Euthanasia: Death with Dignity
Uploaded by yijung on Apr 28, 2005
Question: How would you like to die? Allow me to draw a scenario for you- a beautiful cabin in an unpopulated countryside which you and your significant other have been sharing for the most beautiful last years of your life. You spent the morning taking a memorable walk by the lake. Your children have decided to visit you, and you played with your grandchildren, letting their rolling laughter soothe you. You're self-sufficient, your life has been successful, and your children are grown and loving. You can ask for nothing more. Bathed in perfect happiness, you will peacefully slip away into the afterlife gently during your sleep.
If only.
According to studies, 80% of chronically-ill seniors (aged 65+) die institutionalized in hospitals or long-term care facilities (Valente). Fully two-thirds of that population suffering from both age-related and unnatural disorders is not referred to palliative care soon enough to receive proper care in their last days. As a result, approximately 82% of them suffer unnecessary pain in their last 24 hours, and severely suffering patients typically spend their last eight days in the Intensive Care Unit, plugged with countless tubes, and in extreme cases, either comatose or on ventilators (Valente). Not quite the picturesque end many people picture for themselves.
However horrible the information above sounds, there is something still worse than dying in excruciating pain, hospitalized and surrounded by unfamiliar hospital personnel when you want to live: dying under the same circumstances when you want to die.
When a person is terminally ill (medically diagnosed to die within six months), and will inevitably deteriorate in mental and physical health to a state where the quality of their lives will seem to be worse than death, it makes no sense for the law to force them to live through unnecessary and excruciating pain: they should be given the option of active euthanasia.
Euthanasia is "the intentional termination of a life by another at the explicit request of the person who dies,"- the aided suicide of a terminally ill patient by qualified physicians under carefully supervised circumstances (Robinson).
The world "euthanasia" comes from the Greek words "eu" meaning "good", and "thanatos" meaning "death". As the origins of the word itself suggests, euthanasia gives terminally ill people the chance to die a good death, surrounded by loved ones who can remember the patient in his/her best health before slipping peacefully into death as opposed to the unexpected, sudden death in...