We've done studies looking at the various countries that have legalized this. Generally speaking, the problem you have is that when a patient comes to a doctor and they say that they want to die, many different factors could be contributing to that. Many of those could be dealt with. The problem is that if you are expecting a physician to be able to do the full evaluation required to ensure that the person is not being coerced, no other jurisdiction is willing to put the funding in place to be able to do that properly.
When you say that it's a safeguard to have two physicians.... In other jurisdictions, there is something called “doctor shopping”, where, if they don't get the answer they want from the first two physicians, they'll go on to a third, fourth, or fifth physician. Eventually they will find somebody in the jurisdiction who believes in patient autonomy to the extreme, where they will decide that because the person wants to die, they should be able to die.
The reality is that we have concerns even with the use of the term “safeguard”. It normally means that it's whatever we can put in place to be able to salve our conscience about how these vulnerable people will end up being put to death. The Carter criteria put together include disabled people.
It's so common for our physicians—it happens on a weekly basis—that patients will say they want to die: they've had a traumatic, emotional incident; they've just been diagnosed with a serious illness, or they've just become a paraplegic or a quadriplegic. Any number of factors can generate in a person's mind the desire to end their life. The question is, do we as a society have the compassion and concern to be able to put the resources in place to assist those people, or will we end up just euthanizing them and basically wash our hands of our responsibility for our fellow people?