Euthanasia

===Definitions=== Euthanasia: "Good death" painless death that is sometimes is categorized as assisted suicide. Includes Passive and Active forms Incurable Disease: A disease that has no known successful cure. Painful disease: A disease that inflicts extreme amounts of pain. IMPORTANT: ONLY TO BE USED WITH INCURABLE ILLNESSES. NOT FOR ANYONE WHO REQUESTS IT. ===Contentions=== 1. "The right of a competent, terminally ill person to avoid excruciating pain and embrace a timely and dignified death bears the sanction of history and is implicit in the concept of ordered liberty. The exercise of this right is as central to personal autonomy and bodily integrity as rights safeguarded by this Court's decisions relating to marriage, family relationships, procreation, contraception, child rearing and the refusal or termination of life-saving medical treatment. In particular, this Court's recent decisions concerning the right to refuse medical treatment and the right to abortion instruct that a mentally competent, terminally ill person has a protected liberty interest in choosing to end intolerable suffering by bringing about his or her own death. A state's categorical ban on physician assistance to suicide -- as applied to competent, terminally ill patients who wish to avoid unendurable pain and hasten inevitable death -- substantially interferes with this protected liberty interest and cannot be sustained." 2. "At the Hemlock Society we get calls daily from desperate people who are looking for someone like Jack Kevorkian to end their lives which have lost all quality... Americans should enjoy a right guaranteed in the European Declaration of Human Rights -- the right not to be forced to suffer. It should be considered as much of a crime to make someone live who with justification does not wish to continue as it is to take life without consent." 3. Individuals have a right to die when life becomes excruciating or undignified Those who are in the late stages of a terminal disease have a horrific future ahead of them: the gradual decline of their body, the failure of their organs and the need for artificial support. In some cases, the illness will slowly destroy their minds, the essence of themselves; even if this is not the case, the huge amounts of medication required to ‘control' their pain will often leave them in a delirious and incapable state. Faced with this, it is surely more humane that those people be allowed to choose the manner of their own end, and die with dignity. Chantal Sebire, a 52- year-old Dijon schoolteacher, suffering from a rare disease that has left her disfigured by facial tumors, said in 2008 to Time magazine: "I no longer accept this enduring pain, and this protruding eye that nothing can be done about. I want to go out celebrating, surrounded by my children, friends, and doctors before I'm put to sleep definitively at dawn."[2] From the Time article, "Making a Case for Euthanasia". Mar. 15, 2008, "Sebire and her backers retort that preventing her from getting medical assistance to end her life swiftly and painlessly ensures months or years of additional torment from pain. Her death will come, they say, after a long coma that will reduce her to being nothing but an inanimate burden on her family." Forcing a person to stay on life support in excruciating pain is cruel French President Nicholas Sarkozy said in a 2007 campaign speech, "when I hear debates on euthanasia, I tell myself that while I respect the principles, the convictions, at the bottom of my heart I still say there are limits to the suffering that can be imposed on a human." Euthanasia can be appropriate when a person is no longer themselves. The most sacred element of a person is their identity as individual and a soul. Once this is lost, much of the sanctity and fulfillment in life is lost. While this is not a full justification for euthanasia, it is a salient factor. 4. Individuals have a right to hasten death, not merely to refuse treatment Compassion in Dying v. Washington. United States 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. March 6, 1996 - "While some people refer to the liberty interest implicated in right-to-die cases as a liberty interest in committing suicide, we do not describe it that way. We use the broader and more accurate terms, 'the right to die,' 'determining the time and manner of one's death,' and 'hastening one's death' for an important reason. The liberty interest we examine encompasses a whole range of acts that are generally not considered to constitute 'suicide.' Included within the liberty interest we examine, is for example, the act of refusing or terminating unwanted medical treatment... 5. * Removing life support causes an excruciating death; euthanasia is more humane The Terri Shiavo case is illustrative of the situation created by the illegality of euthanasia. A choice was made that Terri Shiavo's death was imminent and that should should be allowed to die. Without the option of euthanasia, her feeding tubes were removed, and she was starved to death. How is that more moral than euthanasia? Forcing patients to starve to death or go into cardiac arrest, simply because the option of euthanasia does not exist, is a cruel alternative. * Euthanasia is better than non-treatment ways to shorten lives and end suffering Doctors are allowed to make non-treatment decisions in special cases in order to shorten the life of a patient and end their suffering. This is a roundabout form of "euthanasia" that causes patients far more harm than a real euthanasia would. Doctors should be allowed to use euthanasia to avoid having to make these Non-Treatment decisions. * Life can be prolonged unnaturally; euthanasia is a necessary cut-off option Life can be kept "alive" for longer and longer periods with modern technologies and techniques. Is this natural? No. Is it excessive? It certainly can be. When keeping life "alive" becomes an excessive exercise in medicine and technology, a cut-off point become necessary. That cut-off point is euthanasia. This argument will become increasingly relevant into the future, as human-beings are kept alive with dozens of test tubes and transplants. ===Sources=== http://www.time.com...... http://www.euthanasiaprocon.org...... http://www.dignityindying.org.uk...... http://euthanasia.procon.org...... http://euthanasia.procon.org...... ===Conclusion=== Imagine you have some type of incredibly painful disease where you feel like you are being skinned alive and burned, would you want to end your suffering? Or would you want to want to live it out in extreme pain and suffering, then die. In any case, it's either die now and not live to see a few more days of your life and have a painless death, or die later, see a few more days of a hospital wall, then die painfully. Which would you choose?