Euthanasia as a Passive, Voluntary Choice
(It is Illegal, Yet Not Suicide or Immoral)

by Karen Bahr-Wiersma

			Euthanasia is the practice of painlessly putting to death persons who have incurablc, painful, or distressing diseases or handicaps. It comes from the Greek words for good and death, but is commonly called "mercy killing." In being true to the definition, I think that euthanasia should be a passive and voluntary choice by the person inflicted with the disease or handicap.       
			Euthanasia is illegal in the United States, and most religious groups consider it suicide or murder, and therefore, immoral. First of all, I don't think that euthanasia should be illegal, because as Americans we have certain rights and freedoms that guarantee our personal autonomy. Secondly, I do not believe that euthanasia is suicide or murder, because there are clear differences between them. Finally, even if we believe that life is a gift from God, the indignity of sustained artificial life is more immoral than euthanasia.       
			Our Constitution was enacted to protect our rights and freedoms as Americans. The most fundamental is our "right to privacy." In a number of Superior Court cases, a person of adult years and in sound mind has the right to determine whether or not to submit to lawful medical treatment, even that which may prolong or save her life. This basic right informed the Presidential Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine in its conclusion (Moody): 

The voluntary choice of a competent and informed patient should determine whether or not life sustaining therapy will be undertaken, just as such choices provide the basis for other decisions about medical treatment. . . Health care professionals serve patients best by maintaining a presumption in favor of sustaining life while recognizing that competent patients are entitled to choose to forego any treatments including those that sustain life (Deciding to Forego Life Sustaining Treatment, U.S. Govt. Printing Office). 

      This quote shows that people are enabled to refuse treatment, so isn't it a legitimate upholding of personal autonomy to extend this right to include our right to die when in a hopeless and irreversible state? Why should the law force us to live extended, artificial lives? If we are in a vegetative state with no hope of recovery, our rights as the master of our own life and body should allow our wishes (to die) be carried out.       
			Suicide is the deliberate killing of oneseIf. In order to differentiate this from euthanasia, you must firsl identify clear, undisputed cases of suicidal behavior, and then compare them with right to die circumstances. Suicide attempts among depressed people are high. Doctors are obligated to treat depression, and tend to dismiss refusals of treatment made by these (sometimes suicidal) patients. If depression is cured, the patient's outlook improves and he will cease to refuse treatment. To equate the right to die with suicide would fail to recognize that such treatments (as respirators, dialysis machines, chemotherapy, radiation, and feeing tubes) can make continued life an excessive burden. Many of these patients are not depressed, but judge the quality of their life to be so poor that they don't want it prolonged further. And those patients whose depression results from learning their diagnosis of terminal illness may wish to die sooner rather than later. This reasoning demonstrates the need to distinguish between refusals of medical treatment that stem from suicidal wishes, and those emanating from patients' sound judgments about their own quality of life (Macklin).       
			Macklin writes that suicidologists have devised the category of "rational" or "logical" suicide. These approaches recognize a distinction, between suicidal wishes which may be followed by actual attempts to end one's life that are a consequence of mental illness or emotional disorder ("rational"), and those that arise form a miserable quality of life or a hopeless prognosis ("logical").       
			Because of court decisions and assertive action by patients and their families, physicians are not acknowledging another equally valid goal of medical practice alongside their obligation to preserve and prolong life: relieve suffering. 
Murder is defined as "the unlawful killing of a human being with malice and aforethought." If euthanasia is the "relief of suffering," I don't think it should be considered murder, because it certainly isn't malice.
   		Some who opposed eutnanasla believe that life is a gift from God, and that only He had the right to end that life. Morris, for example, believes we are the property of God and concludes that Heaven is t-h-e reward for accepting and using life on His terms. Moody also acknowledge the subject of faith, yet points out that if we truly believe in God and heaven, we ought to know that death is not the last word. Therefore, to grasp one more week or month or year even at unbearable pain is a kind of act of ultimate distrust in that God.    
			In the Declaration of Euthanasia, a Catholic Priest testified for the use of a test requiring the weighing of the burdens and benefits to the patient of remaining alive with the aid of extraordinary life-sustaining treatment. Such procedures could be withdrawn if they were extraordinary (defined as "all procedures, operations or other interventions which are excessively expensive, burdensome or inconvenient or which offer no hope of benefit to a patient").       
			The right to die is as integral a part of our human freedoms as the right to live, and that right should not be taken away by the state. Euthanasia is not suicide or murder but the right to die a dignified death. We need to resist the very real temptation to idolize life while at the same time we value and affirm life as a precious gift of creation, not life as some kind of intellectual abstraction but life as a contextual reality where body, mind, and spirit are functioning so as to make it desirable. The sole determiner of that life's quality and meaning is the one whose life it is, so that person should be allowed to make the decision if that life should end in dignity or be prolonged artificially.