Gallup: Suicide Immoral Unless Doctor-Assisted

Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters.

The Washington Post has a piece about marijuana acceptance today (65 percent now say it’s morally acceptable), but something else caught my eye in the Gallup survey data they cited:
I wonder if this is real, or just some odd polling artifact? Can it really be true that only 20 percent of Americans think suicide is morally acceptable, but 54 percent think it’s OK if a doctor helps out? Does “doctor-assisted” imply pain and incurable disease to most people, thus making it acceptable even though it wouldn’t be if you did it for other reasons? Or does it trigger some other framework entirely? Whatever it is, it makes an awfully big difference.