As more jurisdictions permit a medically assisted death (MAiD)—and none of the jurisdictions that introduced MAiD has seen any serious attempts at reversing it—the focus of debate has turned to the question of what is a morally defensible access threshold for MAiD. This permits us to rethink the moral reasons for the legalization or decriminalization of assisted dying. Unlike what is assumed in many legislative frameworks, unbearable suffering caused by terminal illness is not what oftentimes motivates decisionally capable people to request MAiD. This matters when access thresholds are considered. The argument advanced in this essay is that because MAiD is less destructive to people’s relationships and less harmful than medically unsupervised suicide, access to medical assistance in dying should be open to anyone who is legally capacitated and who persistently requests such assistance.
