Even as someone who believes people have the freedom to take their own lives and can morally request help to do so to end suffering, a dimension to this is modern treatments for terminal illnesses can keep you alive long enough to suffer so much that someone else has to make the active decision to end it. That is to say, medically assisted dying often merely solves a problem that medicine and treatment itself created.
While I respect the principle of religious objections to assisted dying, if they don't extend to assisted life extension as well, I can't assign them much weight. There should be some serendipity to dying, and the religious objection seems to be about people making a decision that should be left to the sacred.
To compensate for this decision problem and the risks of non-consensual assisted suicide by a variety of legalistic players, a better solution could be to just liberalize rules on opioid pain killers for terminal pain management and improve self administration technology and management of the drugs.
> liberalize rules on opioid pain killers for terminal pain management and improve self administration technology and management of the drugs
The same people who argue against euthanasia are against this as well. Opioid pain killers are explicitly rationed in such a way that they make it very hard to "overdose". To me this is cruel and insane, but many people are apparently so afraid of death that won't even allow others in horrible pain to choose death.
While I respect the principle of religious objections to assisted dying, if they don't extend to assisted life extension as well, I can't assign them much weight. There should be some serendipity to dying, and the religious objection seems to be about people making a decision that should be left to the sacred.
To compensate for this decision problem and the risks of non-consensual assisted suicide by a variety of legalistic players, a better solution could be to just liberalize rules on opioid pain killers for terminal pain management and improve self administration technology and management of the drugs.