Opinion: Coerced-suicide case is no slippery slope to assisted dying

The recent New England case involving Michelle Carter has been described ominously as the next step in the “normalization” of suicide. In 2014, Carter sent dozens of text messages to Conrad Roy III, a depressed teenager, urging him to kill himself. Roy attached a hose to the exhaust of his pickup truck and eventually succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning.
Let’s be clear: Michelle Carter’s actions do not represent a slippery slope. Over the past four decades in North Amer