Argument Against Euthanasia

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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 ...

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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 ...

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