Ethics in Euthanasia: Prohibiting Physicians from Conducting the Practice

It was a cold and foggy December morning in the city of Amsterdam. Birds were chirping, dogs barking, and alarm clocks ringing to wake the sleeping city.

“Time of death?” asked the doctor. “6:24am,” replied the nurse as she looked down to the watch on her wrist. For the nurse, this was becoming part of a normal routine. The patient was a woman, in her late 50s who had been in the hospital for about a week now. She had suffered from a stroke and was placed in the hospital by her family. The woman was very buoyant, and had an optimistic personality. She was kind to her doctors and nurses and enjoyed laughing and joking with her daughter and grandkids when they came to visit her. She seemed to do be doing very well. That is until today.

Murder was the first thought that popped into Megan’s head as she exited her mother’s hospital room, tears streaming down her face. The death of her mother was a complete shock to Megan. She paced back and forth on the cold floor of the hospital hallway thinking, “How could this have happened? I visited my mother yesterday, she was doing a lot better and we were anticipating she would be out of the hospital soon.” Although Megan’s mother had been responding well to her medication, the doctors at the hospital feared that she would never fully recover from her illness. With this prognosis, the doctors withdrew Megan’s mother’s medication and cut her feeding. The practice, conducted by these doctors is murder, but also a form of euthanasia.

Euthanasia has been a widely controversial topic among societies for thousands of years. Euthanasia, also known as mercy killing, is ending a patient’s life by withdrawing treatment or using a lethal injection. Euthanasia is often used if a patient desires death,...

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...lity in killing the patient, which is forbidden in most countries.

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