Anti Euthanasia

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If someone is terminally ill, should a doctor be allowed, with consent from the patient and their family, to give the person an overdose in order to end the person’s life?

Being sick and weak has driven people to wish they were dead. People like to be strong and powerful and able, and many cannot cope with reality once they lose the abilities they once had. They become helpless and fragile and it is embarrassing for them to have others see them that way. Some medical patients loose the drive to live. Certain doctors, such as Dr. Jack Kevorkian (who helped approximately 130 people with ‘physician-assisted suicide’), see the anguish this causes them, and have interceded to help them achieve death by giving the patients overdoses of their medicines, or by unhooking them from any life support their bodies had been dependent on. Intentionally killing someone, by action or by doing nothing, for his or her own good is called euthanasia. Physician-assisted suicide, as it is called when the medical persona executes a patient on request, is unethical, inhumane, and a direct violation of the classical doctors’ Hippocratic oath.

The oath states, quite clearly, that the doctor will ‘give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked, nor suggest any such counsel.” Another translation rephrases this, saying, “I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect.” Obviously, physician-assisted suicide contradicts the oath doctors take before going into their practice. The writers of the Hippocratic oath were clearly saying that to kill someone with medicine meant to heal, that is to go against any doctor’s policy. Besides weakening the credibility of the oath, which has for ages reassur...

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Sometimes, it is better for euthanasia to take place. When someone is in a coma, and is hooked up to a feeding tube and a respirator, they are not truly ‘alive’. Their body functions and their organs keep working, but it is the machine that is living, and it is forcing the body, with no ‘soul’ or ‘consciousness’ inside, to be on the receiving end. When the physician kills the patient by letting them fly free, and not confining them with equipment, it is called euthanasia by omission, and that is no sin. Why keep someone alive when his or her body is clearly ready to retire? However, when a body keeps living despite having no prompts from an apparatus, and it is self-sustaining, is it right for the person to demand death, and should the doctors be allowed to give it to them? Does having the means to confer death give them, too, the right to bestow it?

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