When my father was dying from cancer, I worried there might come a day when his pain was so intolerable, his agony so great and his end so near and certain that he would ask someone (me) to help his hasten his end. Thankfully, it never came to that, but I would have helped him if he had asked and if I believed he were making that request with a sound mind.
Remember in the old cowboy movies when a cowboy got shot in the gut, he’d always beg his friends to shoot him in the head so he didn’t have to suffer days of agonizing pain only to die in the end anyway?
It is just too simplistic to say we must never honor someone’s wishes to hasten the inevitable.
I recently saw an old episode of Bonanza with that story line. When that was filmed, we all recognized that murder was wrong. The show reflected those values, and acknowledged that murder was wrong.
In the early ‘60s, we as a society still honored the lessons learned from The Holocaust. “Never again” actually meant something.
Today, the lessons from The Holocaust that are being utilized are the methods of exterminating useless eaters. Starvation/dehydration was one of their more popular methods, as it is here today.
In the early ‘60s, we as a society were civilized enough to recognize that people with disabilities, no matter how severe, were still people, with the same rights as the rest of us. We didn’t hate them enough to kill them, nor automatically assume they hated themselves and wanted to be tortured to death. Nobody needed to hire a lawyer and fill out an advance directive to prove they didn’t want to be tortured to death. It was just assumed that people wanted to be treated humanely.
Times have changed.