Death with Dignity

When my dad was in ICU, an elderly woman coded repeatedly for the last probably ten days of her life. My mother spoke about it with disgust. She felt the family wasn't prolonging the woman's life. They were merely torturously dragging out her death because they were not emotionally ready to accept the reality that she was dying and would not be going home again.

Modern medicine can often extend "life" without really giving you a life. You continue to exist but sometimes in a vegetative state and there is increasingly evidence this may be something akin to cruel and unusual punishment.

Comments in the HN discussion for an article titled Thousands of coma patients may be conscious testify to experiences with being in a coma, aware the entire time and how terrifying it was.

A plot point of Kill Bill is that the character played by Uma Thurman has been in a coma for four years during which time she was being repeatedly raped and can remember it:

Four years later, the Bride wakes up and is horrified to discover she is no longer pregnant. She rips out the tongue of and then stabs to death a man who intends to rape her, and then uses the door to smash in the head of a hospital worker who has been selling her body while she was comatose. 

Yes, that's fiction, but this is not:

Woman in 14-Year Coma Gives Birth in Arizona.

A 36-year-old nurse from the Hacienda HealthCare facility has been arrested and charged with sexual assault.

I know it's extremely common for the legal definition of rape to be framed such that only a man can commit it and only a woman can be raped, but colloquially we use the word more broadly and male prisoners are at times sexually assaulted by other male prisoners. 

We have few resources for male victims of sex crimes and male victims are generally seen as more deeply shamed because it's emasculating. 

Culturally, it's fairly common for men to be users who will treat women like playthings and yet insist she get an abortion if some one night stand contacts him and says "I'm pregnant." So men tend to not want stray children out there fathered by them.

A plot point of The world according to Garp is that the titular character was conceived when his nurse mother had sex with a comatose male patient because she wanted a child but didn't want a man in her life. 

Contrary to popular misconception, the definition of rape hinges on the detail of consent, not on how violent it was. Someone who is comatose is incapable of giving consent so having sex with such a person is sexual assault.

I'm pro death with dignity. We are getting better and better at artificially keeping someone "alive" by definition of still breathing and it's going weird places where merely breathing is all that matters.

In many cases, this is the better answer:

...they tell us that attempting resuscitative efforts that are likely to be futile is not consistent with their values. In these situations, rather than asking for intubation and chest compressions, parents just want to hold their child and find meaning in those final moments of contact.

I also like Bishop's request to be disconnected in Alien 3. Note that he says his legs hurt though he has no legs.