A person may want to end their life for a variety of reasons, and not just because they are terminal or in excruciating pain. If a person is determined to "lea

A person may want to end their life for a variety of reasons, and not just because they are terminal or in excruciating pain. If a person is determined to "leave this world", for whatever reason, they are many ways to do it that no one can prevent: a gun shot, slashing their arms in the tub, gobbling medicine (not always reliable), etc. IMO, a person who wants to leave should be allowed to have controlled death without a mess or violence. I agree that counseling should be required, like maybe 2 sessions, but don't agree that anyone should have the power to deny assistance to die. It's my choice to leave or stay; all we are debating is whether I have to do something messy or can have a goodbye meeting with my family and have a peaceful death. My mom had pneumonia when she was 74. She had been very sick with rheumatoid arthritis for 30 years - bedridden in some of them, on crazy amounts of drugs for all of them, and for the last few years of her life, could only barely walk bent over a walker because of a failed hip replacement. Her body was shot, so when she went to the hospital for the pneumonia, she refused to let them treat her. If she took the oxygen mask off, she turned blue. The doctor wanted to send her home with an oxygen tank to lug around, but she could hardly walk as it was, so that was completely impractical. I guess she convinced the doctors she did want to leave, because they had a conference with us, said she was going to die, and allowed us to hasten it with morphine and Adavan. The shitty thing is, we (mainly me) had to go to the nurses station every 45 minutes to tell them she was "not comfortable" and get a morphine injection, and every hour do the same thing for Adavan. This went on for 9 hours, and it was only that short because they had her on 2 oxygen deliveries and I had to convince them that we couldn't keep doing this for 3-4 days. No one had eaten all day, my sisters are in the room crying their eyes out, and my mom had been unconscious for many hours. We knew what the end game was, but getting there was much more difficult that it needed to be. They could have easily put her on a drip for those 2 drugs to avoid adding to our suffering by forcing us to request drugs on some crazy schedule we had to track while our mother is dying. I am grateful they at least did it, but it was unnecessarily hard on us. There are also cases where a person should be able to write a document, like a living will, that says "Under these circumstances, I want to be euthanized: haven't been able to communicate for N days" etc. There may be cirumstances, like an accident, where a person is not able to go to counseling or is not able to confirm their wishes verbally. That doesn't mean they've changed their mind. If a document is written when the person is sane (maybe someone needs to notarized that), there is no reason to not honor their wishes at the appropriate time. We treat animals better than we treat people when it comes to end-of-life decisions, and that's a damn shame.