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Euthanasia, ethical?


Negative euthanasia is defined as the withholding of life preserving procedures and treatments that would prolong the life of one who is incurably and terminally ill and couldn't survive without .
             them. The word euthanasia becomes a respectable part of our vocabulary in a subtle way, via the phrase ' death with dignity'.(Jonsen,15).
             Tolerance of euthanasia is not limited to our own country. A court case in South Africa, s. v. Hatmann (1975), illustrates this quite well. A medical practitioner, seeing his eighty-seven year old father suffering from terminal cancer of the prostate, injected an overdose of Morphine and Thiopental, causing his father's death within seconds. The court charged the practitioner as guilty of murder because "the law is clear that it nonetheless constitutes the crime of murder, even if all that an accused had done is to hasten the death of a human being who was due to die in any event". In spite of this charge, the court simply imposed a nominal sentence; that is, imprisonment until the rising of the court. (Friedman, 246).
             Courts and moral philosophers alike have long accepted the proposition that people have a right to refuse medical treatment they find painful or difficult to bear, even if that refusal means certain death. However, an appellate court in California has gone one controversial step further. (http://www.sclhsc.org/mission_vision_values/ethics/elizabeth_bouvia.asp) It ruled that Elizabeth Bouvia, a cerebral palsy victim, had an absolute right to refuse a life-sustaining feeding tube as part of her privacy rights under the US and California constitutions. This was the nation's most sweeping decision in perhaps the most controversial .
             In a larger scope of looking at euthanasia, we must look at past and contemporary philosophers. Saint Augustine was a firm believer in living a life without disorder and chaos. He believed that satisfaction and happiness require that an object of love, which could mean living or dying, and contain a sufficient amount of what it takes to fulfill or satisfy the particular need; which again could mean living or dying (Stumpf, 52).


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