[Brian_K_White]

And it's a real life practical issue for me that there be no wiggle room or ambiguity, ever, in any context, about whether it's OK to kill me. Even if the doctor on the scene doesn't know me personally and I'm not capable of making my arguments to him and defend my self from his, say, religious belief that I'll be in a better place or have outlived his concept of usefulness or worth.

It makes sense to me that this is not something that can be done conveniently. It makes sense to me for the system to be rigged such that errors always result in "did not kill when should have" rather than "killed when should not have".

[oleander73]

One of the rules is that two independent doctors need to be sure that you want to be euthanized, so this is already covered and has nothing to do with the ridiculous judgment of whether I am suffering enough.

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

I'm not aware of anyone who is advocating involuntary euthanasia. I've no doubt that someone is but it is far outside of the mainstream, even among those who support an unconditional right to euthanasia. In all current implementations and all the ones I've seen proposed it has to be actively sought by the patient who is to be euthanized. Your comment seems like more than a little bit of a strawman.

[throw0101a]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Involuntary_euthanasia#United_...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-voluntary_euthanasia

> I've no doubt that someone is but it is far outside of the mainstream […] Your comment seems like more than a little bit of a strawman.

For now perhaps, but sometimes the inclined plane has a low coefficient of friction:

> Evidence of widespread evasion of such safeguards in Belgium and the Netherlands, where assisted suicide had previously been legalized, was dismissed as “anecdotal,” while the widening of its application in those countries, from the consenting adults originally envisaged, to children and the mentally ill, was waved away as the product of a different “medico-legal culture.” In essence, the court said, it can’t happen here.

> This was not just an incidental point. This was central to the court’s reasoning, the thing that allowed it to ignore the precedent set in Rodriguez. Legalizing assisted suicide, relaxing the prohibition in place for centuries in virtually all Western countries, need not open the floodgates, as feared. It could be limited to consenting adults, of sound mind, in the last agonizing stages of a terminal illness – the sorts of people who had come before the court in Carter and Rodriguez, the sorts of cases that had moved the public to support their cause.

> Yet here we are, in 2020, considering whether to legalize assisted suicide for non-terminal cases, for the mentally ill, even for children – sorry, “mature minors.”

* https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-on-assisted-...

* https://archive.is/hFXjJ

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

The miniscule risk of a slippery slope in some remote and unlikely future cannot serve as a reasonable justification for violating the bodily autonomy of adults in their sound mind today. Nor am I much impressed by the existence of an organization that advocated involuntary euthanasia eighty years ago in the US. There was all kinds of insanely messed up stuff going on in our country at that time. Involuntary euthanasia, even if they had succeeded in implementing it, wouldn't have remotely been the worst.

[throw0101a]

> The miniscule risk of a slippery slope

The slippery slope is occurring right now in Canada:

> Had you predicted [in 2015] that the right to an assisted suicide would soon come to apply, not only in cases of physical pain but psychological, and not only to patients in the last agonizing stages of death but those who were nowhere near it – had you predicted, indeed, that a patient’s request to be killed would not even have to be repeated and persistent for a doctor to act on it, that the whole process could be telescoped into a single day – you would have been accused of “slippery slope” thinking.

> Had you predicted that, by 2019, just the third full year after it was legalized, nearly one in 50 deaths in the country would be by assisted suicide, even on the (almost certainly underreported) official numbers; and that, this having been accomplished, talk would turn to extending the procedure – not just to competent adults, but the mentally ill and even children – you would have been carted off.

> Yet that, incredibly, is where we are. The cautious, limited exceptions that people understood the issue to involve at the start – what most people understand it to involve even now – have been overtaken by an accelerating drive toward death-on-demand. Had the public known this was where we were headed, they might have objected. Instead it has been done in stages, a series of bait-and-switch routines in which the courts and legislatures have taken equal part.

> The irony is that the very foundation of the Supreme Court’s decision in Carter was that there was no such slippery slope.

* https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-our-cautious...

* https://archive.is/s5bPu

Would you consider killing newborns "involuntary euthanasia"? If so, then that would be an example advocation. Per Jerry Coyne:

> If you are allowed to abort a fetus that has a severe genetic defect, microcephaly, spina bifida, or so on, then why aren’t you able to euthanize that same fetus just after it’s born? I see no substantive difference that would make the former act moral and the latter immoral. After all, newborn babies aren’t aware of death, aren’t nearly as sentient as an older child or adult, and have no rational faculties to make judgments (and if there’s severe mental disability, would never develop such faculties). It makes little sense to keep alive a suffering child who is doomed to die or suffer life in a vegetative or horribly painful state.

* https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2017/07/13/should-one-be-allo...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Coyne

If not "involuntary euthanasia", do you have an opinion of it 'should' be classified (if at all)?

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

> The slippery slope is occurring right now in Canada:

I see that the right to end your own life is being expanded in Canada. I see no evidence from what you shared that the qualitative change over to involuntary euthanasia is in any danger of occurring, nor that there is any motion in that direction.

> [Baby-related stuff]

As the blog you cite points out, we withdraw care from infants in the first two categories on a routine basis, which has exactly the same effect as euthanasia, but with extra suffering for the infant. As far as I'm concerned, we already euthanize these infants. We just do it in the most painful way possible.