Should Euthanasia or Assisted Suicide be openly allowed?

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Complex question.

Although I am very sympathetic to pro-life, I do think that there is a point when there is too much suffering. Back in my home country some time ago grandmother had terminal cancer and the drs after she passed on, and the doctors (off the record told my family) they gave her overdose of morphine, and it was viewed as a merciful act.

However, what if sometimes it is done with negligence. My parent is an aged people carer to help people live independently so she hears a lot about what happens to her clients' spouses etc. There was one lady who could not live alone anymore and so she had been moved her to an aged care home and although she was in 90s and in sound health, but she was depressed about being removed from home and refused to eat. The nurses did not try to persuade her to eat and she basically starved over a period of two weeks which to me seems atrocious and how those nurses are not in jail. Yet on the other hand, many ill elder people's spouses are scared of even having medication like morphine at home out of fear that they'll be falsely suspected of assisting death so it's a really strange double standard.

But in Zurich, it is legal, but, the reasons are one "must be either terminal, or severely mentally ill, or clinically depressed beyond treatment". Even though I myself am the latter, I think such laws are way too loose and reckless in deciding to end another's life, there seems an almost eugenical ring to that (if you are mentally ill or depressed then how can you truly genuinely give consent). If you are terminally ill then you need help because you cannot do it yourself and there is absolutely no possibility that you could ever get better, whereas with depression, I don't think it should be up to doctors to do it because then it's reniforcing a view that people with mental conditions are worthless, and if it becomes a legal option then maybe depressed people will not have as much hope for treatments working because death will become necessarily an outcome of depression and legitimize/validate suicidal thinking. (May seem hypocritical position to take, but I don't wish upon others to feel there is no hope when there for some could be.)

Meanwhile on the other extreme, there is one family whose elderly mother is unable to move or communicate and has very advanced multiple sclerosis, and her daughters feed her. They do this by forcing open her mouth, forcing the food to go down (risk of drowning) a process that takes really long and must be agonizing to have your body forced to move, but her daughers are not wanting to give her a feeding tube because they believe it would worsen her quality of life(!) They also force physical therapy which must also be agonizing. I think forcing this person to live this way and giving her unnecessary pain is a lot worse than death.

So I would say it should be legal because maybe it would make neglectful slow death a less likely scenario because a faster less painful one would exist, but only in medically terminal cases and not otherwise because that could make non-normative people very vulnerable.

I do not know what I will do when I encounter this issue. I would prefer not to think about it.

I say yes but I also fully understand the ways it could be abused to eugenic ends.

We'd need a high degree of cultural maturity to really handle it right and the legislation would need to be set in stone and untouchable - guiding the process to the effect that there needs to be a very high standard of evidence witnessing the autonomy in the person's decision as well as the certainty of the person's decision. No public care institution should be allowed to vouch for people either as this could in a very sickening way be a wonderful way to cut corners on spending. Any fraud on this would need to be responded to by first and second degree murder charges.

To handle the 'slippery' slope for this - I think the only way about it is to specifically cut out and highlight the area of individual autonomy at the most fundamental human right and additionally the decider of life and death. I think unconditionally denying people the right to die in a dignified manner also violates this principal in the opposite direction.

You realize they could make a lot more money by keeping you semi-alive for as long as possible? Injecting someone with lethal drugs is probably pretty cheap. Keeping a semi-vegetable on intensive care costs insane amounts of money (and I'm NOT saying that as an argument in favor of euthenasia). From a business perspective they should treat people for as long as they can.