Forewarning: I'm in the "personal autonomy" camp.<p>The article (novel?) was o.k., until it got towards the end:<p>>"<i>But while some applicants for euthanasia are furious with doctors who turn them down, in practice people are unwilling to take their own lives. Rather than drink the poison or open the drip, 95% of applicants for active life termination in the Netherlands ask a doctor to kill them. In a society that vaunts its rejection of established figures of authority, when it comes to death, everyone asks for Mummy.</i>"<p>The author doesn't even address the byproduct of attempting (and failing) suicide, nor do they address the success rates of suicide compared to euthanasia.<p>Stating that people hide behind the state to perform something that they're unwilling to do themselves is, to me, a myopic statement. In that statement, they're not even addressing the fact that it takes two drugs, which someone couldn't administer themselves (in succession) for it to be successful (medically induced, that is). They also don't address the "surprise" of suicide versus the foreknowledge that euthenasia affords and how the trama of the former is potentially exponentially worse than the latter. Finally, they don't even address the will of seeking the process, what occurs between the request and the action, and how long that takes. It's not as if I could call up a doctor and it happen on the morrow...