Not to be too blunt about it, but why would you need the right? It's not like there would be repercussions.
Unless you meant some kind of contract to be euthanized by the state/caregiver if you lost your faculties. That kind of thing would scare me. What if some interviewer decides they think you have lost it when you're still hanging on? We have a lot to learn about elder care in the modern world I guess.
I think he meant the right to be killed moreso then the right to suicide. However, there are other contexts where the right to suicide makes sense, such as terminal illnesses that leave your mental faculty intact. If you are stuck in a hospital bed, surrounded by doctors, with a machine reading your vitals continously, it can be very hard to commit suicide. Even if you manage to, it would probably not be as pleasent as the morpheme overdose a nurse could give you.
Speaking from the personal experience of having watched a family member die of dementia, I absolutly agree that we should have a right to die. The only arguement should be about where to draw the line.
In my case we had a woman who watched her own mother go through dementia and was very clear in both her will, and in speaking with her immediate family that she never wanted to be kept alive in that state. In addition, by the end, the entire family was in agreement that she should be put down, and (as far as I am aware) every medical professional we spoke with agreed with our decision to put her on a DNR and avoid life prolonging treatments to the extent possible. I cannot imagine that a hypothetical ethics board would come to a different conclusion.
Despite this, she stayed alive until she died of dehydration as a result of loosing the mental faculty necessary to swallow when water was placed in her mouth.
I was told by a former physician (turned engineer) that the interval between realizing that you're starting to lose it and then indeed losing the wherewithal to act on your own is "a matter of weeks."
I suppose there are practical issues, especially once someone has gotten debilitated enough they don't have a lot of personal autonomy or privacy. If it were legal then one could imagine making a autonomous decision and "getting help" with the practicalities.
You would need the right because there are severe repercussions for failure in suicide.
- The stats are against you with a far higher risk of surviving any suicide attempt. Yes, in older age that risk "goes down" probably due to subconscious acceptance of the killing action, whereas a youth might use suicide as desperate cries for attention and not fully commit to go through because there's a glimmer of hope in the back of the mind that someone will save you from yourself. You can look up the stats, even shooting yourself with a gun in the head is usually _survivable_ although you may end up in far greater pain both emotionally and physically, locked in a comatose or paralyzed state and sustaining heavy damage. The 'easy' ways out that are entirely painless, even euphoric, and completely reliable methods of extinguishing consciousness are heavily guarded by gatekeepers who will make sure that it's not accessible so as to keep miserable, dependent, but profitable people in the land of the living even if that means torture in this worldly purgatory.
- The resulting involuntary commitment to psychiatric "services" which will most likely involve a long-term chemical straightjacket and physical confinement that externally may appear to be vegetative and without markers of sentience or apparent pain, but internally are a hell that few truly experience while here on Earth.
- Succession legalities that are currently minefields including the specifics of property transfer, insurance payouts, and in more theocratic/authoritarian states/communities the family members left behind may be the victims of ostracization, excommunication, or even incarceration.
Unless you meant some kind of contract to be euthanized by the state/caregiver if you lost your faculties. That kind of thing would scare me. What if some interviewer decides they think you have lost it when you're still hanging on? We have a lot to learn about elder care in the modern world I guess.