Terminally ill or otherwise hopeless people may choose suicide because they don't want to inconvenience others within a language framework that ascribes, to varying degrees, moral deficiency to people who use social resources without being able to pay for them. Saying that suicide is a normal option for care rather than the current radical option that it is can help to change language and institutions to bias people toward death. I find that extremely problematic as our societies grow more and more dependent on community relationships instead of individual independence.
Legal suicide is incompatible with social medicine. There just isn't any way around it that I can see.
A Dutch patient doesn't easily get into the position before euthanasia is a legal option. I need to strongly underline that we are talking about terminally ill people.
For those people there rests little difference between terminal sedation and euthanasia, except that the first is often imposed through medical staff - unless specifically ruled out by the patient. The second is a determined choice only available when specifically requested by the patient. The choice of dying in this situation is crystal clear - either you drift out in an opiod induced stupour, or with a self-determined choice. That is, simply, the right to die - people who want to face their death themselves. That does not make it an easy choice. And not many choose for it, as Dutch numbers unambiguously reflect.
As it is, I'm proud to live in a country where citizens are granded that final important right of self-determination.
the staff there were angels of mercy, and the atmosphere anything but sombre.
sounds like the dutch don't see a need to sequester this from normal medical practice, and why should they? ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
I think a better argument in favor of legalization of suicide is related to something In Whales mentioned elsewhere in this thread. Euthanasia and suicide happen anyway, so perhaps legalization provides a degree of transparency which helps to mitigate the perverse incentives at least where they involve direct encouragement of others to choose death. (It wouldn't help the larger issue of presenting suicide as a morally superior option to continued treatment in order to avoid inconveniencing others. This isn't refuted by the Dutch experience and data either, because it doesn't show what the Dutch experience would have been if suicide and euthanasia were not already established parts of Dutch discourse by the 1980's when data on such things became available.)
