Morality and Legality of Euthanasia

I just had a long conversation with two esteemed ruggers about euthanasia. Although it devolved (evolved, perhaps?) into the morality of suicide, it brought up some interesting points.

There seem to be three issues at stake:
1. the morality of taking one's own life when it's not already at stake,
2. the morality of helping someone commit suicide who wants to die or who would die anyway,
and 3. the morality of asking someone to be an accessory to, or actually perform, the acts that would cause one's immediate death.
On the legal side, we talked about how one could potentially define the times when doctor-assisted suicide is legally permissible, and also whether it makes sense for suicide to be illegal.

Other issues that came up were severe physical disability (but not enough to be on life support) or severe mental illness in the context of doctor- or family-assisted suicide. We all agreed, for the most part, that mentally ill or incompetent people should not be allowed to request a doctor-assisted suicide.

All in all a very depressing topic, but an interesting one nonetheless.

Compressed and simplified, my conclusion was that suicide should never be illegal (it only invites further stress on the family and on the potential "criminal"), but that doctors should never be asked to directly administer an injection intended to kill someone. In certain situations, allowing medical professionals to set up an IV which the person would have to administer themselves takes away a certain level of moral culpability on the part of the doctor, and adds a lot more weight to the patient's decision to end their life, since they are making all the decisions themselves. My biggest remaining uncertainty is what sort of situations merit the kind of moral and personal burden put on a doctor to perform a doctor-assisted suicide, and I can think of very, very few; they all include situations where the person is terminally ill and will die imminently anyway. Other than that, I can't think of a justification for burdening anyone with responsibility for another's untimely death - note, though, that it's not the suicide or the assistance that I have such a problem with, morally; it's asking someone to help you die that strikes me as immoral.

eek. this is such a depressing topic. Back to coffee and inspirational speeches, anyone?