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In 2016 ISIS attackers bombed the airport in Brussels killing over a dozen people. A seventeen year old girl was present but uninjured. This May she chose to be euthanized because of her psychological trauma. She was 23 and she had no physical injuries. The news of her death was just announced recently.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2022/10/10/2016-brussels-attacks-victim-granted-euthanasia-after-years-of-ptsd_5999805_4.html
This seems absolutely insane to me. I don't doubt she was suffering but she was only 23. A lot could have changed over the next 70 years. She wasn't terminally ill, she didn't have cancer, she wasn't paralyzed from the neck down. She was very sad and very scared and had attempted suicide twice. But I know that at least some people who have survived suicide attempts have gone on to lead happy lives.
I used to disapprove of euthanasia but wasn't strongly in favor of making it illegal, even though it was never a choice I would make myself or approve of making for a relative. But cases like this have made me strongly opposed to it. It seems like the medical establishment can't be trusted to restrict it to only the most extreme cases. The people saying that allowing euthanasia is a slippery slope have been proven right in my opinion.
2020 switched me from being ambivalently pro-euthanasia to vehemently anti-euthanasia. The attitudes of government, and in particular medical authorities over the last few years mean that I think they should never, ever acquire the power to assist in suicides. Not because I object to the actual action itself on moral grounds, but because I believe they are strongly incentivised to misuse this power. There is a serious risk that legalizing euthanasia will lead to governments ignoring suffering of their own creation by, approximately, responding "don't like it, KYS then" - a pressure valve to relieve political issues in a way that they shouldn't be. At it's most extreme, governments might actively encourage suicides among the recalcitrant as a means of further cementing their unchecked power over the population. Canada has already seen someone undergo euthanasia in response to covid lockdowns, after all.
The way euthanasia has broadened runs disturbingly parallel to the way trans and abortion slid down their respective slopes. Legal euthanasia was legislated on the back of activism asking that terminally-ill old people be allowed a dignified release from unbearable suffering, while they still had their ability to consent. Trans activism used sympathetic cases of deeply dysphoric individuals whose transition alleviated life-long suffering. Abortion activists spoke of desperate young rape victims needing a safe, legal, and rare option for a truly horrible situation.
And now we have young people committing suicide with government blessing, as well as Canada's health system telling a veteran "maybe you should KYS"; irreversible medications, surgeries, and everything you see on LibsOfTikTok pushed with very little care or safeguards; and up-to-birth or even partial-birth abortions. "Oh, that's just the slippery slope fallacy" no longer cuts it with me - I need to see the left make a credible commitment to a limiting principle before I even think about supporting their next cause.
The opposite side of this coin is called "salami tactics".
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