It's impossible to know what came before or after this statement without further research by the reader. Another example is when Somerville says, "Euthanasia and assisted suicide involve extinguishing human life. Research shows that humans have a basic instinct against killing other humans, which might be a source of the widely shared moral intuition that it's wrong to do so." This seems to be a solid statement but when looked at closely it can easily be dissected and found to be very weak. Somerville says that "research shows" What research? Who or what organization or school conducted the research? When was this research done? Where was the research done? Somerville also says that the idea that euthanasia is "widely spread." According to whom is this idea widely spread? Is it spread across the world, North America, or just Canada? Another weak point in Somerville's article is when she assumes that social seclusion is a key reason for people to make requests for physician-assisted suicide. Again some of the same question can be asked just like above. According to whom is this true? Was there a survey done for this conclusion to be made? .
Although Somerville's article does have some weak points, she does provide several solid points when trying to prove the slippery slope theory. The slippery slope theory is the idea that if physician-assisted suicide is allowed only for certain extreme cases that it will eventually become accepted in more and more situations and will grow out of control. Somerville tries to support the slippery slope theory by showing how after the Netherlands began to allow physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia that it quickly went out of control and is now obviously abused. In that example she supplies laws and statistics from the Netherlands which seem to hold up. All in all, Somerville's argument could come off very well to the untrained reader but upon further inspection it has a number of weaknesses that hurt her credibility.