True compassion requires that we find out why the patient is in this state and then help to relieve it. It can be relieved through comprehensive palliative care. Moreover, one has to ask whose compassion we are we talking about. Very often, it is compassion for the caregiver and compassion for the observer that are at issue, and those are masked as compassion for the one who is suffering. It can certainly be a relief to be rid of someone who is a physical burden or an economic burden.
Nobody admits that, but unconsciously it is operative.
Anyone who has cared for such persons who has any grain of compassion has felt some of those urges. Third, assisted suicide is not autonomous or voluntary. I think first of the high incidence of clinical depression. In the Netherlands, enormous power is given to the physician, so that his or her particular agenda, his or her notion of what is a quality of life may well be acted upon. I am attributing no maleficent thought to the physician, only a human response in a relationship that is very intimate.