(I'm probably in favor when we're just talking about terminal diseases? I don't really know but I hadn't quite gotten that detail through my head and I wrote this whole response to the thread already. So, disclaimer, this may not apply to anything anyone's saying.)
I guess I'm in favor of laws like this in principle, but I'm not really willing to vote in the poll because the way they shake out in practice is harmful to people with disabilities. With or without these laws, when people without disability or chronic illness want to end their lives, people spend a lot of time and energy trying to convince them not to. But with these laws, when people with disabilities or chronic illnesses want to end their lives, we shrug our shoulders and, instead of saying, "Gee whiz, our society is kind of fucked up if people with disabilities would rather kill themselves than deal with the system we have in place to help them," we say, "Well, it sure must be miserable and awful to be disabled. We're inhumane if we don't let them control their own lives."
That's a problem because it sends the message that we shouldn't actually be dealing with our issues and creating policy that can make disabled people's lives better, we should just be thinking of disability as an inherently shitty trait, one that makes people's lives not worth living. And that disabled people's lives aren't worth living to the people who actually live them isn't our fault (or our government's fault, if you don't buy into collective responsibility) for abandoning and abusing them, it's just the way disability always has to work. That's not an attitude I support, and it makes this policy into one that, in practice, borders on eugenics.
Remember that this idea that it's about freedom is an illusion - there is always going to be more resistance to a non-disabled person using this law than there will be to a disabled person, and the other actors necessary - doctors, etc. - are always going to be more gung-ho about assisting a disabled person than a non-disabled person. There's always going to be stigma that makes a disabled person more likely to choose suicide than a non-disabled person. That's because: those attitudes about disability that I talk about above? We already have them - maybe not you, maybe not your mom, but we as a society do. This, for me, is about not making law which condones the view of disabled lives as inherently not worth living.
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