British Broadcasting Corporation Home. Pinpointing the ethical problems and questions around euthanasia. This article sets out the current legal position in the UK.
Does an individual who has no hope of recovery have the right to decide how and when to end their life? Those in favour of euthanasia argue that a civilised society should allow people to die in dignity and without pain, and should allow others to help them do so if they cannot manage it on their own.
They say that our bodies are our own, and we should be allowed to do what we want with them. So it's wrong to make anyone live longer than they want. In fact making people go on living when they don't want to violates their personal freedom and human rights. It's immoral, they say to force people to continue living in suffering and pain. Giving the individual the moral right to define reality and exercise total coercion and control to take life can become easily generalized.
Permission to kill the self at will cannot help but make other acts of killing more accepted. Ancient societies that honored suicide as a noble way to die were consistent in according a dominating elite the individual liberty to choose to kill their slaves, newborns, or wayward women. All human living, loving, declining, and dying is full of stress that must be endured and overcome by communal support.
What humans need most is an unconditional commitment to steadfastly care for one another through any illness or impairment until the end comes. Checking out at will, choosing death before diminishment or dependence, will set terrible precedents for the way people should live together. Suicides negatively affect their families and all who know of them; won't mercy killings also contribute to a culture of death? Hospice care, by contrast, provides a moral and humane way to live and die a good death.
In hospice, persons offer other persons companionship, social support, pain control, and nonintrusive care in a humane environment that respects individual human dignity.
Individuals must surrender to the moral prohibition against killing themselves or others in order to flourish as an interdependent human community of equality and dignity. If this is a truth of the moral order, then it will be shown to be true through the fruit of human experience. The axiom "Truth is great and will prevail" is true, but only in the long run. In the short run, ethical errors and mistaken moral beliefs can create worlds of suffering and misery for society.
In this coming American moral crisis, Catholic healthcare providers will find themselves at the center of great ethical struggles. The outcome of this moral conflict is as uncertain as everything else in the waning twentieth century. But Catholics dedicated to "a civilization of love" must fight against all initiatives that substitute killing for caring, no matter what appeals are made in the name of free choice, individual autonomy, and mercy.
Log in Forgot Password? Create Account Please Log In. Log In. Forgot Password? Create Account. The Moral Case Against Euthanasia. Summary Catholics who adhere to a consistent ethic of life are going to face tougher opposition as they struggle to defend society's most vulnerable members. The major ethical contention will concern the ethics of dying. Unfortunately, there have not been well-articulated moral arguments to counter society's rush toward physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia.
You matter to the last moment of your life and we will do all we can to help you die peacefully, but also to live until you die. The key to successful palliative care is to treat the patient as a person, not as a set of symptoms, or medical problems. The World Health Organisation states that palliative care affirms life and regards dying as a normal process; it neither hastens nor postpones death; it provides relief from pain and suffering; it integrates the psychological and spiritual aspects of the patient.
The patient's family and friends will need care too. Palliative care aims to enhance the quality of life for the family as well as the patient. Effective palliative care gives the patient and their loved ones a chance to spend quality time together, with as much distress removed as possible.
They can if they want to use this time to bring any unfinished business in their lives to a proper closure and to say their last goodbyes. Palliative care should aim to make it easier and more attractive for family and friends to visit the dying person. A survey USA showed that terminally ill patients actually spent the vast majority of their time on their own, with few visits from medical personnel or family members.
Spiritual care may be important even for non-religious people. Spiritual care should be interpreted in a very wide sense, since patients and families facing death often want to search for the meaning of their lives in their own way. Good palliative care is the alternative to euthanasia. If it was available to every patient, it would certainly reduce the desire for death to be brought about sooner. But providing palliative care can be very hard work, both physically and psychologically.
Ending a patient's life by injection is quicker and easier and cheaper. This may tempt people away from palliative care. Some fear that the introduction of euthanasia will reduce the availability of palliative care in the community, because health systems will want to choose the most cost effective ways of dealing with dying patients.
Medical decision-makers already face difficult moral dilemmas in choosing between competing demands for their limited funds. So making euthanasia easier could exacerbate the slippery slope, pushing people towards euthanasia who may not otherwise choose it.
There should be no law or morality that would limit a clinical team or doctor from administering the frequent dosages of pain medication that are necessary to free people's minds from pain that shrivels the spirit and leaves no time for speaking when, at times, there are very few hours or days left for such communication.
Euthanasia opponents don't believe that it is possible to create a regulatory system for euthanasia that will prevent the abuse of euthanasia.
This argument often appears as 'doctors should not be allowed to play God'. Since God arguments are of no interest to people without faith, it's presented here with the God bit removed.
Since doctors give patients the information on which they will base their decisions about euthanasia, any legalisation of euthanasia, no matter how strictly regulated , puts doctors in an unacceptable position of power. This is another of those arguments that says that euthanasia should not be allowed because it will be abused. The fear is that if euthanasia is allowed, vulnerable people will be put under pressure to end their lives. It would be difficult, and possibly impossible, to stop people using persuasion or coercion to get people to request euthanasia when they don't really want it.
I have seen. AIDS patients who have been totally abandoned by their parents, brothers and sisters and by their lovers.
In a state of total isolation, cut off from every source of life and affection, they would see death as the only liberation open to them. In those circumstances, subtle pressure could bring people to request immediate, rapid, painless death, when what they want is close and powerful support and love.
People who are ill and dependent can often feel worthless and an undue burden on those who love and care for them. They may actually be a burden, but those who love them may be happy to bear that burden.
Nonetheless, if euthanasia is available, the sick person may pressure themselves into asking for euthanasia.
Family or others involved with the sick person may regard them as a burden that they don't wish to carry, and may put pressure which may be very subtle on the sick person to ask for euthanasia. Increasing numbers of examples of the abuse or neglect of elderly people by their families makes this an important issue to consider. The last few months of a patient's life are often the most expensive in terms of medical and other care.
Sandeep Jauhar, cardiologist and author. Please upgrade your browser. See next articles. The Opinion Pages. Holland shows how such measures get out of control. While the state of dying in America is outrageous, two wrongs don't make a right. Expanding the Right to Die Should physician-assisted suicide be more widely available in the United States and what should be the conditions?
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