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Passive euthanasia refers to someone's helping another person to die by withholding or withdrawing life- sustaining treatment, including the administration of food and water. It is also known as euthanasia by omission. The person dying, either verbally or through a written document such as a living will, usually requests passive euthanasia. 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. Active euthanasia, on the other hand, refers to someone's taking active steps to give a dying person, on his or her request, a lethal dosage of drugs in order to hasten death.
We can see through history that the Greeks and the Romans believed in the importance of a death with dignity, which they often achieved by using poisons. In the second and third centuries AD, the Christian spirit opposed the active or passive ending of life for anyone in order to gain relief. Nevertheless during the Renaissance, people stopped to criticize suicide. The modern euthanasia movement began in England in 1935, when G. B. Shaw and H. G. Wells started a Voluntary Euthanasia Society that later became known by the name "Exit". In the United States, Charles Potter began the movement, under the name "Society for the Right to Die". Finally, in the early 1970s, other voluntary euthanasia societies were formed in the Netherlands and in Australia "as the two edged blade of modern medical technology became obvious.
Beginning with the philosophical aspects of euthanasia we must first understand the importance of the sanctity of life. As R. Dworkin (1994), claims that human life is sacred because on the one hand religious traditions believe that God made humankind "in His own image", and that each individual human being is a representation of the Creator. On the other hand the idea that human beings are something special among the whole creation explains why it is horrible that even a single human individual life should be extinguished.