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First Written in May 2006
I’m not going to say why and when euthanasia should be practiced. I just feel that the subject is too sensitive for making such decisions in a matter of minutes, no matter how long I may have thought of them inactively.
However, I do feel like sharing a few thoughts that I have on the subject.
(As you may notice, I have a tendency to ask more questions than to answer the old ones. But that’s just me.)
I too feel that life is a valuable thing and should not be given up lightly. However, especially in cases related to this specific subject (and a few others), if you live, is it necessarily life? Lying at the bottom of a bed, incapable to do just about anything and well aware that I will never get any better, does not feel like a good idea to me. I’d rather that it would be defined so that when I live, I at least do a little bit more than breathe.
A few difficulties in euthanasia also occur when thinking about the different ways it may be practiced. Some people do it actively, meaning that they will be the ones actually killing their “client”. A little more passive way is to give the patient perfectly good ways of killing him/herself and letting him/her to actually “push the button” (sometimes quite literally). Somewhere in between there are the cases where doctors shut down the equipments that are the only things keeping the patient alive. What is the right way? I don’t know. There are too many things to consider for me to answer that one too.
This last one’s going to be a bit shorter. If somebody wants to kill him/herself, shouldn’t we then kill the will to die, not the person. Can it be done? Can it be done without turning the person into a walking dead (the first argument comes to my mind again)? …
What do you think? Should euthanasia be practiced also on persons who aren’t physically sick?
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