...world today is to legalize euthanasia, and already several countries are considering the passing of legal bills to make euthanasia legal. Argument I: Euthanasia in our modern time is seen as a merciful solution, not as a crime, and it is justified by human feelings and understanding. A- Counter Argument: Euthanasia is nothing than an act of suicide, and hence, it is as morally wrong and unacceptable as suicide is. B- Refutation: Suicide and euthanasia are morally different because suicide is the choice of death as one of several options whereas in euthanasia it is the only choice to end permanent and unbearable pain and suffering. Argument II: Euthanasia should be legalized because this is the only way to regulate a concept that is practiced all over the world anyway. A- Counter Argument: Doctors who assist patients to commit euthanasia should be punished as criminals, because according to their oath, they are supposed to elongate the lives of their patients, not to end them. B- Refutation: Doctors who assist euthanasia cannot be treated as criminals if their intentions are to relieve patients of permanent and unbearable suffering. Medical assisted euthanasia is not in violation with the oath that doctors take to relieve their patients of unbearable and permanent pain. Argument III: Euthanasia has deep roots as it has been practiced by human civilizations. A- Counter Argument: Euthanasia was practiced by barbarian and inhuman regimes...
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...ARGUMENTATIVE ESSAY – EUTHANASIA By Troy Jacques Euthanasia is known as the practice of deliberately ending a life which releases an individual from an incurable disease or intolerable suffering. This mercy killing is often referred as an easy and painless death. This can be done from the request of a dying patient or that person’s legal representative. When this is done it is known as Voluntary Euthanasia. Not doing something to prevent someone’s death is known as passive or negative Euthanasia. Active or positive Euthanasia is when someone takes deliberate action to cause a death. Currently Euthanasia is not allowed by law to be practiced on people. My opinion on Euthanasia is that it should be legalised because the patients get to die in less pain and suffering as possible, the majority of the public believe that Euthanasia should be allowed morally and in a free society an individual should be able to choose their time of death. Patients with such diseases as cancer should be allowed to choose their time of death. This is because cancer is the most common cause of death in Australia, accounting for more than a quarter of all deaths. There is major pain that is associated with cancer suffers and it is a severe and intractable form of chronic pain. Patients with advanced cancers often experience multiple symptoms like fatigue, weakness, mental haziness, anxiety and nausea. Many of these symptoms can not be eliminated and any may widely affect the function...
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...Argumentative Essay: Euthanasia Euthanasia is another term for mercy killing. It is usually done by doctors to their patients who are terminally ill. Although euthanasia is done by doctors in certain situations to patients and is legal in some countries, euthanasia should not be practiced or be legalized because it devalues lives, it might become involuntary and doctors should cure and not kill. According to the article “Euthanasia: Arguments Against Euthanasia”, people might think that death is better than being sick. They might think that death is the only solution to problems. People who support euthanasia say that it is done as self-defense. For example, a soldier is brutally wounded and might die if not treated immediately. Is partner decides to ask his consent for euthanasia to end his suffering. Killing for self-defense means that you kill to save another one’s life but in euthanasia, you do not save anyone’s life. Euthanasia devalues lives because it tells us that we can take our or someone’s life easily. Euthanasia is done to a person with his consent. It is the decision of that person if he wants to do it. According to the article “Arguments Against Euthanasia”, people might decide to go for euthanasia because of emotional and psychological pressures. For example, a patient is suffering because of an illness and his doctor said to him that it is better for him to die. That person might go for it because he suffers too much and his doctor said that it is better...
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...Our democracy should not legalize active voluntary, active nonvoluntary euthanasia, or physician-assisted suicide, but should be given as a choice to patients in some extreme cases. Euthanasia is defined as the painless killing of a patient suffering from a terminal illness, disability, or coma. Euthanasia has sparked a strong debate in society, and continues to be controversial on whether it should be practiced at all. Euthanasia attacks the basis of many individual’s ethical beliefs and causes many to fear that how individuals view life will deteriorate in life. The debate also disrupts the world of physicians and their morals on if they want to be given the power to take a patient’s life. But the most salient person to make the decision is the patient. The patient has their own beliefs and choices on how they would like to leave this world. However, because of the harm that could be done to the value of human life and the vulnerable of society, the practice of either euthanasia or physician-assisted...
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... | |Euthanasia | |Pros and Cons of Euthanasia | | | |Lisa Rohn | |10/20/2010 | |Euthanasia is a highly controversial topic among many political and religious groups. The purpose of this project is to detail the facts of | |Euthanasia and to list the pros and cons surrounding the topic. Euthanasia is prohibited in the United States. However I will show that | |patients practice forms of this “mercy killing” legally each day while exercising their right to die. This project will list guidelines in | |which Euthanasia should be legalized and give arguments as to why the decision should be the sole right of the suffering individual. | Imagine that your mother is terminally ill with stomach...
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...undergo and if euthanasia was a choice at the time, then that would be the best decision for her to then hasten her death and eliminate the pain she had to experience. Euthanasia is the voluntary decision of killing oneself made by a suffering patient from an incurable disease or intolerable...
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...Euthanasia/Assisted Suicide Debate Of course we want our loved ones to be a part of our lives as long as possible and thanks to modern medical technology, the average human life span is about seventy-eight years. Yet, some of us get sick, diseased or injured in an accident and become comatose. When the medical condition of a person is deemed progressive, terminal and there is no hope of recovery, that person should be able to exercise the option of ending their life. Particularly, when that individual feels he or she cannot stand the suffering in the last stages of their disease. Moreover, if a person has sustained an injury where their brain is not functional or damaged beyond basic functions, euthanasia is an option to lengthy life-sustaining treatment methods that may be futile. However, euthanasia has been a debated topic since the Greek-written Hippocratic Oath. This Oath is one of the first statements of moral conduct where doctors and health care professionals profess to do no harm by practicing medicine ethically. There are many opinions that in certain special populations, such as minorities and the disabled, euthanasia and assisted suicide give ways to possible abuse of the health care system. The three states that that now allow assisted suicide are Washington (2008), Montana (2008), and Oregon (1994), euthanasia is still illegal in the United States. The difference between euthanasia and assisted suicide is the administration of the lethal drugs to...
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...Euthanasia Is euthanasia morally justifiable? What is euthanasia? According to J. Gay-Williams euthanasia is taking a human life, either one’s own or that of another, the life being taken is believed to be suffering from some disease or injury from which recovery cannot reasonably be expected. These actions must be deliberate and intentional. J. Gay-Williams believes that euthanasia is not morally justifiable. Williams gives three main reasons to justify why he believes that euthanasia is not morally justifiable. He argues that euthanasia is not natural, works against self-interest, and it has practical effects. He believes that euthanasia is not natural. he also explains passive euthanasia which he believes is not euthanasia. Passive euthanasia is not giving someone their needed medicine or not giving someone their needed medicine. He feels that euthanasia is unnatural because it goes against our natural goal of survival. He feels that by ending a life that we do not know what will happen in the end is against God. Williams also says that euthanasia sets us against our own dignity. It takes away our dignity because instead of fighting we are giving up and seeking an end to the battle. Williams feels that euthanasia works against our self- interest. He feels that death is the end and allowing euthanasia to be practiced goes against our self- interest. Using euthanasia as an outlet from life can be wrong because people are wrongly diagnosed daily and someone could...
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...Euthanasia or no Euthanasia? The question of whether Euthanasia should be legalized, in my opinion, lies upon a religious matter: Who are we to choose when somebody should die or continue to live? Same way a murderer is condemned to a punishment when ending somebody’s life, it is not because we feel that we are helping others that we should not be punished. As the years go by, medicine develops and will be able to cure these long-term illnesses, rather than the idea of them consuming us that the paragraph argues. I must admit that I am looking at this through my Jewish education, which has taught me that we cannot choose when to take a human’s life, and that we are a superior race to the rest of the animals. For that reason, we can choose when to end a suffering animal’s life, but not when it comes to a human life. It is a human duty to cure, not to kill. With sufferance and with any illness it is our duty to work to cure that person and to hope for the best, not to quit and end their lives. What is more, euthanasia is usually practiced on patients who have lost the ability to communicate with others, so therefore we would be ending somebody’s life without their own consent. And even if we do have his consent, same way we would not let somebody jump off a roof, we would not let somebody kill himself with euthanasia. We should want to help them, to give them a hand and help them through the hard moments. Sometimes helping means coming up with a cure, sometimes it is just talking...
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...End-of-life Choices: Euthanasia and Others Fact Sheets Prepared by: Dr. TSE Chun-yan Society for Life and Death Education Dr. CHAN Ho-mun Associate Professor Department of Public and Social Administration City University of Hong Kong November 2009 Fact Sheet 1 - Setting the scene: Euthanasia is a frequently debated issue in the community. However, there is often confusion in the concepts and terminologies involved. Different people have different definitions for the terms used in the discussion. Euthanasia could be defined narrowly or broadly. In the medical and legal field, when the term is used without qualification, euthanasia usually signifies “voluntary active euthanasia”. According to the Professional Code of Practice of the Medical Council of Hong Kong, euthanasia is defined as “direct intentional killing of a person as part of the medical care being offered”. Euthanasia is illegal throughout the world with the exception of Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. However, in public debates and in bioethics literature, the term euthanasia often carries a broader meaning. Forgoing life-sustaining treatment (LST) is often considered as one form of euthanasia, labeled as “passive euthanasia”. Different ethicists define “passive euthanasia” differently. Some define the term as all forms of forgoing LST, while some define it as forgoing LST with the intention to shorten life. It should be noted that, legally and medically, forgoing LST is distinct...
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...Euthanasia Euthanasia is defined by the American Medical Association as “the administration of a lethal agent by another person to a patient for the purpose of relieving the patient’s intolerable and incurable suffering” (American Medical Association 2014). Euthanasia is currently illegal in all US states with the exception of Oregon as well as all of Europe aside from the Netherlands. The two concerns typically used to justify this are that life is thought to be precious and we are obligated to prolong it, not take it, as well as the Hippocratic Oath taken by doctors to “do no harm”. Though it currently remains illegal, there is an increase of support for euthanasia to be practiced in the US. Before assessing whether or not euthanasia is morally justifiable, there are two conceptual distinctions to be made. One is the concept of voluntary vs. involuntary euthanasia, and the other is active vs. passive euthanasia. Voluntary euthanasia is chosen by the patient himself or herself, while involuntary is chosen by someone other than the patient. Performing an action that will actively end the patient’s life is defined as active euthanasia, while passive euthanasia is performed by withholding treatment and allowing the person to die naturally. This difference is the basis of James Rachels’ argument in “Active and Passive Euthanasia.” Rachels believes that there is no moral difference between “killing” (active) and “letting-die” (passive). He believes that passive euthanasia defeats...
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...Euthanasia Euthanasia also known as mercy killing is a way of painlessly terminating one’s life with the "humane" motive of ending his suffering. Euthanasia came into public eye recently during the Terri Schiavo controversy where her husband appealed for euthanasia while Terri's family claimed differently. This is a classical case shedding light on the pros and cons of mercy killing. Albania, Belgium, Netherlands, Oregon, Switzerland and Luxembourg are some places where euthanasia or assisted suicide has been legalized. Let's have a look at the arguments that will help us understand the reasoning for / against mercy killing. Pro Euthanasia Arguments: Legalizing euthanasia would help alleviate suffering of terminally ill patients. It would be inhuman and unfair to make them endure the unbearable pain. In case of individuals suffering from incurable diseases or in conditions where effective treatment wouldn’t affect their quality of life; they should be given the liberty to choose induced death. Also, the motive of euthanasia is to "aid-in-dying" painlessly and thus should be considered and accepted by law. Although killing in an attempt to defend oneself is far different from mercy killing, law does find it worth approving. In an attempt to provide medical and emotional care to the patient, a doctor does and should prescribe medicines that will relieve his suffering even if the medications cause gross side effects. This means that dealing with agony and...
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...Robert Regan English 151 C. Weimmer Persuasive essay Euthanasia: It Should Be One's Right To Choose Euthanasia is the act of "killing" someone, by taking away their life support, upon a patients request. When a patient is "terminally ill," they are being kept alive with new technology, and are basically just living bodies. Most of them are suffering. "Pulling the plug," or taking the patient off life support, is illegal all across the world. I think this is wrong. We are not responsible for being born, yet if we feel we have led a long fulfilling life, than we should have the right to not be on life support. This topic has been debated for years. They tried to make it legal in Europe, but it was overturned. There are some concerns about the term "terminally ill." Some people believe that voluntary euthanasia can somehow turn into involuntary euthanasia. For example, when people get to a certain age, they sometimes get diseases that damages their state of consciousness. Some of these include, Altzimers, and Dimentia, and these people can't tell left from right, or what is going on in a certian situation. These are the people who fall in the gray area of the debate. If euthanasia were legalized, it would have to be completely voluntary. If you were the closest person to the patient, and the doctor tells you, that your mother's condition of life is painful, and there is no recovering for her, what would you say? Would you just let her sit there in a vegatative state...
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...Euthanasia has been an ongoing hot topic within the medical field, and it seems like an equilibrium will never be met, but what exactly is euthanasia? Euthanasia is defined as “The deliberate killing of someone when it is believed that their life is so worthless it should be ended” (Jackson p. 4). This request from the patient is typically viewed as a “mercy killing”, this treatment is usually requested by someone that is terminally ill and they are experiencing pain they state as unbearable. There are a variety of diverse styles of euthanasia, and they can be described as voluntary, non-voluntary, active, indirect, or passive. The first, and most recognizable, style of euthanasia is voluntary euthanasia. Voluntary euthanasia is carried out...
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...Euthanasia: Freedom to Die with Dignity Charletta R. Anderson Strayer University ENG 215 Dr. Aaron Miller December 12, 2011 Euthanasia: Freedom to Die with Dignity The word “Euthanasia” comes from a Greek phrase meaning “good death”. However, in today’s society it means killing a terminally ill person as a way to end that person’s pain and suffering (Cundiff, 1992 ). In the year 2007, my grandfather the Honorable Leon Davis was dying. This American war hero had made a request to die with dignity. He was dealing with a failed kidney, pneumonia, dementia, hypertension, MRSA foot infection, a broken hip, and terrible living conditions at a nursing home. All these problems left him weak and physically dependent on others. For terminally ill patients like my grandfather, where death was inevitable and would have been less painful than living, euthanasia should be a consideration or an option. Euthanasia is a way of relieving terminally or severely ill people's pain and save them from the agony of their illness. People claim that the right to die is protected by the same constitutional safeguards that promise such rights as marriage, and the refusal or termination of life-saving medical treatment. This essay will discuss why or why not ill people should have the right to end their suffering with a quick, dignified, and merciful death by the means of Euthanasia. Legalizing Euthanasia In the 1970s , a movement that had tried to legalize some form of...
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