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Granted, true, but that's after only of couple of years of current practices in Canada. Add bureaucratic and generational inertia, and I see that these things tend to swing more extreme in span of decades. The historical trend of news from the Netherlands used to be that every few years or so there was a court decision about a new group of people who can get killed by the doctors: In the 1980s it was cases of "90-year old ladies with incurable cancer" which slowly ticked from there to "yes, depressed young people can get killed by the doctors".
Another example. It is observable in many Western secular countries that marriage used to be viewed as a serious matter after the divorce became easier, but marriage rates fall when the kids who grew up in the divorce regime are adults. In France among women born in 1980s and later, "marriage" is a minority practice .
I am today convinced that in ethical matters, the human society has no tolerance for uncomfortable complexities of grey areas or context-dependent decisions or tradeoffs (such as, assisted suicide can be a reasonable choice for an infirm 90-year old to make, when he or she is of sound mind and has only death by painful sickness to look forward to), but public policy converges to naive deontological equilibria (either everyone who qualifies through some bureaucratic checklist will get killed by their doctors because the checklist absolves everyone of moral responsibility, or even people who are slowly dying in unmitigable pain can't be offered assistance contrary to their wishes because next of kin are delusional of death).
I am yet to see anyone* being "killed by their doctors" whose lives weren't already contingent on continued medical care, unless very esoteric definitions of killing are applied (such as "offered euthanasia and had it accepted"). I call that "abandoned by their doctors", and in the end someone is always getting abandoned as long as we have scarcity and conditions that can't be cured.
*Organ harvester Georg who commits murder and covers it up obviously does not count.
I assume you are proposing "patient surely takes the deadly poison by themselves if he/she is able to do so"? Sure, that is reasonable and happens, but it is one of those reasonable-sounding things that get abandoned. For example, I think in the Netherlands the usual practice is that after the paperwork is done, "the patient" can just lie down comfortable and the doctor administers sedative and deadly stuff through the IV. Link Which is, in my view, killing the person. You can kill people who request to be killed, but it is still act of killing, if the words are to have any meaning.
No, I don't draw any meaningful difference between the patient throwing the switch and the doctor doing so. Whoever's will is being done is the one doing the killing.
"Doctors killing people" is as far as I can tell a rhetorical trick by pro-lifers to paint a picture of uncaring monsters who strap you into a chair and jab you with the death syringe as soon as you admit any shred of bad quality of life. Plus maybe the useful autists carrying water for them.
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