Argument Against Euthanasia

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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 ...

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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 ...

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