Dying with dignity is very different to "living with dignity." Living when you are suffering with dignity. Escaping the suffering - to me that's not called dignity. It's just escaping the suffering. When Australia was debating whether to legalize euthanasia, one part of Australia, called the Northern Territory, which is not exactly a state, but kind of acts like one, decided to legalize it. There was a nurse, I think she was from Sydney, who said she is going to move there and be the first person who kills themselves. She was healthy. She had a disease though, which probably meant that she would die within ten years or so that it was a family inherited disease. She was scared of the disease. She wanted to die.
No - to me, that doesn't make any sense. According to Buddhism, euthanasia is actually murder, it's killing oneself. And anyone who approves of it, is actually helping to murder the person. So Buddhism is against euthanasia. And I personally feel that anyone who wants to die in that way has a mental problem. And it is the mental problem we'd like to help them with. There is a difference between a very old person deciding that it's time to go and just stops eating. There is a difference here. To actually ask somebody else to help kill themselves - that's the problem. It's not a problem if an old person decides they've lived a long life, their body aches a lot, they feel no need to keep eating, so they starve themselves to death voluntarily. That's a very hard thing to do. It takes a lot of courage. That's different. But the minute you ask somebody else to help kill you, then you're asking somebody to be a murderer. And Buddhism is against that.