If I may interject –
Tab, when a person gets to a point where they would consider something like euthanasia, they’re probably already dying slowly. One would think that a person would push it off until the last possible lucid moment, but eventually the quality of life of a person in that situation goes to zero, and how is it any more painful for family for the person to then decide to end their life than it is to watch a person they love die slowly, and more than likely with some amount of pain?
My aunt is a nurse, and she used to do in-home care. She worked for a woman who, at the age of 70, was in excellent shape, went jogging every day – until the day she was jogging and got hit by a car. She spent the next 10+ years of her life lying in a bed unable to move, being taken care of by a bevy of nurses, until the day she just gave up. She didn’t want to be alive anymore, so she quit eating. Her family and all the nurses who had worked with her for so long and grew to love her got to watch her kill herself over the course of a week and a half, and it was torturous. They contemplated force-feeding her, hooking her up to some tubes and pumping liquid nutrients into her, but that would’ve been downright cruel and they knew it. How much more peaceful and easy could the process have been for everyone involved if she had been able to request a shot that would send her to sleep to never wake up again?