Essay, Research Paper: Euthanasia

Euthanasia should be legal practise. We are a democratic country, and we, as free individuals should have the right to decide for ourselves whether or not to terminate the lives of our loved ones or ourselves.
It was only in the nineteenth century that the word Euthanasia 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.
Intolerance of Euthanasia is not limited to our own country (with the exception of the Northern Territory). A court case in South Africa demonstrates 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, causing his father s death within seconds. The court found the practitioner as guilty of murder because the law stated that it constituted the crime of murder even if all the accused had done was hasten the death of a human being who was due to die anyway.
If Euthanasia were to be legalised it should be stated that the practise of it may be abused. There is no guarantee that people will not take advantage of it. However we do not normally think that something should be precluded simply because it might sometimes be used in a way it was not intended. The critical issue is whether the abuse would be so great as to outweigh the benefits of the practise. In the case of Euthanasia, the question is whether the abuses would be so great as to outweigh the advantages. The choice is not between a present policy, which is harmless, and an alternative that is potentially dangerous because the present policy is perilous too.
Individuals have the right to decide about their own lives and deaths. What more basic right is there than to decide if you are going to live? There is none. A person under a death sentence who is being kept alive certainly has the right to say, Enough is enough. The treatment is worse than the disease. Leave me alone. Let me die! Ironically, those who deny the terminally ill this right do so out of a sense of morality. Don t they see that, in denying the gravely ill and suffering the right to release themselves from pain, they commit the greatest crime?
The period of suffering can be shortened. Have you ever been in a terminal cancer ward? It is grim. Anyone who has been there knows how much people can suffer before they die. Today our medical hardware is so sophisticated that the period of suffering can be extended beyond the limit of human endurance. What is the point of allowing someone a few more months or days or hours of so-called life when death is inevitable? There is no point. In fact, it is down right inhumane. When someone under such conditions asks to die, it is far more humane to honour that request than to deny it.
People have the right to die with dignity. Nobody wants to end up wired into a machine and connected to tubes. Who wants to spend their last days lying in a hospital bed wasting away to something that is hardly recognisable as a human being, let alone his or her former self? Nobody. The very thought insults the whole concept of what it means to be human.
Euthanasia should be legal practise. We are a democratic country, and we, as free individuals should have the right to decide for ourselves whether or not to terminate the lives of our loved ones or ourselves.
It was only in the nineteenth century that the word Euthanasia 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.
Intolerance of Euthanasia is not limited to our own country (with the exception of the Northern Territory). A court case in South Africa demonstrates 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, causing his father s death within seconds. The court found the practitioner as guilty of murder because the law stated that it constituted the crime of murder even if all the accused had done was hasten the death of a human being who was due to die anyway.
If Euthanasia were to be legalised it should be stated that the practise of it may be abused. There is no guarantee that people will not take advantage of it. However we do not normally think that something should be precluded simply because it might sometimes be used in a way it was not intended. The critical issue is whether the abuse would be so great as to outweigh the benefits of the practise. In the case of Euthanasia, the question is whether the abuses would be so great as to outweigh the advantages. The choice is not between a present policy, which is harmless, and an alternative that is potentially dangerous because the present policy is perilous too.
Individuals have the right to decide about their own lives and deaths. What more basic right is there than to decide if you are going to live? There is none. A person under a death sentence who is being kept alive certainly has the right to say, Enough is enough. The treatment is worse than the disease. Leave me alone. Let me die! Ironically, those who deny the terminally ill this right do so out of a sense of morality. Don t they see that, in denying the gravely ill and suffering the right to release themselves from pain, they commit the greatest crime?
The period of suffering can be shortened. Have you ever been in a terminal cancer ward? It is grim. Anyone who has been there knows how much people can suffer before they die. Today our medical hardware is so sophisticated that the period of suffering can be extended beyond the limit of human endurance. What is the point of allowing someone a few more months or days or hours of so-called life when death is inevitable? There is no point. In fact, it is down right inhumane. When someone under such conditions asks to die, it is far more humane to honour that request than to deny it.
People have the right to die with dignity. Nobody wants to end up wired into a machine and connected to tubes. Who wants to spend their last days lying in a hospital bed wasting away to something that is hardly recognisable as a human being, let alone his or her former self? Nobody. The very thought insults the whole concept of what it means to be human.