But the doctors refuse, because disconnecting the machines would surely result in his death, and they have an ideological bias against doing this. According to experts who have studied this subject, however, these assumptions are wrong. Human Life Is Sacred Respect for human life is at the heart of all debates regarding euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. Because all human life is a gift from God, the intentional taking of human life is always wrong. As Western society continues down the slope of relativism, though, human life becomes increasingly devalued.
Suicide is simply a form of homicide and consent is no defense to homicide.
A 1974 study conducted in Britain involving interviews and examinations of medical records found that 93 percent of those studied who committed suicide were mentally ill at the time. A similar study conducted in St. Louis, published in 1984, found a mental disorder in 94 percent of those who committed suicide. In addition, there is a great body of psychological evidence that those who attempt suicide are normally ambivalent, that they usually attempt suicide for reasons other than a desire to die, and that they are predominantly the victims of mental disorder. Almost all of those who attempt suicide do so as a cry for help, not after a calculated judgment that death should be better than life. The humane response is to mobilize psychiatric and social services resources to address the problems that led the would-be suicide to such an extremity.