Opposing Euthanasia

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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 the 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 a 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 ...

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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."(Brock 76)

If we accept euthanasia now, we may well delay by ...

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