The practice of euthanasia can be traced back to the darkest period in the twentieth century, the Holocaust. Hitler’s Aktion T4 program during the Second World War was created with the resolve to purge the Aryan race of congenital defects. Physicians ended the lives of some 100,000 persons across Nazi Europe. All of occupied countries, but the Netherlands participated in the killings. Recently there has been an ironic change of heart on euthanasia for the Dutch and Germans. In 2001, even as 10,000 Dutch citizens protested outside The Hague, the vote was 46 to 28 in legalizing the heinous practice.
The world and especially the German response of horror to the Dutch allowing euthanasia was immediate. Doctor George Paul Hefty said in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that the Dutch had “breached a dike” with utmost precarious consequences (Nolan). In the United States, there was also a similar conflict on the issue. Oregon passed a law in 1994 that allowed physicians to administer fatal drugs to a specified category of patients. All other attempts to legalize euthanasia in other states were quickly blocked by legislatures and voters for the many years following.
After almost a decade and a half, the campaign for assisted suicide progressed as Washington State passed a law on the lines of Oregon’s in 2008. The very next year, Montana’s supreme court proposed that euthanasia may not always be against public policy and detrimental to society. Vermont made assisted suicide lawful as well in 2013 (Haerens). With euthanasia becoming increasingly widespread around the world as time goes by, now the problem not only lies with the legislation legalizing it, but also what kinds of euthanasia should be permitted and practiced by physicians.
Euthanasia is intentionally making a person die instead of allowing a natural death, but assisted suicide is a subsection to specifically describe having a non-suicidal person consciously provide the means that would allow someone that is suicidal to kill themselves. However, little distinction is made between the two categories of demise today for they are both referred to universally as “euthanasia”. Most would consider the methods in which all euthanasia is carried out to be lethal injection and or pills but there are more appalling ways in which people are slain.
In the Netherlands, there is a private “charity” that operates portable euthanasia vans, which go from door to door. They check in every week to assist those who would like to die, but could not as their doctor would not permit it (Stanley). Oregon’s Measure 16 led to advocates to believe that if pills were taken, a plastic bag should be utilized so that the patient would be guaranteed death. In Australia, a measure was passed that allowed carbon monoxide gas for use along with lethal injections.
It was also advised that family members exit the room when a patient is being killed because of the involuntary convulsions and muscle spasms that would ensue (International Anti-Euthanasia Task Force). With these disturbing cases of euthanasia, it would be little surprise to find the profound effects that would be reflected in society and the community. The foremost impact of an “okay” of euthanasia on a personal level has to be an upheaval of an individual’s moral traditions and beliefs.
Compassion and solidarity between friends and family is reduced to the low of killing them in the end instead of making sure they leave the Earth in the comfort of their loved ones. Those of religious affiliations will be affected the most as Jewish and Christian teachings have both emphasized being able to live as the pinnacle of human dignity. Society as a whole would start to believe in and accept a skewed and narrow conception of freedom (Haerens). Without the right to life, people would be deprived of the right to vote, to speak, to equal protection under the law, and all other freedoms.
There is the almost certainty of pervasive abuse, manipulation, and lack of regard for those vulnerable because no rights are not given to the patient who is about to die but instead they are given to the physician who does the deed. The patient’s right to life and liberty is supplanted with that of a “medical treatment”. Furthermore, if people see euthanasia as being the best thing to do in treating the sick, then it would be discriminatory and cruel to disallow them it (International Anti-Euthanasia Task Force).
These potential concerns are driven closer to reality at an alarming rate due to the relatively low cost that legalizing euthanasia has from a purely financial standpoint. With policymakers having the most economical choice in mind when deciding on whether to pass a law or block it, it is not unanticipated that euthanasia advocates are winning the fight in many legislatures. A side effect to productivity and autonomy being placed on a pedestal by modern culture may make euthanasia patients see that choosing life would be self-regarding and an unnecessary financial liability on both themselves and others.
Governmental programs and private insurers may curtail support for effective palliative care because it could extend a patient’s life. There seems to be no need from their viewpoints for medical professionals to spend years developing the compassion and aptitudes needed to provide ideal care when there is a quick fix that requires no skill (Haerens). Managed-care facilities are even going as far as presenting physicians with cash bonuses if they do not provide care for their patients.
Instead of putting the health of the patient as priority regardless of their current condition, there is a dangerous dilemma in which it would be better to suggest that they consider euthanasia. The government also gets more money with a patient that “chooses” to die because actual treatment and care is now replaced with the treatment that is death. Within eighteen months of Oregon’s Measure 16, the state cut back on health care coverage for the poor state residents in particular.
Registered nurses are laid off for practical nurses and patients must wait longer for critical surgery (International Anti-Euthanasia Task Force). With expenses leading the health industry to virtually promote patients to kill themselves with a physician’s assistance, the future is grim. The prospect of euthanasia being exploited and going from an uncommon occurrence to an everyday ordeal is very real.
In Belgium, the number of people that have been euthanized has already increased by 25 percent and is the cause of 1 in 50 deaths in the country. percent of such deaths are conducted without request and 47 percent are not documented. Doctors in the Netherlands had once exclusively euthanized only terminally ill patients, but now have progressed to prescribe lethal medicine to those with chronic illnesses and or disabilities, mental illness, and “depression”; the result is euthanasia as the cause of 1 in 30 deaths (Stanley). The growing but already countless cases of life-ending practices, with or without an obvious request, is merciless and borderline murder.
The justification for euthanizing patients will, if not already, fall inevitably from the terminally ill, to the chronically ill, to the mentally ill, and then to those who have no ills at all. Given the trend that is being set, more countries may consider euthanasia as an option such as in France, where the health minister, Bernard Kouchner, claimed that there was an undeniable change in French public opinion about the subject (Nolan). Without an unwavering ground of right to life supporters, euthanized deaths may exceed natural deaths.
Those who are proponents of euthanasia hold it as the only way out of what seems to be an inescapable end. I reason that there is usually never any one solution to any problem and without a doubt, there is not one in situations dealing with the multifaceted issue of a human being’s life. It is true that respect for life means not dragging out a person’s life by medical treatments that are ineffectual and unjustifiably troublesome. With that being said, there is no reason to dispossess those who are in agony from pain medication because proper palliative care will heighten the quality of the life a patient has left.
It may even assuage the qualms that led the patient to desperation and suicide (Haerens). There is research to point out that if those who have their pain and depression adequately remedied, as that would be present in a suicidal nondrying person, then the compulsion to a self-inflicted death vanishes. The activists for euthanasia present the end as being only two roads: euthanasia or excruciating pain. In actuality, nearly all pain, if not all, can be removed from the equation if the right kind of treatment is provided.
If a patient under the care of a physician remains in a state of anguish, there is an immediate need to find a doctor elsewhere that will kill the pain, but not one that kills the patient (International Anti-Euthanasia Task Force). I must admit that I care not of a fiery end, but I nevertheless feel as if I should have the decency, as a part of humanity, to make sure that all else who cannot cope with such an idea are able to at least have a dignified death in which Death comes not with a needle but instead with a kind hand to guide one across to whatever may be next for them.
In the struggle between euthanasia and morality, the latter emerges triumphant as not only what is noble in the minds of those who are not ill, but also what is benevolent in the hearts of those who are. Some say, regardless of whether assisted suicide is permitted or not, patients will die alone. That statement cannot be further from the truth. Indeed, not having one’s family members able to be present at the end of the line is deeply disconcerting.
Now, however, add to the once bleak picture the doctors, nurses, and maybe even volunteers that have visited and all who have shown compassion for oneself during the weeks leading up to this final moment. Is it so bad, then to have people who have no relation whatsoever to oneself genuinely sympathize for what one had to go through? Death succeeds life, but the conclusion need not be grim and dark as there are those who can ensure deep-felt love and comfort so that one is able to rest in peace.