Coleman Hughes has written a personal account of the excruciating death of his mother. What follows is an excerpt from "My Mom—and the Case for Assisted Death: My dying mother chose to end terrible suffering. I want others to have that choice, too."

Instead of a slippery slope, what has emerged over the past three decades are two distinct policies: one restricted to people on their deathbed and exemplified by Oregon, Australia, and New Zealand; and the other open to anyone who is “suffering” and exemplified by the Benelux nations and Canada, without any slippage between the two. It is not a coincidence that all the horror stories come from the latter. The lesson for the rest of the world is not to throw out assisted dying altogether, but to copy the policy that works, and avoid the policy that doesn’t.

Aside from the major objections, critics have leveled many practical objections: Do doctors always know when someone has six months to live? Are fatal drugs always painless? What if relatives pressure someone to commit suicide? I may go through these one by one some other time, but here I will simply say this: Once you understand how much suffering is on the other side of this moral equation—that is, once you understand just how bad “bad deaths” are—then you must view these practical objections as problems to be addressed, rather than as reasons to jettison the whole policy.

It is commonly said that a huge percentage of our healthcare spending comes in the last year of life. But the far more important corollary is rarely said: In many cases, a huge portion—perhaps a majority—of our lifetime suffering comes not just in the last year, but in the last few months. Assisted dying therefore represents an opportunity to prevent an immense amount of needless suffering in the world. If my mother’s story can help even one person come around to this view, then I can say that she did not suffer completely in vain.

I think of these issues every so often. And I often think back to my college days when I volunteered as a counselor and trainer for Suicide Prevention in St. Louis. After doing my best for several years I left. I had had several cases where I did my best to encourage people to live another day, but where I privately wondered whether that was the kind of advice I would want were I in a situation that was truly (not merely apparently) hopeless. I'm referring to people who were terminally ill, jobless, in constant pain, who had no longer had family or friends to look out for them. People who had worked hard for months to find reasons to keep on living but no longer could. People for whom the things that once brought them great joy were no longer interesting to them.

I hope that humane people will step up to help me in my moment of need, people who have the courage to show mercy rather than to obsess about the "rules."