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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. A medical practitioner, seeing his eighty-seven year old father
suffering from terminal cancer of the prostate, injected an overdose of
Morphine and Thiopental, causing his father's death within seconds. The
court charged the practitioner as guilty of murder because 'the law is
clear that it nonetheless constitutes the crime of murder, even if all
that an accused had done is to hasten the death of a human being who
was due to die in any event'. In spite of this charge, the court simply
imposed a nominal sentence; that is, imprisonment until the rising of
the court. (Friedman 246)
Once any group of human beings is considered unworthy of living,
what is to stop our society from extending this cruelty to other
groups? If the mongoloid is to be deprived of his right to life, what
of the blind and deaf? and What about of the cripple, the retarded, and
the senile?
Courts and moral philosophers alike have long accepted the
proposition that people have a right to refuse medical treatment they
find painful or difficult to bear, even if that refusal means certain
death. But an appellate court in California has gone one controversial
step further. (Walter 176)
It ruled that Elizabeth Bouvia, a cerebral palsy victim, had an
absolute right to refuse a life-sustaining feeding tube as part of her
privacy rights under the US and California constitutions. This was the
nation's most sweeping decision in perhaps the most controversial realm
of the rights explosion: the right to die...
As individuals and as a society, we have the positive obligation to
protect life. The second precept is that we have the negative
obligation not to destroy or injure human life directly, especially the
life of the innocent and invulnerable. It has been reasoned that the
protection of innocent life- and therefore, opposition to abortion,
murder, suicide, and euthanasia- pertains to the common good of
society.
Among the potential effects of a legalised practice of euthanasia are the following:
"Reduced pressure to improve curative or symptomatic treatment". If
euthanasia had been legal 40 years ago, it is quite possible that there
would be no hospice movement today. The improvement in terminal care is
a direct result of attempts made to minimize suffering. If that
suffering had been extinguished by extinguishing the patients who bore
it, then we may never have known the advances in the control of pain,
nausea, breathlessness, and other terminal symptoms that the last
twenty years have seen. Some diseases that were terminal a few decades
ago are now routinely cured by newly developed treatments. Earlier
acceptance of euthanasia might well have undercut the urgency of the
research efforts which led to the discovery of those treatments. If we
accept euthanasia now, we may well delay by decades the discovery of
effective treatments for those diseases that are now terminal. (Brock
76)
"Abandonment of Hope". Every doctor can tell stories of patients
expected to die within days who surprise everyone with their
extraordinary recoveries. Every doctor has experienced the wonderful
embarrassment of being proven wrong in their pessimistic prognosis. To
make euthanasia a legitimate option as soon as the prognosis is
pessimistic enough is to reduce the probability of such extraordinary
recoveries from low to zero.
"Increased fear of hospitals and doctors". Despite all the efforts
of health education, it seems there will always be a transference of
the patient's fear of illness from the illness to the doctors and
hospitals who treat it. This fear is still very real and leads to large
numbers of late presentations of illnesses that might have been cured
if only the patients had sought help earlier. To institutionalize
euthanasia, however carefully, would undoubtedly magnify all the latent
fear of doctors and hospitals harbored by the public. The inevitable
result would be a rise in late presentations and, therefore,
preventable deaths.
"Difficulties of oversight and regulation". Both the Dutch and the
California proposals list sets of precautions designed to prevent
abuses. They acknowledge that such are a possibility. The history of
legal "loopholes" is not a cheering one. Abuses might arise when the
patient is wealthy and an inheritance is at stake, when the doctor has
made mistakes in diagnosis and treatment and hopes to avoid detection,
when insurance coverage for treatment costs is about to expire, and in
a host of other circumstances. (Maguire 321)
"Pressure on the Patient". Both sets of proposals seek to limit the
influence of the patient's family on the decision, again acknowledging
the risks posed by such influences. Families have all kinds of subtle
ways, conscious and unconscious, of putting pressure on a patient to
request euthanasia and relive them of the financial and social burden
of care. Many patients already feel guilty for imposing burdens on
those on those who care for them, even when the families are happy to
bear the burden. To provide an avenue for the discharge of that guilt
in a request for euthanasia is to risk putting to death a great many
patients who do not wish to die.
"Conflict with aims of medicine". The pro-euthanasia movement
cheerfully hands the dirty work of the actual killing to the doctors
who by and large , neither seek nor welcome the responsibility. There
is little examination of the psychological stresses imposed on those
whose training and professional outlook are geared to the saving of
lives by asking them to start taking lives on a regular basis.
Euthanasia advocates seem very confident that doctors can be relied on
to make the enormous efforts sometimes necessary to save some lives,
while at the same time assenting to requests to take other lives. Such
confidence reflects, perhaps, a high opinion of doctor's psychic
robustness, but it is a confidence seriously undermined by the shocking
rates of depression, suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction, and marital
discord consistently recorded among this group.
"Dangers of Societal Acceptance". It must never be forgotten that
doctors, nurses, and hospital administrators have personal lives, homes
and families, or that they are something more than just doctors,
nurses, or hospital administrators. They are citizens and a significant
part of the society around them. We should be very worried about what
the institutionalization of euthanasia will do to society, in general ,
how will we regard murderers? (Brody 89)
"The Slippery Slope". How long after acceptance of voluntary
euthanasia will we hear the calls for non-voluntary euthanasia? There
are thousands of comatose or demented patients sustained by little more
than good nursing care. They are an enormous financial and social
burden. How long will the advocates of euthanasia be arguing that we
should "assist them in dying".
"Costs and Benefits". Perhaps the most disturbing risk of all is
posed by the growing concern over medical costs. Euthanasia is, after
all, a very cheap service. The cost of a dose of barbiturates and
curare and the few hours in a hospital bed that it takes them to act is
minute compared to the massive bills incurred by many patients in the
last weeks and months of their lives. Already in Britain, There is a
serious under- provision of expensive therapies like renal dialysis and
intensive care, with the result that many otherwise preventable deaths
occur. Legalizing euthanasia would save substantial financial resources
which could be diverted to more "useful" treatments. These economic
concerns already exert pressure to accept euthanasia, and, if accepted,
they will inevitability tend to enlarge the category of patients for
whom euthanasia is permitted...
"Do not tolerate killing". Now is the time for the medical
profession to rally in defense of its fundamental moral principles, to
repudiate any and all acts of direct and intentional killing by
physicians and their agents. We call on the profession and its
leadership to obtain the best advice, regarding both theory and
practice, about how to defend the profession's moral center and to
resist growing pressures both from without and from within. We call on
fellow physicians to say that we will not deliberately kill. We must
say also to each of our fellow physicians that we will not tolerate
killing of patients and that we shall take disciplinary action against
doctors who kill. (Chapman 209)
On the other hand some people strongly feel that euthanasia is not bad and should not be looked down upon.
Are there no conditions when life is meaningless and should be
quietly ended? If a person is subject to pain that won't stop as a
result of a disease that can't be cured, must he or she suffer that
pain as long as possible when there are gentle ways of putting an end
to life? If a person suffers from a disease that deprives him or her of
all memory and makes him or her a helpless lump of flesh that may live
on for years.
If euthanasia were legalized,it should be admitted that there might
be some abuses of virtually every social practice. There is no absolute
guarantee against that. But we do not normally think that a social
practice should be precluded simply because it might sometimes be
abused. The crucial issue is whether the evil of the abuses would be so
great as to outweigh the benefit of the practice. In the case of
euthanasia, the question is whether the abuses, or the consequences
generally, would be so numerous as to outweigh the advantages of
legalization. The choice is not between a present policy that is benign
and an alternative that is potentially dangerous. The present policy
had it's evils, too.
We spend more than a billion dollars a day for health car while our
teachers are underpaid, and our industrial plants are rusty. This
should not continue. There is something fundamentally insustainable
about a society that moves its basic value-producing industries
overseas yet continues to manufacture artificial hearts at home. We
have money to give smokers heart transplants but no money to retool out
steel mills. We train more doctors and lawyers than we need but fewer
teachers. On any given day, 30 to 40 percent of the hospital beds in
America are empty, but our classrooms are overcrowded and our
transportation systems are deteriorating. We are great at treating sick
people, but we are not that great at treating a sick economy. And we
are not succeeding in international trade. When you really look around
and try to find industries the United States is succeeding in, you
discover that they are very few and far between.(Lamm 133)
There is no way we are going to come to grips with this problem
until we also look at some of these areas that aren't going to go away
. One of the toughest of these is what Victor Fuchs called
"flat-of-the-curve medicine"- those medical procedures which are the
highest in cost but achieve little or no improvement in health status.
He says that they must be reduced or eliminated. We must demand that
professional societies and licensing authorities establish some norms
and standards for diagnostic and therapeutic practice that encompass
both costs and medicine. Wer'e going to have to come up with some sort
of concept of cost-effective medicine.
Individuals have the right to decide about their own lives and
deaths. What more basic right is there than to decide if you're going
to live? There is none. A person under a death sentence who's being
kept alive, through so called heroic measures certainly has a
fundamental right to say, "Enough's enough. The treatment's 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 high 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. If you have ever been in
a terminal cancer ward, It's grim but enlightening. Anyone who's been
there can know how much people can suffer before they die. And not just
physically. The emotional, even spiritual, agony is often worse. Today
our medical hardware is so sophisticated that the period of suffering
can be extended beyond the limit of human endurance. What's the point
of allowing someone a few more months or days or hours of so-called
life when death is inevitable? There's no point. In fact, it's
downright inhumane. When someone under such conditions asks to be
allowed to die, it's far more humane to honor that request than to deny
it.(Barry 405)
People have a right to die with dignity. Nobody wants to end up plugged into machines and wired to tubes.
Who wants to spend their last days lying in a hospital bed wasting
away to something that's hardly recognizable 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. People are entitled to
dignity, in life and in death. Just as we respect people's right to
live with dignity, so we must respect their right to die with dignity.
In the case of the terminally ill, that means people have the right to
refuse life-sustaining treatment when it's apparent to them that all
the treatment is doing is destroying their dignity, and reducing them
to some subhuman level of humanity.
The reasons just stated in favor of euthanasia are often over
looked due to the following arguments that are against euthanasia.
The way you talk you'd think people have absolute right over their
bodies and lives. But that is obviously just not true. No individual
has absolute freedom. Even the patient's Bill of Rights, which was
drawn up by the American Hospital Association, recognizes this.
Although it acknowledges that patients have the right to refuse
treatment, the document also realizes that they have this right and
freedom only to the extent permitted by law. Maybe people should be
allowed to die if they want to. But if so, it's not because they have
an absolute right to dispose of themselves if they want to.(Brock 73)
Only a fool would minimize the agony that many terminally ill
patient endure. And there's no question that by letting them die on
request we shorten the period of suffering. But we also shorten their
lives. Can you seriously argue that the saving of pain is greater good
than the saving of life? Or that presence of pain is worse than the
loss of life? Of course, nobody likes to see a creature suffer,
especially when the creature has requested a halt to the suffering. But
we have to keep our priorities straight.
Pro euthanasianists make it sound as though the superhuman efforts
made to keep people alive are not worthy of human beings. What could be
more respectful of human life, than to maintain life against all odds,
and against all hope?
All of life is a struggle and a gamble. At the gaming table of
life, nobody ever knows what the outcome will be. " Indeed, humans are
noblest when they persist in the face of the inevitable. Look at our
literature. Reflect on our heroes. They are not those who have
capitulated but those who have endured. No, there's nothing undignified
against being hollowed out by a catastrophic disease, about writhing in
pain, about wishing it would end. The indignity lies in
capitulation".(Buchanan 208)
--- Bibliography
Friedman, Emily. Ethics Issues For Health Care Professionals. Baskerville: American Hospital Publishing, 1986.
Maguire, Daniel. Death By Choice. Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1984.
Reich, Warren. Quality Of Life. New York: Paulist Press, 1990.
Brody, Baruch. Life And Death Decision Making. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Chapman, Carleton. Physicians,Law,& Ethics. New York: New York University Press, 1984.
Maestri, William. Choose Life And Not Death. New York: Library Of Congress, 1986.
Low, Charlotte. Euthanasia - Opposing Viewpoints. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1989.
Brock, Dan. Deciding For Others. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Barry, Vincent. Moral Aspects Of Health Care. Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1982.
Current, Richard."Death".The World Book Encyclopedia, 1986 ed.
Gibbs, Nancy. "Dr. Death Strikes Again" TIME, 54 (November 4, 1991).
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