Inside a Story About Helping the Elderly to Die For my article on euthanasia in the Netherlands, I interviewed Petra de Jong, the Dutch doctor who is the head of Right to Die-NL. Euthanasia is widely accepted - and, since 2002, legal - in the Netherlands for those whose suffering is ""unbearable,"" but Dr. de Jong's group has been courting controversy by seeking to extend help in dying to everyone aged 70 and over, even if they aren't sick. It has also begun offering mobile euthanasia teams to assist people whose doctors refuse to provide them life-ending treatment. For an outsider there is something striking about the Dutch attitude to euthanasia, as well as to marijuana - about which I recently wrote - and prostitution, all of which are legal, but closely regulated. The policies of tolerating these practices grew from experience showing that forcing them into the shadows caused even worse problems: crime and disease, in the case of drugs and prostitution; unrelieved suffering, and murky or deeply troubling cases of supposed mercy killing in euthanasia. Dr. de Jong argues that by insisting on ""unbearable suffering,"" the law fails old people who have decided that their lives are complete. These people, whom she described as ""suffering from life,"" may well try to take their own lives anyway, she said. ""Suicide is not illegal, you can always do that,"" she said. ""But you need a way. Old people are less mobile and there are fewer good ways. And some of the ways we know are really awful."" For Dr. de Jong, the questions are deeply personal, I learned: Her parents took their own lives. ""They died together in 2010,"" she told me. ""They had gathered medication for insurance against when they didn't want to live anymore, and they didn't want to depend on their G.P.,"" their general practitioner or everyday doctor. Her father was suffering from cancer and her mother ""didn't want to be alone,"" she said, after a long life together. ""They died in each others" arms together in their bed. So suddenly my private life and my work here came together. That was a bit strange.""