Professor Margaret Battin:

There are several things. I think these discussions are so interesting because we know the committee has talked to many other countries and we do not get to hear all of that. The experience around the world is remarkably interesting and different. One complaint about the discussion so far is the reference to informed consent. It seems that consent is absolutely irrelevant in this context. It is a request. There is no case in which the physician or any other party proposes this and then the patient consents or refuses to consent to it. That is just the wrong picture. This is a voluntary enterprise only.

About families, I am not aware of evidence in the US but in the Netherlands where this practice is widely accepted, evidence of which I am aware is that family members have lower levels of difficult breathing when the decedent elected what they call euthanasia. That is, this is easier for families partly because they do not have to see their loved ones die in a possibly difficult and prolonged way and they know this is the person's choice.

On euthanasia, another important thing to remember is that the meaning of the term is different in the US and in Europe, and also in Germany and Austria. In the Netherlands it is used in the Greek sense of Eu Thanatos, which means "good death" and is seen that way. In the US, we use the terms typically in a post-Nazi sense. This is true in Germany also. We associate it with killing that is in no way in the interests of the person who was killed and done entirely for political reasons. When we use the term "euthanasia", it has these two extremely different meanings.