More jurisdictions around the world are allowing doctors to help terminally ill patients die.
When Beverley Broadbent asked her GP, Dr Nick Carr, to promise to kill her if she had a stroke or developed dementia, he said he could not do that. He did, however, write her a prescription for the maximum possible quantity of a barbiturate, thus giving her the means to end her life. Eight years later, when she was aged 83 and had been diagnosed with breast cancer, she did end her life, although using a different drug than that Carr had prescribed.
Carr also promised Broadbent that he would put on her death certificate that she had died from a heart attack, because she said she wanted "no fuss". He kept his promise to her, although he was aware she had chosen to end her life. What he did not know was that, believing it should be lawful for a doctor to assist a patient in her circumstances to die, she had contacted The Age and spoken about her intentions. Unfortunately for Carr, she did not let him know about this. Perhaps she had forgotten their conversation about the death certificate. 
After Broadbent's death, The Age ran a front-page article about her planned death. That brought the death to the attention of the coroner, who asked Carr to explain his death certificate. He acknowledged he had known Broadbent had ended her own life, and also revealed his earlier prescription. The coroner reported the matter to the Australian Health Practitioners Regulation Authority, which includes the Medical Board of Australia. The board considered what Carr had done and chose the lightest possible sanction - a reprimand that has no effect on his ability to continue to practise medicine.
I am not privy to the reasons for the board's decision, but the following seems a plausible line of reasoning it could have taken:
" Broadbent was rational, without any sign of psychiatric illness, and wanted to be able to choose to end her life if she judged it no longer had sufficient quality to be worth living.
" A good doctor does what is in the patient's interests, unless there are overriding reasons to the contrary.
" Carr acted in his patient's interests.
" Although there are grounds for questioning his prescription of a barbiturate and the death certificate he wrote, taking all the circumstances into account, these acts fall within the range of what a good doctor might reasonably judge to be the right thing to do.
This line of thought would be consistent with the shifting attitudes about end-of-life decisions occurring in many countries. Voluntary euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide has long been legal in the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland, and recently became legal in Colombia, but we identify less with those countries than we do with places that share our language and much of our culture, too. Now the shift has spread to them as well.
In the United States, Brittany   Maynard started a nationwide conversation about the choice to end one's life in 2014, when, at the age of 29, she was diagnosed with brain cancer.
Her doctors told her she had six months to live. In California, where she lived, it was illegal for anyone to help her to die, but Oregon has allowed physician-assisted suicide for terminally ill patients since a referendum approved it in 1997. There is a six-month residency requirement.
  Maynard announced she was moving to Oregon and, at the same time, said it was absurd that she should have to take this step. Why should the state of California prevent a doctor doing the same for her at home?
  Maynard became the new face of the right-to-die movement and was such an effective spokeswoman that after her death in Oregon the California legislature passed the End of Life Option Act, modelled on Oregon's law. It will come into effect not later than   February 2017.
Physician-assisted suicide will then be legal down the entire west coast of the US. At present, the only US states where physicians can lawfully help patients wishing to end their lives are Oregon, Washington, Montana and Vermont, but with California, the nation's most populous state, joining in, many observers expect the movement to spread across much of the country.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that Canadians have a constitutional right to end their life, when they are terminally or incurably ill, and of sound mind. That decision followed a lower-court hearing that carried out the most thorough judicial review ever conducted of the practice of physician-assisted suicide in other jurisdictions, and concluded that good legislation could effectively safeguard against abuse.
In Quebec, the provincial assembly had already passed legislation along the same lines, and that law is already in effect.
In other provinces, Canadians now may apply to a provincial court for permission to end their lives, but this cumbersome procedure is expected to be abolished within the next few months, as the government brings in legislation to put the Supreme Court decision into practice.
The Medical Board's decision not to punish Carr indicates attitudes here are changing, too. It will surely not be long before an Australian state legislature gives Australians what the polls show about four in every five of us want.