Argument Against Euthanasia
Argument Against EuthanasiaA 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...
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