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Thinking about that slippery slope and the hard cases that introduce it, maybe the structure we want is that mercy killing should be illegal and prosecuted by the legal system, but it always remains a possibility for individual action. Someone knows their parent is in incredible pain and wants to die: it's then their prerogative to perform the killing themselves, taking the moral weight of the act onto themselves. It's a decision that's incredibly weighty and a lot to ask of someone, but that's exactly what we want anyway instead of offloading it onto society and the bureaucratic apparatuses to make it routine. And if the killing is discovered with lots of evidence pointing to the person who did it, it's prosecutable.
It's then up to a jury to decide legal guilt, and they can judge the "cancer patient in extreme pain somehow receives an OD of a painkiller" and the "20 year old TikToker with a terminal case of POTS is killed" differently.
This sort of thing is a cry for tyranny. Legal things should be legal, not illegal but overlooked if the right people find it convenient to do so.
You misread me: I said that mercy killing should be illegal and prosecuted. But, if sometimes illegal things are still the moral thing, someone can choose to do the illegal thing and bear the potential consequences if they're certain it's still right. I don't think the person is expected or required to make it easy for the government to prosecute them for the crime, but the government should earnestly do so with the tools at its disposal.
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