X-Message-Number: 7447
From:  (Brad Templeton)
Newsgroups: sci.cryonics
Subject: Re: 20% of cryonicists autopsied?
Date: 3 Jan 1997 14:29:19 -0800
Message-ID: <5ak17v$>
References: <>

In article <>,
Randy <> wrote:
>As for the organic brain damage caused by the "bad (legal) deaths"
>noted above, perhaps legalized suicide may be the answer. I know that
>Dr. Thomas Donaldson has already fought and lost this battle, but I
>have followed the Kevorkian case closely, paying special attention to
>opinion polls. It seems that he has popular opinion on his side.
>Surely time will give us this victory.

Not for a long time, perhaps only after assisted suicide has been the
norm for decades.  Perhaps in your lifetime, perhaps not.

As you may know, doctors like Kervorkian are very careful not to charge
a fee for their assisted suicide work.  They have a good reason.

Remember that the general public considers cryonics to be quackery.
Even some who have examined it closely consider it quackery, but most
who have examined it lightly hold that opinion.  It doesn't matter if
you think they are wrong, what matters here is public opinion.

So now imagine that people are committing suicide because a company
has convinced them that if they do this, *AND PAY THE COMPANY $50,000*
that they can have life after death.  Imagine how you would feel if your
impression was that the people doing this were quacks.  You don't
think cryonics is snake oil, but imagine if you read that some outfit
was selling people literal snake oil for a large fee, saying it might
give life after death, and that your chances were better if you killed
yourself early and thus paid them early.

Would you not support a ban on this sort of fraud?  I would.  I would
like to think that I would examine the procedure in detail and figure out
if it was really quacks or if it had a chance first, but most people
wouldn't do that, they would just go by what they heard.

But it's even worse than that.  Imagine you have somebody who signed
up for cryonics before they got sick.  Clearly they signed up without
any sort of encouragement to kill themselves early to help their chances,
clearly they did not sign up for cryonics under the stress and duress of
terminal illness.

But if, like many, they signed up simply because Cryonics was an
interesting experiment, and the alternative was certain death, what then?
Nobody sane believes cryonics *will* work, at best they think it might
work.  At best you're taking a gamble and all you're betting is some
money.

But even with such a person cryonics could be perceived as now encouraging
him, in his terminal desperation, to gamble with what remains of his
(painful) *life*.

And society will tolerate people gambling with their lives.  But it
absolutely does not tolerate somebody being in the business of
encouraging and facilitating that gamble when, remember, the bulk of
society thinks that the business has convinced the sucker that there
is a chance, when society "knows" there is one.

Imagine a drug company selling a drug they say has a 1% chance of curing
you of AIDS, otherwise it kills you on the spot.  But the chance is better
if you take it early in your disease.  And they don't know it has the
chance of curing, and it never has, and many reputable doctors say it
won't work, but it costs a lot of money.  And some desperate AIDS patients,
looking for any hope, want to take it, even though it has never yet
worked.

Would society let them?  Nope.

Perhaps the first cryonics suicide might be somebody, a decade after
assisted suicide has become common, who has filed a sworn affadavit
while they were fully healthy that, should they be in danger of brain
damage, they wish to end their lives with cryonic suspension before that
happens.   And the cryo-orgs should get togehter and do this first one
for free if they can afford it.

Definitely not somebody who decided to do this after they got sick,
society -- even I -- would not judge their decision as fully rational.
-- 
Brad Templeton, publisher, ClariNet Communications Corp.	 
The net's #1 E-Newspaper (1,400,000 paid sbscrbrs.)  http://www.clari.net/brad/


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