Jim, thank you for your action dealing with this euthanasia issue.
I lost my mother due to withholding of food and water that I could not stop due to issues whose details I'm not going to discuss publicly on the internet. Much has already been said on this thread with which I fully agree, and there's no need to repeat my own story which is all too similar.
I learned two things from that incident.
One was the importance of getting a good lawyer who shares pro-life convictions and understands the potential loopholes which doctors can exploit in “living wills,” and even then, reading every single word of anything that gets signed.
The other was a greatly increased respect for the role of Roman Catholic hospitals in end-of-life issues. My mother trusted her once-evangelical denomination, and when she woke up from a coma, without understanding what would happen, left the intensive care unit of a Roman Catholic hospital and fell into the hands of a hospice founded by one of the worst liberal professors at the official college of her denomination, a man whose evil theology I had fought against for nearly a decade. She thought she was going into a nursing home with care comparable to the hospital if needed, but once she lost consciousness, she was starved to death and nothing could be done because of what she had signed, despite very clear verbal statements made in the presence of several witnesses including me and an elder’s wife.
Not going to say more details here, Jim, but I want to commend you for what you wrote. Theology has consequences, and when it comes to abortion and euthanasia, those consequences can easily be fatal.
We simply cannot trust our doctors or our lawyers to have our best interests at heart; even if they mean well, they don't necessarily share our values, and lawyers may not understand loopholes in areas outside their ordinary scope of professional practice. The documents we sign could be our own death warrants if we're not careful.
For those of you who are Roman Catholics on this thread — keep demanding that your church enforce its doctrine at your hospitals. I am confessionally required to believe some very strong things about the Roman Catholic Church, just as the Council of Trent requires you to believe some very strong things about Protestants, but abortion and euthanasia are good examples of where conservative Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants can and should work together. At least for now, we can typically trust Roman Catholic hospitals and unfortunately I cannot always say that about Protestant hospitals and nursing homes, even if they're supposedly evangelical.