It is Catholic doctrine that euthanasia is morally wrong.[1] But suppose a government made it a crime, punishable by death, to request assistance with suicide.
Clearly, it would just be a farcical way to provide assisted suicide. The physical facts are the same: someone asks to be killed and is killed. But I see no way to prove that it would be morally the same. So, as far as I know, it actually wouldn’t be, and the government really could do this, with no infringement of Catholic morality.[2]
The government could probably even allow the “penalty” to be “executed” by normal citizens in certain conditions, rendering it basically the same as how euthanasia is performed nowadays.
Furthermore, it is sometimes contended that the biblical “ordeal of the bitter water” (Numbers 5:11–31) involved giving an abortifacient substance to a woman suspected of adultery. If this contention is correct, then because God gave those laws, it must be legitimate for a government to induce abortion as a punishment, regardless of the wrongness of individual voluntary abortions. (Otherwise, God gave an immoral law, which is blasphemous.) But if so, then there is no reason why the government could not punish requests for abortion with abortion, as before.
(I do not know whether the contention is actually correct.)
Notes
[1] see CCC 2277, and the CDF’s 1980 Declaration on Euthanasia
[2] This supposes, of course, that the death penalty is a legitimate punishment. Nowadays, the most famous defense of this proposition is given by Edward Feser’s writings.
Update (2022-05-13): Regarding recent papal statements on the death penalty, see this other post.
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