Many people suffering from deadly diseases such as AIDS, and some cancers volunteer to die rather than take the pain. ... When people have an incurable and debilitating illness, extreme suffering, and lose of personal dignity, that is when mercy death is recommendable because it would reduce immediately the pain of the patient. ... For instance, people with incurable diseases or extremely ill patients must go to court, and then the court will decide if they are allowed to use assisted suicide. ...

• Word Count: 2565
• Approx Pages: 10
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

In passive euthanasia, by withholding intravenous feedings, medications, surgery, a pacemaker, or a respirator, the doctor can let the patient die of the underlying disease. ... The medical experience has taught that the incurable man may ask for his end under the state of unbearable suffering, but when his pains shrink or stop, life reappears and the appeal is now for its preservation and not for its ending. ...

• Word Count: 3258
• Approx Pages: 13
• Grade Level: High School

The Right to Die: The Legalization of Euthanasia Christiaan Barnard, a South African cardiac surgeon, once said, "I have never seen any nobility in a patient's thrashing around all night in a sweat-soaked bed, trying to escape from the pain that torments him day and night" (Walker 18). Should a...

• Word Count: 2895
• Approx Pages: 12
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: High School

An international panel of the World Health Organization defined palliative care as "the active total care of patients whose disease is not responsive to curative therapies" (qtd. in Foley 293). ... According the Center for Disease Control (CDC), the average life expectancy is currently 77.2 years compared to almost a century ago when it was only 47 years ("Life"). ...

• Word Count: 4057
• Approx Pages: 16
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

This so called "mercy killing" gives the patient a chance to escape potentially long-term suffering and misery resulting from terminal diseases and conditions that are hurting and or slowly killing the patient. This method of death also gives the individual a chance to decide when to end his or her life, by committing suicide in a peaceful manner rather than waiting through prolonged and continuous periods of suffering from the disease that it is killing him or her. ...

• Word Count: 5515
• Approx Pages: 22
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate