Varieties of Assistance

Sarah Hoyt writes:

"There is no way for assisted suicide laws NOT to be abused, particularly when they intersect with a state health system."

I suppose everything gets "abused" after a while.

And people have been making murders look like suicides since forever.

One feared abuse here, I take it, is that the state will begin to encourage suicide in an inappropriate way, something like that young woman who just got charged with involuntary manslaughter for giving her boyfriend this sort of counsel:

'"You can't think about it. You just have to do it. You said you were gonna do it. Like I don't get why you aren't," Michelle Carter allegedly wrote to Conrad Roy III the day he parked his truck outside a Fairhaven Kmart and killed himself through carbon monoxide poisoning.'

He is described in the article as having a history of depression, and of having made a prior suicide attempt.

He doesn't seem to have had any terminal condition
diagnosed by a physician.

It sounds like she charged down the slippery slope
of crushing a person's last hope.

ADDED:

By the way, to be fair, the girl was not some consistent ghoul who constantly worked on him to just do it. She had advised him to seek help previously. The boy seems to have been playing pity party a lot. You can see where she would get sick of it. Maybe she thought she was using reverse psychology on him!

Maybe her lawyer could give the "reverse psychology" thing a try,
and say she never wanted him to die,
but thought he had whined enough,
and was just trying to call his bluff.