When we die, it is only very rarely that we do so without days, weeks, or months of illness in which the suffering may be very great, sometimes from pain, often from breathlessness, impairment of consciousness, depression, anxiety, vomiting, bedsores, and incontinence. If we were able to choose our own time to die, there would be no need to suffer any of this. There should be a “right to die.” It should be ethically and legally possible for the doctor attending a terminally ill patient, who asks him for help to take his own life, to put the means within his reach.
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