Helping a Suicide When the End Isn't Near - Room for Debate - NYTimes.com

A debate on assisted death.  Professor Mark A.R. Kleiman says:

Of course, if the laws were changed, it would be necessary to separate out determined suicides from impulsive ones, to determine whether people asking to be killed were under pressure from health-care providers or family members to end lives that had become inconvenient to others, and to identify instances where better medical treatment or social care might eliminate the desire to die. People for whom the source of suffering is profound clinical depression pose the hardest cases, because the disease makes it difficult to determine what the subject “really wants.”

But the fact that a problem is hard isn’t a good enough reason to choose an easy, simple, wrong answer. Current laws create untold amounts of avoidable suffering. It’s time to change those laws.

Professor Ira Byock says:

Society should discourage suicide. Assisted suicide should be illegal. And if the populace insists on making assisted-suicide legal, physicians are the wrong professionals to do it.

Helping a Suicide When the End Isn't Near - Room for Debate - NYTimes.com