Euthanasia

Term Paper Title	Euthanasia
# of Words	2965
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	11.86

Euthanasia

A considerable size of society is in favor of Euthanasia mostly because they feel that as a
democratic country, we as free individuals, have the right to decide for ourselves whether or not
it is our right to determine when to terminate someone's life. The stronger and more widely held
opinion is against Euthanasia primarily because society feels that it is god's task to determine
when one of his creations time has come, and we as human beings are in no position to behave
as god and end someone's life. When humans take it upon themselves to shorten their lives or to
have others to do it for them by withdrawing life-sustaining apparatus, they play god. They usurp
the divine function, and interfere with the divine plan.

Euthanasia is the practice of painlessly putting to death persons who have incurable , painful, or
distressing diseases or handicaps. It come from the Greek words for 'good' and 'death', and is
commonly called mercy killing. Voluntary euthanasia may occur when incurably ill persons ask
their physician, friend or relative , to put them to death. The patients or their relatives may ask a
doctor to withhold treatment and let them die. Many critics of the medical profession contend
that too often doctors play god on operating tables and in recovery rooms. They argue that no
doctor should be allowed to decide who lives and who dies.

The issue of euthanasia is having a tremendous impact on medicine in the United States today. It
was only in the nineteenth century that the word came to be used in the sense of speeding up the
process of dying and the destruction of so-called useless lives. Today it is defined as the
deliberate ending of life of a person suffering from an incurable disease. A distinction is made
between positive, or active, and negative, or passive, euthanasia. Positive euthanasia is the
deliberate ending of life; an action taken to cause death in a person. Negative euthanasia is
defined as the withholding of life preserving procedures and treatments that would prolong the
life of one who is incurably and terminally ill and couldn't survive without them. The word
euthanasia becomes a respectable part of our vocabulary in a subtle way, via the phrase ' death
with dignity'.

Tolerance of euthanasia is not limited to our own country. A court case in South Africa, s. v.
Hatmann (1975), illustrates this quite well. A medical practitioner, seeing his eighty-seven year
old father suffering from terminal cancer of the prostate, injected an overdose of Morphine and
Thiopental, causing his father's death within seconds. The court charged the practitioner as guilty
of murder because 'the law is clear that it nonetheless constitutes the crime of murder, even if all
that an accused had done is to hasten the death of a human being who was due to die in any
event'. In spite of this charge, the court simply imposed a nominal sentence; that is, imprisonment
until the rising of the court. (Friedman 246)

Once any group of human beings is considered unworthy of living, what is to stop our society
from extending this cruelty to other groups? If the mongoloid is to be deprived of his right to life,
what of the blind and deaf? and What about of the cripple, the retarded, and the senile?

Courts and moral philosophers alike have long accepted the proposition that people have a right
to refuse medical treatment they find painful or difficult to bear, even if that refusal means
certain death. But an appellate court in California has gone one controversial step further.
(Walter 176)

It ruled that Elizabeth Bouvia, a cerebral palsy victim, had an absolute right to refuse a
life-sustaining feeding tube as part of her privacy rights under the US and California
constitutions. This was the nation's most sweeping decision in perhaps the most controversial
realm of the rights explosion: the right to die...

As individuals and as a society, we have the positive obligation to protect life. The second
precept is that we have the negative obligation not to destroy or ...

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