If a person commits suicide on their own they have to face what happens after death. The person who helps them gets to face life in prison.
The second term is passive euthanasia, which is "hastening the death of a person by altering some form of support and letting nature take its course. For example, removing life support, stopping food and water and allowing the person to dehydrate or starve to death and not delivering CPR and allowing a person, whose heart has stopped, to die." (Robinson) Passive euthanasia could also be considered murder because even though the patient will eventually die they did not die on his or her own will. The patient had help and was not able to tell you whether or not they wanted to die. .
The third term is voluntary euthanasia. In voluntary euthanasia a person asks to die (by either active or passive euthanasia). The person who wants to die does not want to end their lives by themselves in fear that they will fail if tried on their own. Many people feel that when a person is faced with the idea that they are dying, "their mental state of mind is impaired if one is asking to die and therefore there is no voluntariness." (Wansbrough) With voluntary euthanasia it is hard to establish a line between what is right and what is wrong. .
The fourth term is involuntary euthanasia. Involuntary euthanasia is much like passive euthanasia but includes not only older patients but the younger patients as well. For example, a patient might be in an irreversible coma or in a permanent vegetative state. These patients are the ones who become a burden on the family both mentally and physically. Someone's life being a burden on you can hardly justify euthanasia. Someone who is not incapacitated could be a burden on you but you cannot just kill him or her because of that fact. The terms have been defined so it will be easier to understand why euthanasia is morally and ethically wrong.