Palliative care focuses on relieving the patient's symptoms, pains, and stress. Another alternative treatment would be hospices. Hospice is a comfort home that offers care and comfort for patients with illness that medical cannot cure. People who seek euthanasia is usually because they are scared of getting abandoned. If they understand that they will be cared for, many rule out euthanasia. Nearly all pain can be treated if the patient receives proper support, which causes euthanasia to become unnecessary. .
Furthermore, if the medical boards of all countries legalized euthanasia as an option, this could possibly lead to non-voluntary euthanasia. Many argue that there is no right to be killed as well as slipping into peer pressure which could lead to possible danger. Euthanasia does not only exposes vulnerable people to pressure into ending their lives, but it also diminishes the recognition to options. The vulnerability could lead to confusion and blindness in which most cases, the patient cannot make rational decisions. As stated above, many alternatives are available so euthanasia becomes unnecessary. Moral pressures are often times on elderly patients who are burdened with selfish families. On the other hand, patients who are abandoned by their family are led to believe that death is their only path left in life. Human errors, such as a doctor's diagnosis could be could be misinterpreted, meaning the patient might not even be terminally ill (Euthanasia 1).
"Activists often claim that laws against euthanasia and assisted suicide are government mandated suffering. But this claim would be similar to saying that laws against selling contaminated food are government mandated starvation. Laws against euthanasia and assisted suicide are in place to prevent abuse and to protect people from unscrupulous doctors and others. They are not, and never have been, intended to make anyone suffer" (Marker 1).