When my father-in-law passed, in a rural assisted living facility, we found they had stopped feeding him despite saying they were and our requests that they continue.
We were stuck in this uncomfortable position of not being able to move him somewhere else, being completely blindsided by his (bone and bladder) cancer and how quickly it progressed, and not knowing what standard of care to advocate for understanding that he was passing.
One of the things that was also frustrating is that when we would ask for more pain medication, they would refuse as it might lead him to stop breathing (I thought, ‘so what?’), yet they were making decisions that ultimately accelerated to his demise.
Looking back, I don’t know that ceasing nutrition was a bad choice, but it wasn’t their decision to make. When I talked to friends in healthcare they effectively gave me the ‘oh, you sweet summer child’ talk.
My FIL, while he could communicate, could not wait to be out of pain and I wish he had the agency to make the decision before having to go through endless pain in the delirium of opioids.
There are, of course, details I’m leaving out, but my general takeaway is that in at least some cases the euthanasia debate is not about whether the call is being made, but who is making the call.
That is not alone reason to support one side of the debate or another, but it is an important nuance that I was naive about until I witnessed it first hand.
Edit: what I described does not appear to meet the traditional definition of euthanasia, but I will leave the post in its original form and just clarify that I mean making decisions that hasten someone’s death either passively or actively.