Agreed. I'm also someone who spent a long time contemplating suicide, though I never attempted it and my outlook is much brighter these days. This is less a matter of whether suicide can ever be a justifiable choice and more about the ramifications of involving wider society and government institutions in that choice. Even in my bleaker periods I came to the conclusion that reasonable deterrents to suicide are a good thing and state facilitation of suicide is potentially a catastrophic thing.

One time, before the internet died, a certain search brought me upon a page where all sorts of suicidal randos were posting in despair. People of all ages, teenagers, pensioners, single, married, all had got there within like 1 click of a google hit and spilled their thoughts anonymously. Something which surprised me was the significant proportion of them who said they wanted to kill themselves and were prepared to, but that they were scared what would happen afterwards because they were Christian. As a non-Christian, this didn't strike me as a great deterrent against suicide - for someone like me. But it was worth contemplating that some meaningful number of posters, whose fear forced them to carry on living, may well have kept going and then later developed a perspective that quenched their suicidal impulses. Maybe I just wasn't a very good nihilist, but it was impossible not to feel some relief and compassion from that idea.

Further, you have to consider how society shapes people's values just as much as it is shaped by them. I think secular modernity has unquestionably introduced a streak of nihilism into many people's lives. Our leaders are in no way moral leaders any more. Most politicians have settled for trying to advertise themselves as competent managers and shied away from anything deeper or more philosophical. As such, if you turn to the state and grill them for a good answer to the question of why you should go on living, you will never get one, beyond an idea that turns you into a well-behaved citizen and profitable consumer. A society that starts down the path to demolishing the obstacles between an individual and wilful death, will eventually demolish them all, because there is no moral to divert them other than profit. Life in general will be cheapened.

But that isn't the worst of it. Human beings are purpose-driven, even apparachiks who work for a soulless state, so you will start to find that purpose within the euthanasia option, even if the option itself arose out of moral abrogation and nihilism. I feel like the pattern of this will be easy to predict based on recent global affairs: in a secular and supposedly rational society, the meaning and purpose that people lose from an absence of tradition starts to be rediscovered in science and medicine, as the few remaining trusted pillars of the society - the repositories of meaning. Legalised euthanasia will necessarily be presented as a medical, rational, scientific process - and therefore it can't ever be demonised. It won't ever be sold as 'you can do this, we've made it possible for you - but we strongly discourage this for all people, we think it's a terrible idea'. Instead it will be presented as a noble, graceful option for a certain type of person, and something that can't be misused because it is guarded against by rational, medical principles. As such it will be perfect for weaponisation against the suggestible masses, since at that point you can get them to nobly kill themselves by convincing them they're the right kind of people for euthanasia.

I completely disagree with what you’re saying, here. Which is fine. That’s why we have these debates.

But I don’t agree. At all. Shame, in this case, does far more harm than good.

I fundamentally have a different view of the “morality” and “societal consequences” of this than you do. But that’s fine.