A Good Day To Die? (Euthanasia)

Member Name: kfingleton

Product:	Euthanasia
Date:	19/05/01 (90 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Puts people out of their misery

Disadvantages: Puts a price on human life

Ever feel like you couldn’t be bothered living? The pain, the suffering and the devastation life throws up at us sometimes feels like too much to bare. I sometimes look at the world and see things that my mind can’t comprehend, like the evil that infests people in Northern Ireland during July or the disease and famine throughout Africa. Is life really worth living through all this? In my view it really is. Every life is as precious as the next and while I’m ambiguous as to whether our bodies were given to us by a God, I feel they should be treated with respect.

The human body is more complex than anything man has ever made, it is a work of engineering we should marvel at. It has evolved and will evolve further into something stronger and better. A Mercedes S-Class may be the peak of human engineering in the field of the motorcar, but we can crush it when it gets too old. I don’t think we should do something similar to a human being when he or she finally reaches his or her last legs.

Life is never easy for anyone. It’s easier for some than it is for others but we all have problems, physical and psychological that we must face on a daily basis. If euthanasia was to be legalised I wonder where the line would be drawn. Would depressives be allowed to top themselves? Should we round up pensioners, who are such a burden on Welfare State? In fact, why not go the whole hog and pay off the poor a final sum and direct them to the nearest suicide booth? This is very much the bottom of the slippery slope and I can see no sane argument why euthanasia should be legalised to such a degree.

But what about those who are in severe pain? Some people have severe disabilities that give them little or no quality of life, be it a birth deformity or as a consequence of a severe stroke or something similar. Not only do they live their own lives in pain but they take away much of the life of those who care for them. T
hey will never be economically productive and waste the economic potential of those who care for them. The Nazis had a way to deal with these people and it was called extermination, but that was murder and it could be argued that euthanasia is not. I cannot come down either way on this. Maybe where the quality of life is so little it would be best to legalise euthanasia on the very strictest terms. If abortion is legal, what’s the difference with it and euthanasia? I believe that a human life is taken away in both cases (plenty will disagree). I don’t think I would have the strength to lose someone I love, when they could have chosen to live on, but maybe people should have the right to choose.

But what about those who can’t decide for themselves? If a family choose to turn off a life-support system it is very different to when someone severely disabled whose body is in working order is put to rest. I honestly don’t think those who don’t have the capacity to decide, should have their right to life decided by someone else. If they were, there is a chance that others would put them to rest for selfish reasons. This is another slippery slope.

"Life’s a bitch and then you die." It’s not a nice observation but it is quite true. We have built the society in which we live. We are the upper, middle, working classes, the racists, the selfish, the arrogant, the useless, everyone’s. We are the people who would rather watch ITV than any other channel and the people who laugh at the misfortune of others. It’s a stinking nation we live in and we created. We’ve made our bed so we should damn well sleep on it. We are responsible for the murder of six million Jews, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the lot. This is the worth of human beings. This is what we have offered the world.

But we are also doctors, nurses, aid workers, charity contributors, conscientious, amiable, friendly.
We created great pieces of art in many fields. We invented the wheel, the car, the aeroplane and the rest. We show love and compassion, we procreate and we created the Welfare State and municipality. Human beings have a worth and that worth is more than all the money in the world. We cannot allow one life to be thrown away because it is as precious as the next life. If someone offered you £10,000,000 so that he could shoot your son, you wouldn’t allow it to happen. So why should euthanasia be legalised when life is worth so much?

But if war was declared tomorrow, I would be conscripted into the army. "Those I fight I don not hate / Those I guard I do not love" (Yeats), but I would still lay down my life and take the life of others. People’s lives are taken without retribution all the time, so why shouldn’t euthanasia be legalised?

If euthanasia was to rise to the surface as an issue in this country, then we need to hear every single view on the subject and come to a middle ground. Only informed debate will find the conscience of the nation. On that note I eagerly await your feedback on my opinion. I haven’t read any other opinion on the subject, but I will read them all after I submit this. Thanks for reading.

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