Pro

Eugene Volokh, JD, Gary T. Schwartz Professor of Law at the University of California at Los Angeles, stated in a Feb. 2003 Harvard Law Review article titled "The Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope":

“[A] sort of equality-based slippage has indeed happened in the Netherlands.

Dutch courts began by declining to punish doctors who assist the suicides of the terminally ill. They then extended this to those who are subject to ‘unbearable suffering,’ without any requirement that they be terminally ill.

They then extended this to a person who was in seemingly irremediable mental pain, caused by chronic depression, alcohol abuse, and drug abuse, on the theory that the suffering of the mentally ill is ‘experienced as unbearable’ by them, presumably comparably to how the physically ill experience physical suffering.

Dutch courts then extended this to a 50-year-old woman who was in seemingly irremediable mental pain caused by the death of her two sons, again on the theory that ‘[h]er suffering was intolerable to her.'”

Feb. 2003