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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.
I'd argue that suicide prohibition and lockdownism are actually quite similar: they both severely curtail individual rights in the name of preventing social harm; they both a contrast themselves against a cruel, stony-hearted, libertarian alternative ('letting Grandma die'); they're both fairly easy to circumvent in isolation, but very difficult to oppose in an organised way. I suspect the fury you feel against the total, arbitrary, capricious power of the medical/state establishment would be very familiar to suicidal people who have been involuntarily committed.
But perhaps this is tangential to your point; truly legal suicide is far from the same thing as medically-sanctioned euthanasia. Still, I'd be surprised if anyone petitioning the Belgian state for euthanasia wouldn't have saved themselves the bother if equivalent means were freely available to them.
Legal suicide indeed isn't the same thing as medically-sanctioned euthanasia.
I see the combination of government being strong enough to engage in systematic torture of the population, as evidenced by lockdowns, and also offering euthanasia to be a uniquely dangerous combination of circumstances. At it's most extreme, consider the practice of psychiatric abuse in the Soviet Union. Dissidents were classed as mentally ill, with the nonsense-diagnosis of "sluggish schizophrenia". This didn't progress to outright euthanasia as e.g the Nazis did, but if there's no pre-existing barriers to euthanasia, like there is now in places like Canada, it's very easy to see that progression. All this hypothetical government need do to kill a bunch of dissidents is make their lives unliveable with restrictions (such as targeting the unvaccinated with vaccine mandates) cause them severe unhappiness via the circumstances, misdiagnose that as depression rather than the normal affect towards the circumstances, and off them.
This is personal, too. My very vehement disagreement with lockdowns lead some now-former family members (as in, I distanced myself from them in response to this) to falsely accuse me of mental illness because I refused to provide information to a track and trace scheme. I see a concerningly short path from the government legalizing euthanasia to them trying to use it to find some reason to murder people like me.
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