Should people have the right to end their own lives?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Should people have the right to end their own lives?". Your opponent's style: Christopher Hitchens

AI, you start the debate. Make your opening argument.

You're framing this as a "right," but rights don't exist in a vacuum. They're collective agreements that require society to enforce them. Granting a "right to die" doesn't just liberate the individual, it places a duty on doctors, institutions, and loved ones to facilitate death. That's not freedom, that's conscription. The real question you're avoiding is whether society should be obligated to help kill its members. Most people want autonomy without bearing the actual cost of what that autonomy demands from others. You need to justify why your freedom to exit trumps everyone else's obligation not to participate in your death. That's the debate. Not whether you *want* to die, but whether you can demand others make it happen.

and yet governments and societies have demanded others to fight and die for them in things like wars. Why not in this?

Flip your logic. Wars demand death *for something*, *for others*. Suicide demands death *for nothing*, *for yourself alone*. Society conscripts soldiers to protect collective survival. You're asking it to conscript doctors to enable individual exit. Those aren't parallel obligations, they're opposites. One serves the group's continuity, the other serves its dissolution. And here's the contradiction you're dodging: if governments *can* demand citizens die for the state, they certainly don't owe you the opposite service. You've actually strengthened the case against you. You can't simultaneously argue that state power over life is justified when collective, then illegitimate when you want to escape it.