Argument Against Euthanasia

Essay by crash6544College, UndergraduateA-, November 2008

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A significant portion of society is in favor of euthanasia. They feel that as a democratic country, we as free individuals have the right to decide for ourselves whether or not to terminate one's life. The stronger and more widely held opinion is against euthanasia. This belief is 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 take over the divine function, and interfere with the divine plan.

Euthanasia is the practice of painlessly putting to death persons who have incurable, painful, or difficult diseases or handicaps. The word Euthanasia comes from the Greek words "eu" and "thantos" which translates to "good death" and is commonly called mercy killing.

Voluntary euthanasia may occur when that incurably ill person asks their physician, friend or a 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 has been...