[throwaway324324]

Some of my family members have died to suicide. One violently after many people could not restrain them. One very much planned, very much like Pieter. Both found reasons to end their suffering, to take authoritative control over their own death. The suffering doesn't go away, it just takes another form in other people. It seems I'm the authoritarian lunatic, the psychopath, because I cannot see what separates euthanasia from every other tragic suicide.

* Is it because someone else performs the injection? Then what about suicide by cop, and cases where the patient injects herself?

* Is it because their family members join them in that initial feeling of peace following their decision (which suicide prevention pamphlets warn to watch for)?

* Is it because a cancer patient really is better off dead? Then so are many other seemingly-hopeless people, who are depressed, abandoned, and addicted. Is it because doctors agree that they are better off dead?

Nobody is pro-suffering, but sometimes we must suffer for the things that make us human. When we hear about deaths, aren't the most painful ones those where a person has said "this human life is not worth living"? No inanimate disease can say something so painful, can affirm it so permanently through willful action.

[robryk]

> (...) what separates euthanasia from every other tragic suicide

I see two large differences:

1. A requirement for euthanasia is usually that the patient keeps wanting it for a reasonably long period of time: it should never be a spur of the moment thing.

2. Another requirement usually is that the patient is mentally competent.

> When we hear about deaths, aren't the most painful ones those where a person has said "this human life is not worth living"?

If euthanasia is forbidden, people _will still be saying that in similar situations_, just they won't be able to do anything about it.

[throwaway324324]

We usually don't want them to do anything about it - this is why we have suicide prevention. The difference with euthanasia is that you personally agree that certain lives really are "not worth living", and for practical purposes you defer that judgement, via government, to a set of doctors. This shifts the requirement away from informed consent to a judgement external to the person, from "do they really want to" to "do I really want them to".

The differences you mention (duration of ideation/plan, competence) are ultimately about determining if the person "really wants to". But this applies equally to "normal" suicide: it places the many rationally planned suicides into the same class as euthanasia (it's their life, they're freeing themselves, keep your morality to yourself).

http://www.emorycaresforyou.emory.edu/resources/suicidestati...

Furthermore, according to the above link, of the 1 million who create a plan, only half report going through with it - how many with a "planned death" would not actually have gone through with it and instead endured, had they been lucid?

Should we be trying to prevent "(rationally) planned death", or shouldn't we?

[throwaway324324]

What are the downvotes for? The questions aren't rhetorical, if that's the issue - I really do want to know what distinction people see between this and suicide, which periodically comes up as a topic here, and people are so much against.