Voters last month made New Zealand the seventh country to legalize euthanasia. The official results of the referendum, released last week, show 65 percent voted in favor of the “End of Life Choice Act.” Terminally ill adults with fewer than six months to live will be able to request euthanasia or assisted suicide starting in November 2021.

The Canadian House of Commons voted to advance a bill Thursday that would expand assisted suicide in the country. The legislation would extend the procedure’s availability from patients whose death is “reasonably foreseeable” to those who don’t have a terminal diagnosis.

Doctors in the Netherlands could perform euthanasia on terminally ill children ages 12 and younger without facing legal consequences under a policy the country’s health minister proposed last week.

As countries around the world consider legalizing assisted suicide, strong voices out of the Netherlands warn of a slippery moral and ethical slope. In a Dutch medical journal last month, one of the Netherlands’ most prominent euthanasia providers chronicled how the practice easily went beyond its original limits. A different Dutch ethicist testified before the British Parliament this month that legalizing assisted dying leads to an increase of nonassisted suicides.

Doctors diagnosed Nola Leach’s husband, Tony, with Alzheimer’s disease in 2014. He was hospitalized, incontinent, and had lost the use of his legs when he told his wife, “I don’t think I can do this anymore.” The couple living in the U.K. did not have the legal option of euthanasia, and Tony’s feeling of despair soon passed. “That was one fleeting moment,” Nola reflected later.

A woman in the U.K. received a terminal diagnosis 15 years ago that left her feeling depressed and suicidal. Alison Davis considered traveling to Switzerland to end her life through that country’s legal assisted suicide program and looked into the cost of the procedure. But she changed her mind thanks to the support of her doctor and family, and she lived on for the better part of a decade.

The number of women attempting to reverse the effects of the abortion pill and save their babies’ lives doubled in March and April, according to Heartbeat International’s Abortion Pill Rescue Network.

“In 2019, we averaged about 51 reversal starts each month,” said Christa Brown, a director at Heartbeat. “In March, there were 108, and in April there were 104.”

Women who call the Abortion Pill Rescue hotline have taken mifepristone, the first of two pills used in chemically induced abortions. Some regret their decision immediately.