Euthanasia, The Ending of a Human Life

Voluntary euthanasia has been a controversy for many years but the administration of the pain relief morphine which should eventually end in death or the withholding of antibiotics, chemotherapy or surgery has been accepted for years.

Voluntary euthanasia, suicide, mercy killing or the right to die physician assisted, call it what you like but it all adds up to the same thing at the end of the day. A lethal injection, unplugging a life support machine or an overdose of morphine to end someone’s life.

There are euthanasia machines that aid a suffering person in ending their life with dignity and no pain, maybe after years of suffering the agonies of their illness and no longer being able to take care of them selves this is the best thing that could happen for them. This would be classed as assisted suicide.

The word euthanasia was made up from Greek words meaning “well dying” or “dying well” and was mentioned as far back as 400 and 300 BC in the Hippocratic Oath. The ancient Greeks and Romans didn’t think that life needed to be kept forever and were tolerant of suicide.

For some people there is a religious link as to why they don’t think euthanasia should be legalised “Thou shalt not kill” And life and death being a blessing and a curse and we must choose life.

For others it’s the fear of recrimination. There are many fours and against but of course it has to be done for the correct reasons.

What are the correct reasons?

If somebody is terminally ill or critically ill with no chance of recovery and he or she are suffering serious pain. Is it not their right to have assisted euthanasia? With their consent and nobody that’s involved getting a prison sentence for aiding a mercy killing.

The mother with cancer raging through her body, now unable to sit up or feed herself, who wants her three young children to remember her as she was 4 months ago, not as she now is in an emaciated wrecked body?

The man with the last stages of multiple sclerosis, whose body cannot move any more and every time he chokes on his redundant tongue he thinks he is going to choke to death in the pain of suffocation?

Mercy killing has been happening for decades. Two such examples were men out on the battlefields, their friends or even enemies would finish them off to stop the suffering and turning off the life support machines of coma victims, who’s only way to stay alive is the help of a ventilator and support machine.

There are many debates on the subject and the fears of it being used to cull the human race as it has been in the past are a major concern. In Nazi Germany the government ordered doctors to take the lives of thousands of fellow citizens that were not terminally ill but were institutionalised, taking up precious resources in the form of care and shelter.

Jack Kevorkian M.D ended more than a hundred peoples lives in hospice care. Those people neither had a terminal illness nor were they dying. They could have found relief from their symptoms with the correct treatment or they had depression.

Do we not owe it to the dying to let them make up their own minds as to whether they want to end the pain and torment of their suffering?

Careful consideration should be made and every case has different circumstances. We should not just assume that poor quality of life justifies taking that life away but dying with dignity has its bonuses.

Author Lillyrose  26/10/09