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.