Your wife of 50 years is suddenly diagnosed with a terminal disease. She liesin a bed, motionless and unaware of her surroundings. The medication to easeher pain has been wearing off. She just lies there in pain and unable tocommunicate with the outside world.
The doctors give her a month to live at themost. What would you do? Would you let her sit in a hospital bed in agonizingpain for the last few months of her life, or do you help to prematurely meet herGod? That is the topic of discussion in this paper: Euthanasia. Let’s start by defining the term. Euthanasia is also referred to as “mercykilling.
” That is the killing of someone for their own good due to the pain andsuffering they are enduring. Euthanasia also includes situations where theindividual who is suffering makes the decision to die, a type of suicideactually. In today’s world there are two types of euthanasia that are mostcommon. The first are people who, perhaps because of serious illness or perhapsfor reasons unrelated to their illness, are extremely depressed and say thatthey want to die (Johanson 1). Research has shown that the vast majority ofthese people are just asking for sympathy and don’t really want to die butrather hear the calls of there loved ones begging them not to go on with theprocedure. They want the attempt to fail.
The second type of euthanasia involvepeople who are suffering from an illness that makes them unable to communicate(Johanson 2). These type of people are those who are in comas, paralyzed, orsimply so sick that they cannot make meaningful sounds or other communication(Johanson 2). This is a much more accepted type of euthanasia. Especially inthe Netherlands where Euthanasia is more common then the United States. Thereare two sides to attack this issue from.
One being from the view of theCatholic Church and the other from a legal standpoint. Lets start with thelegal standpoint. Who has the right to tell us when or when cannot die? Manyfeel that we have the right to do whatever we want to our bodies because theyare our personal property. It is our inalienable right to do whatever we liketo ourselves. They have a point since it all goes back to how we formed ournation.
We formed it on individual rights that we modeled after the ideas ofRousseau before the French Revolution. Pro-euthanasia people also believe thatanyone should have the right to turn away medical treatment if he believes thatthe side-effects, whether pain or the burden of being tied to some machine orwhatever, are worse then the disease (Johanson 1). Even if this means he willlive a shorter life. Pro-euthanasia activists also believe that if someone isin there right mind and honestly wants to end his life to the pain he issuffering he should have the right to do so.
Some people stretch that beliefeven farther in saying that we all have the inalienable right to kill ourselvesat anytime for any reason at all. That is when things can get out of control. The Ohio Law Review went as far as publishing a “Model Aid-in-Dying Act” thatthey believe all states should accept. It states that a child over the age ofsix could request “aid-in-dying” and if his parents refused to agree with him,an “Aid-in-Dying Board” could overrule them and grant him his wish (Johanson 1).
Sometimes the idea of euthanasia can be twisted into extremely evil ways. Someeuthanasia activists believe that the patient should be put to death becausethey have become a burden on society. They decide that it would be morebeneficial to spend the money on something more useful. This is what it hascome to in the Netherlands where according to Rita Marker of the InternationalAnti-Euthanasia Task Force, euthanasia now accounts for 15% of the deaths in theNetherlands (Johanson 3). It gets pretty scary in the Netherlands with casestories like the following.
A Dutch doctor diagnosed a woman with cancer. Hechecked her to the hospital for treatment and the results were astonishing. Thetreatments were already showing improvement. Well two days later the doctorgoes to pay the recovering patient a visit and found another patient in her bed.When he asked about her, a nurse said that they needed the room so they
