have an open will for my friends and family; everything goes to charity with the taxes and tangible assets worked out so they don’t have issues; they get a net amount of a few million. Everyone else knows they don’t get 1 cent; helps with the accidental button holding.

your value is what you contribute to the economy by working and consuming, or helping others work and consume. You're not getting out that easy!