euthanasia

euthanasia

World Affairs: Report Outline By: Shaireen Moon
Euthanasia

Euthanasia is the act of deliberately killing a person for their supposed benefit. It originates from the Greek words for 'good' and 'death'. Euthanasia is also commonly known as mercy killing. A patient who undergoes euthanasia is in most cases terminally ill, except there are other situations in which some people may want to undergo euthanasia. In most cases euthanasia is performed when the patient requests for it, which is called voluntary euthanasia. However, there are cases in which the patient can’t make such a request and a relative or the doctor has to make this decision for the patient, this is involuntary euthanasia. I will be addressing voluntary euthanasia. I believe that euthanasia isn’t justified because it conflicts with the aims of medicine, it devalues life, and it will be difficult to regulate and control.


1. Conflicts with the main aims of medicine:
• It will decelerate the progress of medicine. If we accept euthanasia now, then we will delay the discovery of effective treatments for those diseases that are, at the present, considered terminal.
• A doctor, from the very beginning of his or her career, is trained to save lives, by asking them to perform euthanasia we are asking them to go against the values that they have been taught to believe as doctors. They consider it their jobs to saves lives, then how can we ask those same people to take the lives of the people that they were originally meant to save? Due to this doctors may suffer from: depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, and marital discord.


2. It devalues life:
• By allowing people to euthanize themselves we are basically sending the message that some lives aren’t worth living. This puts a lot of pressure on the elderly, sick and disabled to undergo euthanasia. They may feel as they are a burden on society because we are telling them that they lives aren’t good enough for them to want to...