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The Controversy of Euthanasia

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Published: Feb 12, 2024

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Introduction, definition of euthanasia, psychological and physiological aspects, religious aspects, advantages of euthanasia, disadvantages of euthanasia.

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Related Essays on Euthanasia

Euthanasia, a topic fraught with moral and ethical complexity, stands at the intersection of personal autonomy, suffering, compassion, and empathy. In this in-depth exploration, we will delve into the profound moral and ethical [...]

Euthanasia, also known as mercy killing, is a highly controversial topic that has sparked heated debates across the globe. The concept of euthanasia involves deliberately ending the life of a patient who is suffering from an [...]

The topic of euthanasia, the deliberate termination of a person's life to end their suffering, has ignited ethical debates worldwide. The arguments surrounding euthanasia often involve deductive reasoning to support positions [...]

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Battin, M. P., Rhodes, R., & Silvers, A. (2015). The Patient as Victim and Vector: Can Ethics Abandon the Ideal of the Autonomous Patient? The American Journal of Bioethics, 15(3), 3-14.Pereira, J. M. (2011). Legalizing [...]

Imagine facing a terminal illness with no hope for recovery, only prolonged suffering and pain. In such situations, the concept of euthanasia, or assisted suicide, becomes a controversial but increasingly relevant topic. [...]

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Euthanasia and assisted dying: the illusion of autonomy—an essay by Ole Hartling

Read our coverage of the assisted dying debate.

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• Ole Hartling , former chairman
• Danish Council of Ethics, Denmark
• hartling{at}dadlnet.dk

As a medical doctor I have, with some worry, followed the assisted dying debate that regularly hits headlines in many parts of the world. The main arguments for legalisation are respecting self-determination and alleviating suffering. Since those arguments appear self-evident, my book Euthanasia and the Ethics of a Doctor’s Decisions—An Argument Against Assisted Dying 1 aimed to contribute to the international debate on this matter.

I found it worthwhile to look into the arguments for legalisation more closely, with the hope of sowing a little doubt in the minds of those who exhibit absolute certainty in the matter. This essay focuses on one point: the concept of “autonomy.”

(While there are several definitions of voluntary, involuntary, and non-voluntary euthanasia as well as assisted dying, assisted suicide, and physician assisted suicide, for the purposes of brevity in this essay, I use “assisted dying” throughout.)

Currently, in richer countries, arguments for legalising assisted dying frequently refer to the right to self-determination—or autonomy and free will. Our ability to self-determine seems to be unlimited and our right to it inviolable. The public’s response to opinion poll questions on voluntary euthanasia show that people can scarcely imagine not being able to make up their own minds, nor can they imagine not having the choice. Moreover, a healthy person answering a poll may have difficulty imagining being in a predicament where they simply would not wish to be given the choice.

I question whether self-determination is genuinely possible when choosing your own death. In my book, I explain that the choice will always be made in the context of a non-autonomous assessment of your quality of life—that is, an assessment outside your control. 1

All essential decisions that we make are made in relation to other people. Our decisions are affected by other people, and …

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The Ethics of Euthanasia

Malleeka Suy | SQ Blogger | SQ Online (2021-2022)

Picture t his: It is the year 3020, and the Martian soil you have been drilling into has finally worked out. Colonizing Mars is taking shape, and soon your family can permanently live on this rusty, rocky planet. However, the effects of progress don’t go unnoticed; every time you move, your skin screams in pain. Everything you once loved doing has lost its appeal. Would you take death in your own hands or live until a painful end?

This moral dilemma seems straight out of a science-fiction novel for most, but euthanasia is a legitimate deliberation for patients with terminal and mental illnesses who deem their lives too painful to live on. It is a practice that is still heavily debated in modern bioethics. Among many definitions, the American Medical Association defines euthanasia as the administration of a lethal agent by a medical professional to a patient to relieve their intolerable or incurable suffering.

Although euthanasia is not a new scientific process, as it has been practiced since the time of the ancient Greeks more than three thousand years ago, it wasn’t generally accepted by Western medicine until recently. The Netherlands was the first country to allow legal euthanasia and assisted suicide in 2002, totaling 1.7-2.8% of total deaths. Euthanasia is generally illegal in the United States, but in a nationwide 2017 American poll , 73% of the public were in favor of euthanasia, and 57% said euthanasia is morally acceptable. These numbers are nearly double the initial poll in 1947. If I had to guess why, it may be partly because of progressive exposure to mental health and its effects. This may have allowed people to understand and empathize with the circumstances and support what euthanasia stands for: a release from an unbearable life.

Euthanasia is especially controversial among general society and the bioethical community. One main argument for the support of euthanasia is grounded in personal autonomy–our ability to act independently– since living life is about minimizing physical pain and maximizing dignity and control . This idea is rooted in ancient times when physicians considered dying with peace and dignity a human right. An article from Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy regards autonomy as self-determination, so choices about how and when people die is them taking responsibility for their lives. Terminally ill patients in Oregon mentioned how they chose euthanasia because their condition stripped them of their independence and ability to engage in activities that gave their life meaning. After all, what is the meaning of life if we cannot live it?

Another article by the Linacre Quarterly highlights how the ethics of compassion justify the use of euthanasia. From a humanitarian standpoint, we can show compassion by suffering and sympathizing with patients and respecting their wishes of euthanasia as their “remedy.” Kenneth L. Vaux, a consultant in medical ethics, notes in his article that physicians would give a lethal dose to their loved ones out of love if they were dying and suffering, so he finds it “strange and hypocritical” that doctors cannot legally do so for their patients. He claims that “we have lost empathy, sympathy, and the covenant of care with those who have entrusted their lives to us because they believe we embody those very qualities.” Vaux also asks: “Having barred the door to Death, are we not then obliged at some point to open it?” He suggests that since doctors bring life into the world every day, consensually ending a patient’s life for their benefit should be no different.

Despite popular social support, there are many arguments against euthanasia as well–the most popular being religion. Several faiths, such as Christianity, see euthanasia as a form of murder and find it to be morally unacceptable because it may weaken society’s respect for the sanctity of life. Religious groups actively argue against euthanasia, and for this reason, euthanasia became a debate of preservation and purity of life.

Even though medicine is rooted in science, some physicians also use religion as justification against practicing euthanasia. Contrary to public British opinion, studies show that most UK doctors do not support legislation permitting euthanasia due to their religiosity or faith, and less than a quarter of doctors would be willing to practice euthanasia if it became legal.

Physicians also have a professional obligation to fulfill that becomes morally blurred with euthanasia. For more than 2,500 years, doctors have taken the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm and treat those under their care. Does bringing death by euthanasia violate the Hippocratic Oath, or is it in line with a doctor’s mission? Would acting under Hippocrates then make a doctor a hypocrite?

Because of this subjectivity, doctors sometimes feel uncertain about administering euthanasia. Even if a patient is under a lot of pain and medication, how can doctors be sure that their decision was made rationally? In a Dutch article , an experienced psychiatrist dealing with a patient’s invisible suffering made him uncertain about assessing how deeply rooted their suffering really was, and therefore how moral it would be to allow euthanasia to happen. The fickle nature of the human mind makes many physicians and ethicists question whether or not euthanasia should be a normal practice.

Physicians often have their own reservations about euthanasia and how they cope with patients who wish for it. They frequently feel pressured by the patient or the patient’s relatives to perform euthanasia. A 2011 survey among Dutch physicians also found that 86% of physicians dread the emotional burden of performing euthanasia. One physician recounts how a patient told them, “If you won’t perform euthanasia, I might go to a railway line or climb a high building.” This form of blackmail can lead to dangerous expectations, where future normativity of the practice is anticipated or even praised.

Instead of placing the burden on doctors, what if the government or even robots could control euthanasia? Although this faceless jurisdiction seems like a good solution, critics argue that euthanasia would be normalized and twisted for eugenic purposes, adding to the nightmare of AI domination and impeding the sanctity and preciousness of life. These speculations seem inconceivable, but history has unfortunately seen it happen, such as in Hitler’s Germany, where Aktion T4, a Euthanasia Program systematically murdered patients with disabilities to restore the “integrity” of the German nation, thrived. Perhaps then a grimmer alternative to the use of euthanasia is the elimination of incurable, disabled, or elderly patients. Mechanization of euthanasia would also impact the patient and the medical profession, both in what it means to be human and obeying the Hippocratic Oath. Routinization of the practice could also increase the desires of people’s wishes to end their lives, whether individually justified or not.

References:

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2532018

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/euthanasia-voluntary/#MoraCaseForVoluEuth

http://www.cirugiaycirujanos.com/frame_esp.php?id=308

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0885392414003066?via%3Dihub

https://www.healthline.com/health/what-is-euthanasia#making-a-decision

https://livinganddyingwell.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Redefining-Physicians-Role-in-Assisted-Dying.pdf

https://shibbolethsp.jstor.org/start?entityID=urn%3Amace%3Aincommon%3Aucsd.edu&dest=

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3561966&site=jstor

https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0269216310397688

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/182951#some-statistics

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0269216310397688

https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMclde1310667

https://medicine.missouri.edu/centers-institutes-labs/health-ethics/faq/euthanasia

https://news.gallup.com/poll/211928/majority-americans-remain-supportive-euthanasia.aspx

https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/ethics/euthanasia

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21145197/

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpainsymman.2014.04.016

https://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/gjhs/article/view/19405/13366

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/euthanasia-program

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Inside The Fight For The Right To Die: Logistical And Ethical Challenges

Terry Gross

Katie Engelhart details the right-to-die movement in her new book, The Inevitable . She says that many patients in the U.S. are forced to act alone, without telling friends and family, because they fear their loved ones will be prosecuted after the fact. Germán Vogel/Getty Images hide caption

Katie Engelhart details the right-to-die movement in her new book, The Inevitable . She says that many patients in the U.S. are forced to act alone, without telling friends and family, because they fear their loved ones will be prosecuted after the fact.

When you have a dog or a cat that is in pain and near the end of life, you have the option of putting down your beloved pet. Some people who fear loss of function — mental or physical — would like a similar option for ending their own lives in a safe, peaceful and legal manner.

Journalist Katie Engelhart explores the "right to die" movement in her new book, The Inevitable. Engelhart says individuals seeking death on their own terms sometimes resort to ordering lethal veterinary drugs from Mexico or China.

"When I started reporting the book, I heard this phrase over and over ... 'I'd rather die like a dog,' " Engelhart says. "A lot of people spoke to me about euthanizing beloved pets in their past. They talked about [euthanizing their pets] as being acts of mercy and acts of love — and all they wanted was the same option for themselves."

The Two-Way

As planned, right-to-die advocate brittany maynard ends her life.

Engelhart's book focuses on six individuals — two doctors and four patients — who represent different aspects of the debate about physician-assisted death. She notes that in the U.S., physician-assisted death or medical aid in dying is legal in only a handful of states and Washington, D.C. — and there are strict measures regulating which patients qualify. Some people assume that patients who choose to end their own lives do so because they are in physical agony, but Engelhart says her research shows that's not necessarily the case.

New Zealand Supports The Right To Die, But Rejects The Right To Get High

"Most people who choose to end their lives at a preplanned moment are more concerned with things like dignity ... autonomy," she says. "They're worried less about the physical pain than the loss of themselves, though that's not to say that pain doesn't enter the equation."

Interview Highlights

On who qualifies for physician-assisted death

The law [on who qualifies] is very strict in the United States. ... A person must be terminally ill, within six months of a natural death according to two doctors. Prognostication is a kind of fuzzy science, but two doctors need to agree that six months or less is a reasonable time frame. And the person needs to have the mental capacity to be making the decision. If that's in doubt, the patient's usually referred for a psychiatric assessment.

That's very different from what the laws look like in other places. ...

Physician-assisted death is legal across [Canada] and the criteria are looser. So instead of having this hard six-months-or-less time frame, patients are required to be suffering "unbearably and irremediably," and their death is required to be reasonably foreseeable, which some doctors interpret as being 10 or even 20 years away. ... So it opens up the law to patients who, say, have multiple sclerosis, who were on a predictable physical downhill slope but who are unlikely to die in the immediate short term. And, in fact, the Canadian government now is considering several amendments to the law, which would open it up to people who are mentally ill but not suffering physically and to people who have dementia. And there are several countries in Europe that already allow euthanasia for both of those conditions.

On how the states that do permit medically assisted death don't give specific guidance on what drugs to use

We invent veterinary drugs specifically to kill pets, in some instances, [but] we don't design drugs to kill people. We design drugs to alleviate pain or to sedate. And, in fact, though physician-assisted death is legal in a number of states, the laws don't specifically outline what drugs should be used and what combination and what timing — that's been left up to doctors to decide and sort out.

So doctors have, in fact, come up with a kind of cocktail of respiratory and cardiac drugs that will work to end life. The timing will vary from 20 minutes to a couple of hours, depending on the patient and her condition. But [figuring out the doses and timing in those situations is] actually a much more difficult process than I think a lot of people would have imagined. And again, that's specific to the United States. In most countries where aid in dying is legal, people choose to die by an injection given by a physician. And that's swift and quite straightforward.

Shots - Health News

Despite sweeping aid-in-dying law, few will have that option.

On the "euthanasia underground"

Congress Moves To Overturn D.C. 'Death With Dignity Law'

The more I researched, the more I realized that people were organizing outside of the law, in some cases within family units and in some cases through quite organized groups committed to guiding people through the dying process. This really surprised me in my reporting, but I don't think it should have. I'm very loathe to make comparisons with the abortion movement, but there is one relevant point of comparison here. We know that groups like the Jane Collective existed before Roe v. Wade — they provided safe abortion access before it was legal. And there are groups big and small that sort of do an equivalent for the end of life. ... I probably should have expected that people find a way when they feel abandoned by the law and by medicine. So I ended up profiling a number of those groups. Some are quite informal — we're talking more about websites that refer people to different means of procuring lethal drugs — and some are very organized.

On the risk of prosecution if a friend or family member helps someone end their own life

Family Struggles With Father's Wish To Die

I think there is concern that an accomplice or an aide might be somehow pushing a person toward death, that this might veer into some sort of murder, homicide. But certainly it puts people in a difficult situation. I met a lot of men and women who were working very hard to obtain either drugs or materials that would help them end their lives and were being forced to do it alone without their loved ones' knowledge, because they just worried so much about their loved ones being prosecuted after the fact.

And in fact, some of the "euthanasia underground" groups that I profiled in my book offer quite detailed guidance to families who are trying to help their loved ones in a sort of furtive way. So they'll say something like: After your loved one ends her life, make sure you go to a grocery store, go shopping, get a receipt with a time stamp on it, bring it home, have an alibi. I think that can be sad in a lot of situations for a lot of families because people want to be there for their loved ones. The idea that their parents would die alone and in fear because they're worried about future prosecutions is a difficult one.

If You Have Dementia, Can You Hasten Death As You Wished?

On the complications patients with dementia face in planning physician-assisted death (which is not allowed for people with dementia in the U.S.)

For anyone who's been close to dementia, it's not like there's an on/off switch that you can see coming. There are good days and bad days and then there are fewer good days and more bad days — and then one day, a bad day stays a bad day forever. In the Netherlands, the law actually goes further. So a person can say when she's diagnosed, "I want to be euthanized when I reach X, Y, Z moment, say, when I don't recognize my husband anymore or when I lose the ability to speak and to eat." But these cases are very difficult too. And doctors are often very reluctant to be part of them, because what those deaths could mean, effectively, is that a patient could be smiling, a patient could seem happy on the day of her death. And the doctor is still required to euthanize her because of what she specified potentially months and years earlier.

'I Look Forward' To Ending My Life, Assisted Suicide Backer Says Before Dying

On the "suicide tourism" in Switzerland

Switzerland does have quite liberal aid-in-dying laws and, unusually, they're open to nonresidents. So there are a few clinics that have formed that serve visitors from abroad who want to to come and end their lives there. The Swiss even speak of "suicide tourism" to the country. And these clinics require that patients be suffering unbearably, that they are sick with something that will at some point reasonably soon end their lives. So anyone [from any country] can qualify to go. But again, I find that people end up traveling to Switzerland and dying before they really want to, because they have to be healthy enough to get on a plane to travel around Zurich or Bern and to complete the process for getting final approval.

On the ethical issues Engelhart grappled with while researching her book

Katie Engelhart has worked as a correspondent for Vice News and NBC News in New York. She won a George Polk Award for her article about the nursing home in Kirkland, Wash., that became the first COVID-19 hotspot in the U.S. Owain Rich/Macmillan hide caption

I was very careful with who I spoke to, and some of this was just born of a self-preservation instinct. I didn't want to get in trouble. I didn't want to be in a situation where I was speaking to someone who I fundamentally didn't think was stable. So in almost every instance, I would only speak to someone at length if I could also speak to their loved ones, their family, their friends, their colleagues, their clinicians, their therapists — if I could have access to their medical notes. So I really didn't want to feel like I was speaking to someone in, kind of, obscurity. I wanted the people around them to know that I was there. And that, of course, would open the opportunity for someone around the person to say to me, "this is a bad idea" or "I think you're making things worse."

And then I also was just very careful in my interactions with people. So I said at length, probably excessively, something along the lines of, "I appreciate you for talking to me, but just because we're having this conversation doesn't mean we have to have more. You can choose at any moment to stop talking to me and that's OK. You can let me know if you don't want to continue the conversations, or if that's too uncomfortable for you, you can just ignore my calls and emails and I will get the point and I will leave you alone." So I definitely left that option open. And in a couple of instances, people took it. I was very aware I didn't want anyone to die for the sake of a story and certainly not for my story.

Amy Salit and Seth Kelley produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Deborah Franklin adapted it for the Web.

• right to die
• physician-assisted suicide

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Euthanasia: A controversial debate

Nihal, Kanwal

Department of Medicine, Dow University of Health Sciences, Karachi, Pakistan

Address for correspondence: Dr. Kanwal Nihal, Dow Medical College, Dow University of Health Sciences, Baba-e-Urdu Road, Saddar, Karachi, Pakistan. E-mail: [email protected]

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 Unported, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

To the Editor,

As the word indicates, euthanasia is derived from the Greek word “euthanatos” meaning “early death.” This term has such countless debates that it has incited emotive reactions both among the clinical practicians and people in general. According to the House of Lords Select Committee on Medical Ethics, the correct definition of euthanasia is “a deliberate intervention undertaken with the express intention of ending a life, to relieve intractable sufferings.”[ 1 ] As of March 2021, active human euthanasia is legal in the Netherlands, Belgium, Colombia, Luxembourg, Western Australia, Canada, and Spain. As a matter of concern, there are many incurable diseases such as dementia and multiple sclerosis, yet my fundamental spotlight is about dementia.

People affected with dementia become unaware of their surroundings as their cognitive efficiency decreases crescively (Cheston and Bender; Kitwood), along with that they become anosognosic and adapt to a lack of decision-making capability. Thus, they live their lives through unbearable sufferings. Therefore, in the research reported by Dröes et al .[ 2 ] and Smith et al. ,[ 3 ] it is stated that the caregivers can enhance the confidence and quality of life of people with dementia by providing them access to their autonomy. Therefore, in 2004–2006 assent for geriatric care was brought in contact for cognitively impaired patients. However, in this practice, only the decision taken by the demented person before his worst condition will be taken in the subject. Thus, the result of this study showed that even after the collaborative efforts tried by the caregiver, it did not mitigate the moral dilemma; instead, it escalated the conflict.[ 4 ]

However, according to a new study, many medical organizations have accentuated to improve palliative care. The International Association for Hospice and Palliative Care stated that no country or state should consider the legalization of physician-assisted suicide-euthanasia until it ensures universal access to palliative care services and appropriate medications, including opioids for pain and dyspnea.[ 5 ]

Therefore, after going through these studies, it has raised significant concern as Pakistan is a third-world country and Islamic country where Muslims solely believe that only God should end their lives, and killing a person who is undergoing unbearable sufferings by euthanasia is forbidden.[ 6 ] As we think of Pakistan, which is a poverty-stricken country, people are confused about whether to continue treatment, which has unpredictable efficacy or to go through euthanasia that will question their lives with a moral dilemma. Thus, they live their lives between Scylla and Charybdis. Not only this, as Pakistan is an underdeveloped nation, it has very few effective therapeutics, hence we should give our prior attention to the palliative care and the conduction of rehabilitation programs to solve this issue. Therefore, the implementation of these new findings in Pakistan will surely help and improve the lives of terminally ill patients.

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Euthanasia and the Law: The Rise of Euthanasia and Relationship With Palliative Healthcare

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158 Euthanasia Topics & Essay Examples

If you’re writing a euthanasia essay, questions and topics on the subject can be tricky to find. Not with our list!

• 📑 Aspects to Cover in a Euthanasia Essay

🏆 Best Euthanasia Essay Examples & Topics

💡 clever euthanasia titles, 🎓 simple & easy euthanasia essay titles, ✅ most interesting euthanasia topics to write about, ❓ euthanasia essay questions.

Our experts have prepared a variety of ideas for your paper or speech. In the article below, find original euthanasia research questions and essay titles. And good luck with your assignment!

📑 Aspects to Cover in an Euthanasia Essay

Euthanasia is the process of intentional life ending. Its goal is to stop patients’ suffering and pain. In today’s world, euthanasia is a debatable topic, and there are many questions about it.

Euthanasia essays can help students to raise awareness of the process and its aspects. That is why it is crucial to research this issue and write papers on it.

You can discuss various problems in your essay on euthanasia, as there is a broad variety of related issues. You can choose the one you are the most concerned about, search for euthanasia essay questions online or consult your professor.

Here are some examples of euthanasia essay topics and titles we can suggest:

• The benefits and disadvantages of a physician-assisted suicide
• Ethical dilemmas associated with euthanasia
• An individual’s right to die
• Euthanasia as one of the most debatable topics in today’s society
• The ethical dilemma around euthanasia
• The ethics associated with voluntary euthanasia
• Can euthanasia be considered murder?
• Euthanasia debate: Should the government legalize this procedure?
• The legality of physician-assisted suicide in today’s society

Once you have selected one of the euthanasia essay titles, you can start working on your paper. Here are some important aspects to cover:

Start from developing a solid euthanasia essay thesis. You should state the main idea of your paper and your primary argument clearly. A thesis statement can look like this: Euthanasia is beneficial for patients because it prevents them from suffering. Euthanasia can be equal to murder.

• Remember to include a definition of euthanasia and related terms, such as physician-assisted suicide. Your audience should understand what you are talking about in the essay.
• Do not forget to include the existing evidence on the issue. For instance, you can research euthanasia in different countries, the debates around its legalization, and all other aspects related to the problem. Support your claims with facts and cite your sources correctly.
• Legal and ethical questions are some of the most significant aspects you should cover in the essay. Discuss the potential benefits and disadvantages of the procedure, as well as its impact on patients’ families and medical professionals.
• If you are writing an opinion paper, do not forget to state your opinion clearly. Include relevant experience, if possible (for example, if you work at a hospital and patients have asked you about the procedure). Have you met people who could have benefited from euthanasia? Include their stories, if applicable.
• Do not forget to cover the legal aspects of euthanasia in your state. Is it legal to perform some form of euthanasia where you live or work? Do you think it is beneficial for the patients?
• Remember to look at the grading rubric to see what other aspects you should cover in your paper. For example, your professor may want you to state a counter-argument and include a refutation paragraph. Make sure that you follow all of your instructor’s requirements.
• If you are not sure that you have covered all the necessary questions related to your issue, check out related articles and analyze the authors’ arguments. Avoid copying other people’s work and only use it as an inspiration.

Please find our free samples below with the best ideas for your work!

• Euthanasia: Advantages and Disadvantages The most heavily criticized of all such similar actions is involuntary euthanasia which bears the brunt of all severe protests against the issue, with involuntary euthanasia being dubbed as the deprivation of an individual of […]
• Arguments in Favor of Euthanasia Due to the sensitivity of the issue, laws that will protect the rights of both the patient and the physicians who practice euthanasia should be put in place.
• Consequentialism: Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide People against euthanasia view the consequences of legalization as a gateway to other unethical practices being accepted, which is a slippery slope that could lead to adverse consequences to the fundamental principles and values of […]
• The Morality of Euthanasia In the meantime the medication and the doctors are not trivial anymore in stopping the pain and the victim despite all the sufferings, he or she is in a vegetative state and there is nothing […]
• Euthanasia as Self-Termination Velleman believes that a person should not have the right to end their life as it can make other people suffer, but there is an objection to his opinion related to that person’s own pain.
• An Argument Against Euthanasia 5 Generally, it is contrary to the duty of the subject of euthanasia and that of those who intend to perform the mercy killing to take one’s life based on their own assessment of the […]
• David Velleman’s Views on Euthanasia Velleman is correct in his conviction that in this case, the patient’s decision will be the outcome of a federal right to die; the situation with euthanasia is common to that of abortion with the […]
• Why Active Euthanasia is Morally Wrong The issue of active euthanasia has come to the attention of the public over the past decades as more people demand for the right to be assisted to die.
• Euthanasia for Terminally Ill People: Pros & Cons Despite the fact that euthanasia causes a lot of controversy, every person should have the right to end suffering. Permission of euthanasia is the realization of a person’s right to dispose of their body.
• Euthanasia in Christian Spirituality and Ethics By examining Christian’s views on the fallenness of the world, the hope of resurrection, and the value of a person’s life, one can see that euthanasia is not a morally acceptable option for a Christian […]
• Euthanasia: Right to Live or Right to Die Euthanasia or mercy killing as it is informally referred is the act of ending a person life if it is deemed to be the only way to help a person get out of their suffering.
• The Problem of Euthanasia in Animal Shelters Animal shelters are forced to euthanize animals for a number of reasons which includes: Lack of funds to treat sick animals, overcrowding as a result of the increased number of animals brought in by owners […]
• Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide The final act that results in the death of the person is however usually performed by the person intending to die after the provision of information, advice and even the ways through which he or […]
• The Death Definition and the Need for Euthanasia If the concept of the soul is to be believed in, then one’s death is simply a process that detaches the soul from the body.
• Euthanasia as a Polarizing Issue The example of a plethora of countries shows that the inclusion of assisted suicide is not detrimental to the broad society.
• Rachel’s Stance on Euthanasia: Passive and Active Killing Despite the appealing nature of Rachel’s argument, his claims of equity of killing and letting a person die are not ethically right. A major distinction between killing and witnessing death is the level of responsibility […]
• Analysis of Ethical Dilemma: Euthanasia One of these is the right to live, which includes much more than the ability to simply exist, and suggests an adherence to a minimum of quality and self-determination.
• Euthanasia-Related Ethical and Legal Issues There are no discussions about whether the person has the right to commit suicide or not because most individuals agree that it is the decision of the adult person who can dispose of their life.
• Euthanasia: Legal Prohibitions and Permits In addition, it is necessary to take into account the right of a suffering person to get rid of the suffering of loved ones.
• Euthanasia: Why Is It Such a Big Problem? Thus, according to the utilitarian viewpoint, there is no problem with euthanasia as along as it is better for the patient. Who is it to decide what is better for the patient?
• Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide as a Current Issue in Nursing Nowadays, even in nations where the procedure of euthanasia and assisted suicide has been legal for decades, this topic continues to be controversial due to ethical and policy issues. However, in the light of the […]
• Euthanasia and Its Main Advantages However, after realizing the condition is untreatable and having the consent of both the sick person and the relatives, undertaking assisted suicide will enable the patient to evade extreme suffering.
• Euthanasia: Nurses’ Attitudes Towards Death The weakest part of the article is that most of the participants did not clearly define the concept of euthanasia, which casts doubt on the reliability of the sampled data.
• Right to Die With Euthanasia Methods The possible answer is to develop the functionality of both ordinary public hospitals and hospices that are located in their departments. In addition, it is critical to specify the desirable methods of euthanasia.
• “Active and Passive Euthanasia” by James Rachels The second issue about euthanasia that Rachels raises is the difference between killing and allowing one to die. For Rachels, it is necessary to emphasize that killing is sometimes even more humane than allowing one […]
• Arguments Against Legalization of Euthanasia Although the PAS/E should be offered voluntarily to a patient, in some cases it is offered in secret by physicians to patients who are perceived to be dying.
• Euthanasia: The Terri Schiavo Case Analysis The long-term judicial resolution of the Terri Schiavo case was related to the bioethical problem of the humanity of euthanasia, which had many opponents and supporters.
• Can Euthanasia Be Considered Ethical Consequently, from this perspective, the act of euthanasia would be regarded as violence to someone else’s life. As a result, euthanasia is likely to be considered unethical from the point of view of any of […]
• “Active and Passive Euthanasia” and “Sexual Morality” According to Scruton, morality is a constraint upon reasons for action and a normal consequence of the possession of a first-person perspective. For Scruton, sexual morality includes the condemnation of lust and perversion that is, […]
• Nursing Role in Euthanasia Decision and Procedures The weakest point is the lack of analysis of other factors’ influence on the process of euthanasia. The researchers discovered that the role of nurses in euthanasia is underestimated.
• Aspects of Nursing and Euthanasia The subject of the research by Monteverde was to ask people who work in the medical sphere and face the necessity for euthanasia, whether they are for or against it, and why.
• Pros and Cons of Euthanasia from an Ethical Perspective Primarily, this is apparent on American soil, in which some states decriminalized euthanasia, although the supreme court maintained that there is no law that legalized the practice nor the ban of the mentioned act.
• Euthanasia in the Context of Christianity The questions addressed in the paper include the notions of fall and resurrection as means of interpreting suffering, the Christian stance on the value of human life and euthanasia, and the discussion of possible solutions […]
• Nursing Practice and Euthanasia’s Ethical Issues Effective healthcare management is the involvement of all stakeholders, such as CMS, and the federal government in the decision-making process to improve the sustainable growth in the effectiveness of Medicaid.
• Counseling on Euthanasia and End-of-Life Decision The immediate dynamic killing is a clinical demonstration coordinated to the hardship of life, while a doctor helped self-destruction is a demonstration of the doctor where he gives the patient a medicament for taking life.
• Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide Articles According to the methods of application, there are two main types of euthanasia: “active”, which consists in performing certain actions to accelerate the death of a hopelessly ill person, and “passive”, the meaning of which […]
• Legal and Ethical Issues of Euthanasia Davis argues that there exists a challenge on how to establish a consensus in the competing views regarding the desire for patients to have the choice to die with dignity while under pain and distress […]
• Debates on Euthanasia – Opposes the Use Therefore, the legal system should work hand in hand with healthcare shareholders in distinguishing the limits between the patients’ rights and the physicians’ accountability based on the possible life-limiting treatment choices.
• Active Euthanasia: Ethical Dilema In case of active euthanasia, it is the patient who requests the medical practitioner to end his or her life and the former abides by the wish.
• Euthanasia: Every For and Against Jane L Givens and Susan L Mitchell “Concerns about End-of-Life Care and Support for Euthanasia” Journal of Pain and Symptom Management Article in Press FOR The authors state socio-demographic characteristics of the people are the […]
• Pro Euthanasia in the United States The discussions of euthanasia implementation in the United States began in the early 19th century after the development of ether, which was applied to pain-relieving.
• The Euthanasia in Humans The moral and ethical aspects of medical practice include not only the features of interaction with patients and other interested parties but also deeper nuances. In particular, one of the controversial and acute topics is euthanasia and its acceptability from different perspectives, including both patients’ and healthcare employees’ positions. In addition, religious issues are involved, […]
• Euthanasia: Philosophical Issues at Stake in Rodriguez I will argue that the prohibition of euthanasia contradicts utilitarianism and the principle of quality of life in particular, and can hardly be supported by paternalism since the ban does not benefit an individual’s life.
• “Euthanasia Reconsidered” by Deagle In more detail, there is a clearly discernible introduction that provides the background to the topic, introduces the thesis statement, and state the opinion of the author of the topic discussed.
• Euthanasia Movement in Modern America Euthanasia movements in modern America perfected the art of rhetoric in their communication and this worked for them in terms of winning the heart of the public.
• Euthanasia: The Issue of Medical Ethics In this respect, the position of a physician under the strain of extreme circumstances should be weighed about the value of compassion.
• The Dilemma of Euthanasia It is at this point, when it becomes a contention of professional ethics and moral considerations on the part of Jack and his wife on the one hand, and personal choice on the part of […]
• Euthanasia: Ethical Debates When a patient is in the final stage of life, sometimes, the disease or the conditions of the patient, cause a lot of physical and psychological suffering.
• Euthanasia Moral and Ethical Agitation If grandma were a dog, most all would agree that the only humane option would be to ‘put her to sleep.’ U.S.citizens are guaranteed certain rights but not the right to wouldie with dignity.’ This […]
• Life-Span Development: Terri Schiavo’s Euthanasia Case Euthanasia is the process of stopping the medical maintenance of a patient’s life when the patient/herself does not want to suffer anymore and the doctors are sure that no improvements in the patient’s condition are […]
• Euthanasia and Other Life Termination Options However, there is a strong case for helping terminally ill patients spend the remainder of their lives with care provided by the medical fraternity and with support from the state and insurance companies. And in […]
• The Problem of Euthanasia Nevertheless, we must recognize that the interruption of life, alone or with the help of doctors, is contrary to one of the basic tenets of Christianity: the more people suffer on earth, the easier it […]
• Euthanasia: Allow Them to Be Free From Body Euthanasia, the practice of deliberately bring about an easy, painless, and moderate death to a person who is in the last days of his life and can no more bear the pain of living, has […]
• Palliative Medicine Replacement for Euthanasia Euthanasia is not about helping ill and dying people to end their pain and bring comfort. Euthanasia undermines the core values of life and decreases the motivation to provide care for the dying.
• Euthanasia: A Legalized Right to Die Nothing could be further from the intent of those who favor a limited reconsideration of public policy in the areas of assisted suicide and voluntary active euthanasia.
• Euthanasia and Suicide Issues in Christian Ethics Based on the two perceptions of euthanasia, theological and professional, it is valid to say that assisted suicide is probably not the best way out.
• Euthanasia: Morals, Ethics, and the Value of Life James Rachels however disagrees with the position taken by doctors when it comes to active Euthanasia and argues that, given a case where the patient is in intolerable pain and is certain to die in […]
• Euthanasia. Arguments of Opponents The request of the patient to relieve them from Karma and sufferings that is clarification and healing, nobody gives the right to break life of a physical body.
• Attitudes Related to Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide Among Terminally Ill Patients Consequently, the outlined safeguard becomes the first line of defense in making sure that only the right individuals with chronic and incurable medical conditions benefit from assisted death.
• Active Euthanasia Legalization Controversy While many people present the notions of medical ethics, the right to life, and the availability of palliative care to oppose active euthanasia, there are those who support it since it is evidence-based in nature […]
• Dying With Dignity: Euthanasia Debate On the other hand, the supporters of the law claim that assisted death is not a suicide, and it allows more end-of-life options for terminally ill patients. The majority of people are concerned with control […]
• Euthanasia Legalization as an Unethical Practice The decision to legalize euthanasia is an idea that societies should ignore since it places many global citizens at risk, fails to provide adequate safeguards, diminishes social values, and undermines the teachings of Islam.
• The Ethics of Euthanasia In the analysis of the claims in favor and against euthanasia, the cause and effect relationships between the factors affecting the choice of euthanasia should be established.
• Today’s Moral Issues: Euthanasia To ensure that the right to life is respect, the law was amended to include assisted or aided suicide as a criminal offense.
• Controversial Issues of Euthanasia Decision We now had to make this difficult decision to end his life and relieve him of all the pain that he was undergoing.
• Confronting Physician-Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia It was because of that pain that led my mother and I to bring her to a Chinese holistic healer who treated her with some sort of secret Chinese medical injection.
• Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia Rights in Canada The article asserts that in the year 1993, Rodriquez petitioned in vain to the Supreme Court of Canada to allow her to undertake euthanasia. In the article, the author asserts that, in the year 1993, […]
• Euthanasia: “Being a Burden” by Martin Gunderson As it was implied in the Introduction, in his article, Gunderson argues in favor of the idea that it is utterly inappropriate to even consider the legalization of voluntary euthanasia, due to a number of […]
• Euthanasia: Fighting for the Right Cause Sommerville is a renowned Samuel Gale Professor of Law at the McGill University in Montreal, the Professor in the Faculty of Medicine, and the Founding Director of the Center for Medicine, Ethics, and Law. The […]
• Euthanasia as a Way of Painless Termination of Life The introduction of the Hippocratic School led to the abolishment of the practice. According to the approach, taking human life is unethical and violation of the core right to life.
• Euthanasia and Other Life-Destroying Procedures From this perspective, it is unethical to decide in favor of an end-of-life procedure on the condition that there are at least minimal chances for a patient’s survival.
• Ethics of Euthanasia and Pain-Relieving This leads to the historical argument that voluntary euthanasia is often the beginning of a slippery slope that gives rise to unintentional euthanasia and the murder of people who are unwanted in society.
• Euthanasia Legalization: Public Policy Debates The requirements of physicians to perform euthanasia and consideration of the second opinion eliminate the violation of legal and ethical stipulations, and thus, control the performance of euthanasia in health care environment. Opponents of euthanasia […]
• Euthanasia: Moral Rationalist View Human beings rely on the available evidence to generate beliefs about life and goals that should be attained, and thus the use of reason leads to success in these objectives.
• Euthanasia: Is It Worth the Fuss? In order to grasp the gist of the deliberations in this essay, it is important to first apprehend what the term euthanasia means and bring this meaning in the context of this essay.
• Active and Passive Euthanasia Analysis and Its Concept The issue of morality is one of the things that have to be mentioned when discussing the concept of euthanasia. In this instance, both the patient and the doctor know that there is no cure […]
• Euthanasia: Legalisation of a Mercy Killing The fact that the minority of countries and only several states in the US accept euthanasia proves that today people are still not ready to accept it as a mercy.
• Euthanasia in Today’s Society Euthanasia is the deliberate termination of life with the intention of relieving a patient from pain and suffering. If the prognosis of a patient is gloomy, medical care providers may find it more compassionate to […]
• When Ethics and Euthanasia Conflict? The main aim is to reduce the lifetime of a patient who is terminally ill. There is a deep mistrust of the motivations that fuel euthanasia.
• Religions Views on Euthanasia This essay highlights religious thoughts with regard to the whole issue of euthanasia, bringing into focus the extent to which our society has been influenced by courtesy of the Dr.
• Euthanasia as the Key Controversy of the XXI Century The fact that in the present-day society, human life is put at the top of the entire list of values is a major achievement of the civilization and the fact that the current society is […]
• Euthanasia: Is It the Best Solution? In twentieth century, various agencies erupted to address the practice of euthanasia such as Voluntary Euthanasia Legislation Society in 1935, which was advocating for its legalization in London and the National Society for the Legalization […]
• Legalizing Euthanasia The are supporters of the idea that only God has the right to take human’s life, on the other hand, the sufferings of the person may be unbearable and they may ask for euthanasia to […]
• A New Fight to Legalize Euthanasia Before settling down on the conclusion of the need to adopt the practice of euthanasia in our state, it is important to visit some basic aspects that are very key in the issue of euthanasia.
• The Ethics of Active Euthanasia In support of the euthanasia action, the argument is that there are circumstances when the rule of natural life can be violated.
• Advantages and Disadvantages of Euthanasia in Modern Society In its turn, this points out to the fact that, in the field of health care, the notion of medicinal compassion organically derives out of the notion of scientific progress, and not out of the […]
• Is Euthanasia a Morally Wrong Choice for Terminal Patients? It is imperative to note that for both the opponents and proponents of euthanasia, the quality of life is usually the focal point, even though there is no agreement on the criteria of defining quality […]
• The Right to Life and Active Euthanasia The god of every individual should be the only one to bring death to a person and no person should have the authority to accept dying no matter the situation he/she is in.
• Singer’s Views on Voluntary Euthanasia, Non-voluntary Euthanasia, and Involuntary Euthanasia Hence, if a person consciously consents to die, there are no chances for recovery, and killing is the only way to deprive a patient from pain and suffering, euthanasia can be regarded as voluntary.
• Euthanasia Authorization Debate Euthanasia, which is equivalent to the termination of life, can be equated to a total breach of the principle of the sacredness of life, as well as the breach of the legal right of human […]
• Moral and Ethical Concerns of Euthanasia in Healthcare In the matter of euthanasia, professionals ought to decide between the overall good of the dying patient and that of other stakeholders.
• Good and Harm to Humanity of the Use a Euthanasia An Overview of Euthanasia The meaning of euthanasia has changed over the years from how it was originally construed to what it means to the contemporary world.
• Euthanasia and Meaning of Life The meaning of life is the most general aspect of judging about the requirements that must be set out by laws and people’s morals in regarding to the voluntary or involuntary taking of that life.
• Euthanasia: Your Right to Die? Although both positions can be supported with a lot of arguments, people should change their absolutely negative vision of euthanasia because the right to die with the help of physicians can be considered as one […]
• Euthanasia and Human’s Right to Die Trying to support human life with the help of modern equipment is a good idea, however, not in case there are no chances for a person to live without that equipment.
• Euthanasia Moral Permissibility Secondly, the application of voluntary euthanasia should not be regarded as the only way of reducing the pain that a patient can experience.
• Euthanasia (Mercy Killing) In some circumstances, the family and friends of the patient might request the hospital to terminate the life of the patient without necessarily informing the patient.
• Euthanasian Issues in Modern Society Is it possible to find the relief in the life which is full of pain and agony for those people who suffer from serious diseases and have only a little chance to get rid of […]
• Euthanasia From a Disciple of Jesus Christ in Today’s World Another form of euthanasia is that of Assisted Suicide where the person intending to end his/her life is provided with the necessary guidance, means as well as information as to how to go about the […]
• Euthanasia and Modern Society Towards this end Battin asserts that “the relief of pain of a patient is the least disputed and of the highest priority to the physician” in direct reference to sole and major reason of carrying […]
• Euthanasia: Moral Issues and Clinical Challenges Therefore, any law that rejects euthanasia is a bad one because it denies the patients the right and the liberty to die peacefully.
• Ethical Issues Surrounding the Choice of Euthanasia in the United States
• The Advantages and Disadvantages of the Legalization of Euthanasia
• Confronting Physician-Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia
• The Difference Between Active and Passive Euthanasia
• Euthanasia: Current Policy, Problems, and Solution
• The Permit and Legalization of Euthanasia for the Terminally Ill Patients
• Moral and Religious Differences Between Euthanasia and Suicide
• The Criticisms and Opposition of Euthanasia in Australia
• Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia It Is Not Murder, It Is Mercy
• The Factors That Influence the Legalization of Active and Passive Euthanasia in the United States
• Roman Catholic Church’s Teachings on Abortion and Euthanasia
• The Different Reasons Why People Are Against Euthanasia
• Religious and Ethical Arguments in Favour of Euthanasia
• The Moral and Ethical Views on the Goal of Euthanasia
• Euthanasia and the Role of Politics and Religion
• The Philosophical, Legal, and Medical Issues on Euthanasia
• General Information About Euthanasia and the Legality of Suicide in Australia
• The Nazi Euthanasia Programme Based on Racial Purity Theories
• Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s Role in Physician-Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia
• Utilitarian and Libertarian Views on Euthanasia
• The Moral and Religious Differences, if Any, Between Euthanasia and Suicide
• Biblical World View About the Euthanasia, Suicide, and Capital Punishment
• The Truth About Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide
• Tracing Back the Origins of the Practice of Euthanasia During the Greeks and Roman Times
• The Causes and Effects of Euthanasia and the Moral Right To Die
• The Arguments Against Euthanasia From a Standpoint of a Catholic Christian in the United States of America?
• Why Should Active Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide Be Legalized?
• What Are the Good and Bad Sides of Euthanasia?
• Do People Have To Commit Suicide by Euthanasia (Suicide by a Doctor)?
• What Is the Difference Between Passive and Active Euthanasia?
• What Are the Social Issues and Ethical Values of Euthanasia?
• What Is the Current Legal Situation Regarding Euthanasia?
• How Does Prohibition of Euthanasia Limit Our Rights?
• What Is the American Medical Association’s Attitude to Euthanasia?
• Can Hegelian Dialectics Justify Euthanasia?
• What Are the Viewpoints and Studies of the Legalization of Euthanasia in the United States?
• Why Does Parenting Make Euthanasia More Acceptable?
• What Are the Negative Arguments Against Euthanasia?
• Voluntary Euthanasia: What’s Right and Wrong?
• Why Can Christians not Accept Euthanasia?
• Can Euthanasia Help the Terminally Ill?
• What Are the Top Ten Reasons for Legalizing Euthanasia?
• Should Non Voluntary Euthanasia Be Legal?
• What Is the Difference Between Doctor-Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia?
• Why Should Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide Be Legalized?
• What’s Wrong With Involuntary Euthanasia?
• Why Are There So Different Views on Abortion and Euthanasia?
• How Would Christians Respond to the Issue of Abortion and Euthanasia?
• What Are the Objections To Legalizing Euthanasia in Hong Kong?
• How Does Euthanasia Devalue Human Life?
• What Are the Views and Arguments About Euthanasia?
• How May the Christian Faith Inform the Debate Over Euthanasia?
• What Does Euthanasia Mean to Society Today?
• What Are the Religious and Ethical Considerations to the Issue of Euthanasia?
• Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide – Who Wants It?
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IvyPanda. (2024, February 28). 158 Euthanasia Topics & Essay Examples. https://ivypanda.com/essays/topic/euthanasia-essay-examples/

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Arguments for and Against Physician-Assisted Suicide

The right to legally end your own life is a heavily debated issue..

Posted September 16, 2020 | Reviewed by Gary Drevitch

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Although September is designated National Suicide Awareness Month, there are those who think about suicide 12 months of the year. They may be survivors of suicide loss—the family and friends of those who have taken their own lives—or they may be people who often contemplate suicide or have already made attempts. Articles and anecdotes of suicide published during the month of September and at other times most often focus on prevention. But there’s another side to the story.

Many people believe that ending one’s own life is a human right, particularly for those who are terminally ill and suffering from indescribable pain or impairment. In the United States, however, it is only a right for those in the nine places where physician-assisted death is now legal when strict guidelines are followed. In Oregon, Washington, Vermont, Maine, Hawaii, California, Colorado, New Jersey, or the District of Columbia, eligible, terminally ill patients can legally seek medical assistance in dying from a licensed physician. In all of these places, a physician can decide whether or not to provide that assistance. At the same time, other states—Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, New Mexico, Ohio, South Dakota, and Utah—have, in recent years, strengthened their laws against assisted suicide. In 2018, for instance, Utah amended its manslaughter statute to include assisted suicide.

In a nutshell, it works like this: The patient orally requests legal medical assistance in dying from a qualified physician. That physician must assess and confirm the patient’s eligibility and also inform the patient of alternative treatments that provide pain relief or hospice care. At that point, a second physician must confirm the patient’s diagnosis and mental competence to make such a decision. If deemed necessary, either physician can require the patient to undergo a psychological evaluation. The patient must then make a second oral request for assistance. Once approved, the original physician writes a prescription for lethal medication (usually a high-dose barbiturate powder that must be mixed with water) that the patient can self-administer when and where they choose, as long as it is not in a public place. Some people never fill the prescription or fill the prescription but never take the medication. Those who do generally fall asleep within minutes and die peacefully within a few hours.

Several organizations have been formed to both support and oppose physician-assisted dying for moral, ethical, and legal reasons. Groups such as Death with Dignity and Compassion and Choices are in favor of what they call “medical aid in dying” and work to provide assistance and lobbying efforts to initiate legal “right to die” programs in every state. They support patient autonomy and choice, particularly in the case of terminal illness. To these groups and their supporters, most of whom come to this side of the issue as a result of agonizing personal experience, death with dignity is a human rights issue and those who are suffering are entitled to a peaceful death.

On the other side of the debate, groups like the Patients Rights Council and Choice Is an Illusion work to tighten laws against euthanasia and medical aid in dying. They fear a complete lack of oversight at the moment of death, as well as normalization of the process to the degree that patients will feel they must relieve their families of the burden they are inflicting by living with their illness. They are concerned that decisions will be made by others on behalf of those too ill to speak for themselves. These groups believe the job of a physician is to find ways to eliminate patients’ suffering, not the patients themselves. They do not believe a physician is qualified to make the decision to assist in ending a life.

In the end, no group really wants assisted suicide to be the final answer, but those who favor medical aid in dying see little recourse for those living with unbearable chronic pain , who are terminally ill, and who have no hope of improving the quality of their lives because medical science has not yet caught up with our modern potential for longevity.

Compassion and Choices: https://compassionandchoices.org/

Death with Dignity: https://www.deathwithdignity.org/

Patients Rights Council: http://www.patientsrightscouncil.org/site/

Choice is An Illusion: https://www.choiceillusion.org/2019/04/in-last-ten-years-at-least-nine-…

Susan McQuillan is a food, health, and lifestyle writer.

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Euthanasia – Arguments in Favour and Against

Last updated on April 7, 2024 by ClearIAS Team

Euthanasia is the deliberate act of ending a person’s life to relieve them of suffering. It is a complex and ethically sensitive topic that has sparked debates and discussions worldwide. There are different forms of euthanasia, and it is regulated differently in various countries.

Euthanasia (“good death”) is the practice of intentionally ending a life to relieve pain and suffering. It is also known as ‘mercy killing’.

In many countries, there is a divisive public controversy over the moral, ethical, and legal issues of euthanasia. Euthanasia is categorized in different ways, which include voluntary, non-voluntary, or involuntary. Euthanasia is also classified into active and passive Euthanasia.

Table of Contents

Voluntary, Non-Voluntary, and Involuntary Euthanasia

• Voluntary euthanasia: It is conducted with the consent of the patient and is termed voluntary euthanasia. Voluntary euthanasia is legal in some countries. Jurisdictions, where euthanasia is legal, include the Netherlands, Colombia, Belgium, and Luxembourg.
• Non-Voluntary euthanasia: It is conducted where the consent of the patient is unavailable and is termed non-voluntary euthanasia. Non-voluntary euthanasia is illegal in all countries. Examples include child euthanasia, which is illegal worldwide but decriminalized under certain specific circumstances in the Netherlands under the Groningen Protocol.
• Involuntary euthanasia: It is conducted against the will of the patient and is termed involuntary euthanasia. Involuntary euthanasia is usually considered murder.

Passive vs Active euthanasia

Voluntary, non-voluntary, and involuntary euthanasia can all be further divided into passive or active variants.

• Passive euthanasia entails the withholding of common treatments, such as antibiotics, necessary for the continuance of life.
• Active euthanasia entails the use of lethal substances or forces, such as administering a lethal injection, to kill and is the most controversial means.

Euthanasia debate

Euthanasia raises profound ethical and moral questions. Supporters argue that it can be a compassionate and dignified way to end suffering, particularly in cases of terminal illness.

Opponents argue that it raises significant ethical concerns, including the potential for abuse, coercion, and mistakes in diagnosing terminal conditions.

Arguments in Favor

Historically, the euthanasia debate has tended to focus on several key concerns. According to euthanasia opponent Ezekiel Emanuel, proponents of euthanasia have presented four main arguments:

• that people have a right to self-determination, and thus should be allowed to choose their fate
• assisting a subject to die might be a better choice than requiring that they continue to suffer
• the distinction between passive euthanasia, which is often permitted, and active euthanasia, which is not substantive (or that the underlying principle–the doctrine of double effect–is unreasonable or unsound);
• permitting euthanasia will not necessarily lead to unacceptable consequences. Pro-euthanasia activists often point to countries like the Netherlands and Belgium, and states like Oregon, where euthanasia has been legalized, to argue that it is mostly unproblematic.
• Constitution of India: ‘Right to life’ is a natural right embodied in Article 21 but euthanasia/suicide is an unnatural termination or extinction of life and, therefore, incompatible and inconsistent with the concept of ‘right to life’. The State must protect life and the physician’s duty to provide care and not to harm patients. Supreme Court in Gian Kaur Case 1996 has held that the right to life under Article 21 does not include the right to die.
• Caregiver’s burden: Right-to-die supporters argue that people who have an incurable, degenerative, disabling, or debilitating condition should be allowed to die in dignity. This argument is further defended by those, who have chronic debilitating illness even though it is not terminal such as severe mental illness. The majority of such petitions are filed by the sufferers or family members or their caretakers. The caregiver’s burden is huge and cuts across various financial, emotional, time, physical, mental, and social domains.
• Refusing care: The right to refuse medical treatment is well recognized in law, including medical treatment that sustains or prolongs life. For example, a patient suffering from blood cancer can refuse treatment or deny feeds through a nasogastric tube. Recognition of the right to refuse treatment gives way to passive euthanasia.
• Encouraging organ transplantation: Mercy killing in terminally ill patients provides an opportunity to advocate for organ donation. This, in turn, will help many patients with organ failure waiting for transplantation. Not only does euthanasia give the ‘Right to die‘ for the terminally ill, but also the ‘Right to life‘ for the organ needy patients.

Arguments against

Emanuel argues that there are four major arguments presented by opponents of euthanasia:

• not all deaths are painful;
• alternatives, such as cessation of active treatment, combined with the use of effective pain relief, are available;
• the distinction between active and passive euthanasia is morally significant; and
• legalizing euthanasia will place society on a slippery slope, which will lead to unacceptable consequences
• Euthanasia weakens society’s respect for the sanctity of life.
• Euthanasia might not be in a person’s best interests, for example, getting old-aged parents killed for property will.
• Belief in God’s miracle of curing the terminally ill.
• The prospect of a discovery of a possible cure for the disease shortly.
• Proper palliative care makes euthanasia unnecessary.
• There is no way of properly regulating euthanasia.
• Allowing euthanasia will lead to less good care for the terminally ill.
• Allowing euthanasia undermines the commitment of doctors and nurses to save lives.
• Euthanasia may become a cost-effective way to treat the terminally ill.
• Allowing euthanasia will discourage the search for new cures and treatments for the terminally ill.
• Euthanasia gives too much power to doctors.

Euthanasia in India

Passive euthanasia is legal in India. On 7 March 2011, the Supreme Court of India legalized passive euthanasia using the withdrawal of life support to patients in a permanent vegetative state. The decision was made as part of the verdict in a case involving Aruna Shanbaug, who had been in a Persistent Vegetative State (PVS) for 42 years until she died in 2015.

The Aruna Shanbaug Case

In March 2011, the Supreme Court of India passed a historic judgment permitting Passive Euthanasia in the country. This judgment was passed after Pinki Virani’s plea to the highest court in December 2009 under the Constitutional provision of “Next Friend”. It’s a landmark law which places the power of choice in the hands of the individual, over government, medical or religious control which sees all suffering as “destiny”. The Supreme Court specified two irreversible conditions to permit Passive Euthanasia Law in its 2011 Law:

• The brain-dead for whom the ventilator can be switched off.
• Those in a Persistent Vegetative State (PVS) for whom the feed can be tapered out and pain-managing palliatives be added, according to laid-down international specifications.

The same judgment law also asked for the scrapping of 309 , the code that penalizes those who survive suicide attempts. In December 2014, the Government of India declared its intention.

PIL filed by Common Cause

However, on 25 February 2014, a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court of India termed the judgment in the Aruna Shanbaug case to be ‘inconsistent in itself’ and referred the issue of euthanasia to its five-judge Constitution bench on a PIL filed by Common Cause , which case is the basis of the current debate.

Then, the CJI referred to an earlier Constitution Bench judgment which, in the Gian Kaur case , “did not express any binding view on the subject of euthanasia; rather it reiterated that the legislature would be the appropriate authority to bring change.” Though that judgment said the right to live with dignity under Article 21 was inclusive of the right to die with dignity, it did not conclude the validity of euthanasia, be it active or passive.

“So, the only judgment that holds the field about euthanasia in India is the ruling in the Aruna Shanbaug case, which upholds the validity of passive euthanasia and lays down an elaborate procedure for executing the same on the wrong premise that the Constitution Bench in Gian Kaur had upheld the same,” the CJI said.

Common Cause Case: In 2018, the Supreme Court issued a significant judgment in the Common Cause case. The court recognized the right to die with dignity as a fundamental right and permitted passive euthanasia. It provided guidelines for the process and conditions under which passive euthanasia could be allowed.

Government’s endorsement of Passive Euthanasia

On December 23, 2014, the Government of India endorsed and re-validated the Passive Euthanasia judgment law in a Press Release, after stating in the Rajya Sabha as follows: The Hon’ble Supreme Court of India, while dismissing the plea for mercy killing in a particular case, laid down comprehensive guidelines to process cases relating to passive euthanasia.

Thereafter, the matter of mercy killing was examined in consultation with the Ministry of Law and Justice and it has been decided that since the Hon’ble Supreme Court has already laid down the guidelines, these should be followed and treated as law in such cases. At present, there is no legislation on this subject and the judgment of the Hon’ble Supreme Court is binding on all.

The court rejected active euthanasia using lethal injection. In the absence of a law regulating euthanasia in India, the court stated that its decision becomes the law of the land until the Indian parliament enacts a suitable law. Active euthanasia, including the administration of lethal compounds to end life, is still illegal in India, and in most countries.

As India had no law about euthanasia, the Supreme Court’s guidelines are law until and unless Parliament passes legislation. The following guidelines were laid down:

• A decision has to be taken to discontinue life support either by the parents the spouse or other close relatives, or in the absence of any of them, such a decision can be taken even by a person or a body of persons acting as a next friend. It can also be taken by the doctors attending the patient. However, the decision should be taken bona fide in the best interest of the patient.
• Even if a decision is taken by the near relatives or doctors or next friend to withdraw life support, such a decision requires approval from the High Court concerned.
• When such an application is filled, the Chief Justice of the High Court should forthwith constitute a Bench of at least two Judges who should decide whether to approve or not. A committee of three reputed doctors to be nominated by the Bench, will report the condition of the patient. Before giving the verdict, a notice regarding the report should be given to the close relatives and the State. After hearing the parties, the High Court can give its verdict.

A law commission had proposed legislation on “passive euthanasia”, it said. According to the Centre, the decision to come out with a bill was taken after considering the directives of the apex court, the law commission’s 241st report, and a private member bill introduced in Parliament in 2014.

The Centre said that initially, a meeting was held under the chairmanship of B.P. Sharma, secretary in the Health and Family Welfare Ministry, on May 22, 2015, to examine the draft of The Medical Treatment of Terminally Ill Patients (Protection of Patients and Medical Practitioners) Bill and the draft of The Euthanasia (Regulation) Bill.

This move to introduce a bill is a welcome step to clear the grey areas in the Euthanasia debate. Students can also link to this issue while answering questions on:

• Judicial activism: SC framing laws when the parliament hasn’t. Just like the Visaka case.
• Ethical dilemma in Paper 4 .

In India,  euthanasia has no legal aspect , and there is no penal law yet introduced in the IPC that specifically deals with euthanasia.

• However, the Supreme Court of India legalized passive euthanasia in 2018 with some conditions, allowing patients to withdraw medical support if they go into an irreversible coma.
• Passive euthanasia is a matter of ‘living will’, and an adult in their conscious mind is permitted to refuse medical treatment or voluntarily decide not to take medical treatment to embrace death naturally, under certain conditions.
• Individuals are only allowed to draft a living will while in a normal state of health and mind.
• Active euthanasia remains illegal in India.

Read:  Living wills

Article by: Jishnu J Raju

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Reader Interactions

February 11, 2016 at 3:48 pm

excellent one..

February 24, 2016 at 8:34 pm

Giving passive euthanasia to a patient who is already dead (not literally) is a right choice.Its better than making them as well as others to suffer.

July 20, 2017 at 4:28 pm

so very true.

July 1, 2016 at 10:58 pm

If the patient does not wants to suffer and himself asking for euthanasia then voluntary euthanasia should be made legal because it will be difficult for him to live than to die. But in case of involuntary euthanasia, there should be some specific time limit upto which the patient’s relatives must wait for him to recover but if there is no improvement like in case of coma , after 7-10 years , there is less chances of the patient to recover. In such cases , involuntary euthanasia should be made legal.

March 16, 2017 at 12:37 pm

no it is not possible If the patient tends to recover over a period of time or suddenly he becomes normal then the involuntary euthanasia will become very dangerous

March 16, 2017 at 12:35 pm

Very Very Useful

June 26, 2018 at 8:12 am

Helpful source I can use to rely on research. Thank you so much, clear IAS.

May 17, 2019 at 9:58 pm

Thanku for quality content

May 23, 2020 at 10:27 pm

“Mercy Killing ” is a responsible debate . It mainly depends on persons will on his /her life.

July 2, 2020 at 2:26 pm

Euthanasia should not be accepted as there is always some hope for better.

May 24, 2021 at 11:57 am

If under Article 21 of the constitution, right to live with dignity is inclusive of right to die with dignity, then why should the provisions under the Euthanasia act be restricted to the old and dying patients. There are a lot of people in their 60s and 70s with limited financial resources, who feel neglected / unwanted by the family who would like to die with dignity rather than be dependent on their children or the other members of family. They may be in good health but would still like to self determine to end their life with dignity. In such cases the law should allow for such people to adopt active Euthanasia. Such people could be persuaded to donate their organs which will help save other lives.

August 25, 2021 at 9:40 am

euthanasia cannot be legalised because of its higher probability of misuse. whether it is for property, money or because of any family problem

August 4, 2022 at 12:11 pm

A thought for all: If you do not have a choice to life, i.e. choose to be born then how can choosing your own means of death, be fair or valid? Something you cannot create or re-created is not yours to manage. My say: God is the giver of life and He alone should take it. Our sufferings are a means of learning, loving, understanding and above all our closeness to Almighty God.

June 28, 2023 at 6:36 pm

ur death is already written whether you take it or god does so doesnt matter

September 19, 2022 at 12:47 pm

I can’t put my dog to sleep for I am as old as he; and despite our handicaps he also wants to live like me.

Boghos L. Artinian

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The Outer Limits of Liberalism

What happens when a society takes individualism to its logical conclusion?

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In October of 1858, John Stuart Mill and his wife, Harriet, were traveling near Avignon, France. She developed a cough, which seemed like just a minor inconvenience, until it got worse. Soon Harriet was racked with pain, not able to sleep or even lie down. Mill frantically wrote to a doctor in Nice, begging him to come see her. Three days later her condition had worsened further, and Mill telegraphed his forebodings to his stepdaughter. Harriet died in their hotel room on November 3.

Explore the June 2023 Issue

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Mill sat alone with her body in their room for a day. He was despondent over the loss of his marriage: “For seven and a half years that blessing was mine. For seven and a half years only!”

Later that same month, he sent a manuscript to his publisher, which opened with a lavish dedication to Harriet. He subsequently wrote that she had been more than his muse; she had been his co-author. The book was, he said, “more directly and literally our joint production than anything else which bears my name, for there was not a sentence of it that was not several times gone through by us together.” The book’s “whole mode of thinking,” he continued, “was emphatically hers.”

The book was called On Liberty . It is one of the founding documents of our liberal world order. Individuals, the Mills argued, have the right to be the architect of their own life, to choose whom to marry, where to live, what to believe, what to say. The state has no right to impinge on a citizen’s individual freedom of choice, provided that the person isn’t harming anyone else.

A society organized along these lines, the Mills hoped, would produce a rich variety of creative and daring individuals. You wouldn’t have to agree with my mode of life, and I wouldn’t have to agree with yours, but we would give each other the space to live our fullest life. Individual autonomy and freedom of choice would be the rocks upon which we built flourishing nations.

The liberalism that the Mills championed is what we enjoy today as we walk down the street and greet a great variety of social types. It’s what we enjoy when we get on the internet and throw ourselves into the messy clash of ideas. It is this liberalism that we defend when we back the Ukrainians in their fight against Russian tyranny, when we stand up to authoritarians on the right and the left, to those who would impose speech codes, ban books, and subvert elections.

After he sent in the manuscript, Mill bought a house overlooking the cemetery where Harriet was buried, filled it with furniture from the room in which she’d died, and visited every year for the rest of his life. It’s a sad scene to imagine—him gazing down at her grave from the window—but the couple left us an intellectual legacy that has guided humanity another step forward in civilization’s advance.

Many good ideas turn bad when taken to their extreme. And that’s true of liberalism. The freedom of choice that liberals celebrate can be turned into a rigid free-market ideology that enables the rich to concentrate economic power while the vulnerable are abandoned. The wild and creative modes of self-expression that liberals adore can turn into a narcissistic culture in which people worship themselves and neglect their neighbors.

These versions of liberalism provoke people to become anti-liberal, to argue that liberalism itself is spiritually empty and too individualistic. They contend that it leads to social breakdown and undermines what is sacred about life. We find ourselves surrounded by such anti-liberals today.

I’d like to walk with you through one battlefield in the current crisis of liberalism, to show you how liberalism is now threatened by an extreme version of itself, and how we might recover a better, more humane liberalism—something closer to what the Mills had in mind in the first place.

In 2016, the Canadian government legalized medical assistance in dying . The program, called MAID, was founded on good Millian grounds. The Canadian Supreme Court concluded that laws preventing assisted suicide stifled individual rights. If people have the right to be the architect of their life, shouldn’t they have the right to control their death? Shouldn’t they have the right to spare themselves needless suffering and indignity at the end of life?

As originally conceived, the MAID program was reasonably well defined. Doctors and nurses would give lethal injections or fatal medications only to patients who met certain criteria, including all of the following: the patient had a serious illness or disability; the patient was in an “advanced state” of decline that could not be reversed; the patient was experiencing unbearable physical or mental suffering; the patient was at the point where natural death had become “reasonably foreseeable.”

To critics who worried that before long, people who were depressed, stressed, or just poor and overwhelmed would also be provided assistance to die, authorities were reassuring: The new law wouldn’t endanger those who are psychologically vulnerable and not near death. Citing studies from jurisdictions elsewhere in the world with similar laws, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared that this “ simply isn’t something that ends up happening .”

But the program has worked out rather differently. Before long, the range of who qualifies for assisted suicide was expanded. In 2021, the criterion that natural death must be “reasonably foreseeable” was lifted . A steady stream of stories began to appear in the media, describing how the state was granting access to assisted suicide to people who arguably didn’t fit the original criteria.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, please know that you are not alone. If you’re in danger of acting on suicidal thoughts, call 911. For support and resources, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or text 741741 for the Crisis Text Line.

For example, the Associated Press reported on the case of Alan Nichols. Nichols had lost his hearing in childhood, and had suffered a stroke, but for the most part was able to live independently. In June 2019, at age 61, he was hospitalized out of concern that he might be suicidal. He urged his brother Gary to “bust him out” of the facility as soon as possible. But within a month, he applied for a physician-assisted death, citing hearing loss as his only medical condition. A nurse practitioner also described Nichols’s vision loss, frailty, history of seizures, and general “failure to thrive.” The hospital told the AP that his request for a lethal injection was valid, and his life was ended. “Alan was basically put to death,” his brother told the AP.

In The New Atlantis , Alexander Raikin described the case of Rosina Kamis, who had fibromyalgia and chronic leukemia, along with other mental and physical illnesses. She presented these symptoms to the MAID assessors and her death was approved. Meanwhile, she wrote in a note evidently meant for those to whom she had granted power of attorney: “Please keep all this secret while I am still alive because … the suffering I experience is mental suffering, not physical. I think if more people cared about me, I might be able to handle the suffering caused by my physical illnesses alone.” She was put to death on September 26, 2021, via a lethal injection, at the age of 41.

Read: Is aid in dying a better death?

In The Free Press , Rupa Subramanya reported on the case of a 23-year-old man named Kiano Vafaeian, who was depressed and unemployed, and also had diabetes and had lost vision in one eye. His death was approved and scheduled for September 22, 2022. The doctor who was to perform the procedure emailed Vafaeian clear and antiseptic instructions: “Please arrive at 8:30 am. I will ask for the nurse at 8:45 am and I will start the procedure at around 9:00 am. Procedure will be completed a few minutes after it starts.” Vafaeian could bring a dog with him, as long as someone would be present to take care of it.

About two weeks before the appointment, Vafaeian’s 46-year-old mother, Margaret Marsilla, telephoned the doctor who was scheduled to kill her son. She recorded the call and shared it with The Free Press . Posing as a woman named Joann, she told the doctor that she wanted to die by Christmas. Reciting basic MAID criteria, the doctor told her that she needed to be over 18, have an insurance card, and be experiencing “suffering that cannot be remediated or treated in some way that’s acceptable to you.” The doctor said he could conduct his assessment via Zoom or WhatsApp. Marsilla posted on social media about the situation. Eventually, the doctor texted Marsilla, saying that he would not follow through with her son’s death.

Personally, I don’t have great moral qualms about assisted suicide for people who are suffering intensely in the face of imminent death. These cases are horrible for individuals and families. What’s important here is that the MAID program has spilled beyond its original bounds so quickly.

When people who were suffering applied to the MAID program and said, “I choose to die,” Canadian society apparently had no shared set of morals that would justify saying no. If individual autonomy is the highest value, then when somebody comes to you and declares, “It’s my body. I can do what I want with it,” whether they are near death or not, painfully ill or not, doesn’t really matter. Autonomy rules.

Within just a few years, the number of Canadians dying by physician-assisted suicide ballooned (the overwhelming majority of them by lethal injection). In 2021, that figure was more than 10,000, one in 30 of all Canadian deaths. The great majority of people dying this way were elderly and near death, but those who seek assisted suicide tend to get it. In 2021, only 4 percent of those who filed written applications were deemed ineligible.

If autonomy is your highest value, these trends are not tragic; they’re welcome. Death is no longer the involuntary, degrading end of life; it can be a glorious act of self-expression. In late 2022, the Canadian fashion retailer La Maison Simons released a branding video that paid tribute to the assisted suicide of a 37-year-old woman afflicted with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which affects the body’s connective tissue. The video, titled “All Is Beauty,” was released the day after the woman’s death. In a series of lush images of her on tourist-destination beaches and at a dinner party, the video portrayed her death as “the most beautiful exit”—a sort of rich, Instagram-ready consumer experience that you might get from a five-star resort.

Back in 2016, critics of the MAID law saw this coming. They warned that soon enough, people in anguish and near death wouldn’t be the only ones given assistance to die. That warning turned out to be understated. Within a few years, Canada went from being a country that had banned assisted suicide to being one of the loosest regimes in the world.

Some people leading pathos-filled lives have begun to see assisted suicide as a release from their misery. Michael Fraser, though not terminally ill at age 55, had become unable to walk and suffered from an array of medical problems—liver disease and incontinence, as well as mental-health issues after what he described as prolonged sexual abuse as a child. His monthly check from the Ontario Disability Support Program was barely enough to live on. “Some of the struggles he talked to me about was this feeling of not being worthy,” the doctor who gave Fraser a lethal injection on July 2, 2022, told the Toronto Star . “There’s a social aspect to poverty, a hierarchy, that affected his psyche. He told me that it did.”

As assisted suicide has become an established part of Canadian society, the complex moral issues surrounding the end of life have drifted out of sight. Decisions tend to be made within a bureaucratic context, where utilitarian considerations can come to dominate the foreground. Or as the president of the Quebec College of Physicians, which regulates medical practice in the province, put it, assisted suicide “is not a political or moral or religious issue. It is a medical issue.” A materialist cost-benefit analysis, for some people, crowds out affirmations that life is sacred, and socioeconomic burdens weigh heavily in the balance.

Tyler Dunlop is a physically healthy 37-year-old man who suffers from schizoaffective disorder and PTSD, and has no job or home or social contact. “When I read about medically assisted dying,” he told a local news website earlier this year, “I thought, well, logistically, I really don’t have a future.” Knowing that “I’m not going anywhere,” as he put it, he has started the process for approval under MAID. The New Atlantis published slides from a Canadian Association of MAID Assessors and Providers seminar, in which a retired care coordinator noted that a couple of patients had cited poverty or housing uncertainty, rather than their medical condition, as their main reason for seeking death.

Health-care costs also sometimes come into play. According to the Associated Press, Roger Foley, a patient at a hospital in Ontario who has a degenerative brain disorder, was disturbed enough by how often the staff talked about assisted dying that he began recording their conversations. The hospital’s director of ethics informed Foley that if he were to stay in the hospital, it would cost Foley “north of $1,500 a day.” Foley replied that he felt he was being coerced into death. “Roger, this is not my show,” the ethicist replied. “I told you my piece of this was to talk to you about if you had an interest in assisted dying.” (The hospital network told The Atlantic that it could not comment on specific patients for privacy reasons and added that its health-care teams do not discuss assisted dying unless patients express interest in it.)

These trends have not shocked Canadian lawmakers into tightening the controls on who gets approved for MAID, or dramatically ramping up programs that would provide medical and community-based help for patients whose desperation might be addressed in other ways. On the contrary, eligibility may expand soon. On February 15, a parliamentary committee released a set of recommendations that would further broaden MAID eligibility, including to “mature minors” whose death is “reasonably foreseeable.” The influential activist group Dying With Dignity Canada recommends that “mature minors” be defined as “at least 12 years of age and capable of making decisions with respect to their health.” Canada is scheduled to move in 2024 to officially extend MAID eligibility to those whose only illness is a mental disorder.

The frame of debate is shifting. The core question is no longer “Should the state help those who are suffering at the end of life die?” The lines between assisted suicide for medical reasons, as defined by the original MAID criteria, and straight-up suicide are blurring. The moral quandary is essentially this: If you see someone rushing toward a bridge and planning to jump off, should you try to stop them? Or should you figure that plunging into the water is their decision to make—and give them a helpful shove?

I don’t mean to pick on Canada, the land of my birth. Lord knows that, in many ways, Canada has a much healthier social and political culture—less bitter and contentious—than the United States does. I’m using the devolution of the MAID program to illustrate a key feature of modern liberalism—namely, that it comes in different flavors. The flavor that is embedded in the MAID program, and is prevalent across Western societies, is what you might call autonomy-based liberalism.

Autonomy-based liberalism starts with one core conviction: I possess myself. I am a piece of property that I own. Because I possess property rights to myself, I can dispose of my property as I see fit. My life is a project that I am creating, and nobody else has the right to tell me how to build or dispose of my one and only life.

The purpose of my life, in this version of liberalism, is to be happy—to live a life in which my pleasures, however I define them, exceed my pains. If I determine that my suffering outweighs my joys, and that things will never get better, then my life isn’t working. I have a right to end it, and the state has no right to prevent me from doing so; indeed, it ought to enable my right to end my life with dignity. If you start with autonomy-based liberalism, MAID is where you wind up.

But there is another version of liberalism. Let’s call this gifts-based liberalism. It starts with a different core conviction: I am a receiver of gifts. I am part of a long procession of humanity. I have received many gifts from those who came before me, including the gift of life itself. The essential activity of life is not the pursuit of individual happiness. The essential activity of life is to realize the gifts I’ve been given by my ancestors, and to pass them along, suitably improved, to those who will come after.

Gifts-based liberals, like autonomy-based liberals, savor individual choice—but our individual choices take place within the framework of the gifts we have received, and the responsibilities to others that those gifts entail. (This understanding of choice, I should note, steers a gifts-based liberal away from both poles in the American abortion debate, endorsing neither a pure abortion-rights stance rooted in bodily autonomy, nor a blanket ban that ignores individual circumstances and pays no heed to a social consensus.) In our lives, we are citizens and family members, not just individuals and property owners. We have obligations to our neighbors as well as to those who will come after us. Many of those obligations turn out to be the sources of our greatest joy. A healthy society builds arrangements and passes laws that make it easier to fulfill the obligations that come with our gifts. A diseased society passes laws that make it easier to abandon them.

I’m going to try to convince you that gifts-based liberalism is better than autonomy-based liberalism, that it rests on a more accurate set of assumptions about what human life is actually like, and that it leads to humane modes of living and healthier societies.

Let me start with four truths that gifts-based liberalism embraces and autonomy-based liberalism subverts:

You didn’t create your life. From the moment of your birth, life was given to you, not earned. You came out bursting with the gift of being alive. As you aged, your community taught you to celebrate the prodigality of life—the birds in their thousands of varieties, the deliciousness of the different cheeses, the delightful miracle of each human face. Something within us makes us desperately yearn for longer life for our friends and loved ones, because life itself is an intrinsic good.

The celebration of life’s sacredness is so deeply woven into our minds, and so central to our civilization, that we don’t think about it much until confronted with shocking examples of when the celebration is rejected. For example, in the early 2000s, a German man named Armin Meiwes put an ad online inquiring whether anybody would like to be killed and eaten. A man came by and gave his consent. First, Meiwes cut off the man’s penis, and the two men attempted to eat it together. Then Meiwes killed and butchered him; by the time of his arrest, he had consumed more than 40 pounds of his flesh. Everything was done with the full consent of both participants, but the extreme nature of the case forced the German court system not only to sentence Meiwes to life in prison, but to face an underappreciated yet core pillar of our civilization: You don’t have the right to insult life itself. You don’t have the right to turn yourself or other people into objects to be carved up and consumed. Life is sacred. Humanity is a higher value than choice.

You didn’t create your dignity. No insignificant person has ever been born, and no insignificant day has ever been lived. Each of us has infinite dignity, merely by being alive. We can do nothing to add to that basic dignity. Getting into Harvard doesn’t make you more important than others, nor does earning billions of dollars. At the level of our intrinsic dignity, all humans are radically equal. The equal dignity of all life is, for instance, the pillar of the civil-rights movement.

Once MAID administrators began making decisions about the life or death of each applicant based on the quality of their life, they introduced a mode of thinking that suggests that some lives can be more readily extinguished than others—that some lives have more or less value than others. A human being who is enfeebled, disabled, depressed, dwindling in their capacities is not treated the same way as someone who is healthier and happier.

When such a shift occurs, human dignity is no longer regarded as an infinite gift; it is a possession that other humans can appraise, and in some cases erase. Once the equal and infinite dignity of all human life is compromised, everything is up for grabs. Suddenly debates arise over which lives are worth living. Suddenly you have a couple of doctors at the Quebec College of Physicians pushing the envelope even further, suggesting that babies with severe deformations and limited chances of survival be eligible for medically assisted death. Suddenly people who are ill or infirm are implicitly encouraged to feel guilty for wanting to live. Human dignity, once inherent in life itself, is measured by what a person can contribute, what level of happiness she is deemed capable of enjoying, how much she costs.

You don’t control your mind. “From its earliest beginning,” Francis Fukuyama writes , “modern liberalism was strongly associated with a distinctive cognitive mode, that of modern natural science.” In liberal societies, people are supposed to collect data, weigh costs and benefits, and make decisions rationally. Autonomy-based liberalism, with its glorification of individual choice, leans heavily on this conception of human nature.

Gifts-based liberals know that no purely rational thinker has ever existed. They know that no one has ever really thought for themselves. The very language you think with was handed down as a gift from those who came before. We are each nodes in a network through which information flows and is refracted. The information that is stored in our genes comes from eons ago; the information that we call religion and civilization comes from thousands of years ago; the information that we call culture comes from distant generations; the information that we call education or family background comes from decades ago. All of it flows through us in deep rivers that are partly conscious and partly unconscious, forming our assumptions and shaping our choices in ways that we, as individuals, often can’t fathom.

Gifts-based liberals understand how interdependent human thinking is. When one kid in high school dies by suicide, that sometimes sets off a contagion, and other kids in that school take their own life. Similarly, when a nation normalizes medically assisted suicide, and makes it a more acceptable option, then more people may choose suicide. A 2022 study in the Journal of Ethics in Mental Health found that in four jurisdictions—Switzerland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Belgium—where assisted dying is legal, “there have been very steep rises in suicide,” including both assisted and unassisted suicide. The physician who assists one person to die may be influencing not just that suicide but the suicides of people he will never see.

From the March 2010 issue: Ludwig Minelli crusades for “the last human right”

Gifts-based liberals understand the limitations of individual reason, and have a deep awareness of human fallibility. Gifts-based liberals treasure having so many diverse points of view, because as individuals, we are usually wrong to some degree, and often to a very large degree. We need to think together, over time, in order to stumble toward the truth. Intellectual autonomy is a dangerous exaggeration.

Gifts-based liberals understand that at many times in life, we’re just not thinking straight—especially when we are sick, in pain, anxious, or depressed. My friend the Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson, who died of cancer last year, once said , “Depression is a malfunction of the instrument we use to determine reality.” When he was depressed, lying voices took up residence there, spewing out falsehoods he could scarcely see around: You are a burden to your friends; you have no future; no one would miss you if you died. This is not an autonomous, rational mind. This is a mind that has gone to war with its host.

In these extreme cases, human fallibility is not just foolish; it is potentially fatal. To cope with those cases, societies in a gifts-based world erect guardrails, usually instantiated in law. In effect the community is saying: No, suicide is out of bounds. It’s not for you to decide. You don’t have the freedom to end your freedom. You don’t have the right to make a choice you will never be able to revisit. Banish the question from your mind, because the answer is a simple no. Individual autonomy is not our ultimate value. Life and belonging are. We are responsible for one another.

You did not create your deepest bonds. Liberal institutions are healthiest when they are built on arrangements that precede choice. You didn’t choose the family you were born into, the ethnic heritage you were born into, the culture you were born into, the nation you were born into. As you age, you have more choices over how you engage with these things, and many people forge chosen families to supplant their biological ones. But you never fully escape the way these unchosen bonds have formed you, and you remain defined through life by the obligations they impose upon you.

Autonomy-based liberals see society as a series of social contracts—arrangements people make for their mutual benefit. But a mother’s love for her infant daughter is not a contract. Gifts-based liberals see society as resting on a bedrock of covenants. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks once captured the difference this way: “A contract is a transaction . A covenant is a relationship . Or to put it slightly differently: a contract is about interests. A covenant is about identity. It is about you and me coming together to form an ‘us.’ ”

A society constructed on gifts-based liberalism does everything it can to strengthen the bedrock layer of covenants. The MAID program, by contrast, actively subverts them. It has led a mother to plead with a doctor not to end her son’s life. It has left a man enraged, feeling that he and his other family members were shut out of the process that led to the killing of his brother. The state, seeing people only as autonomous individuals, didn’t adequately recognize family bonds.

Families have traditionally been built around mutual burdens. As children, we are burdens on our families; in adulthood, especially in hard times, we can be burdens on one another; and in old age we may be burdens once again. When these bonds have become attenuated or broken in Western cultures, many people re-create webs of obligation in chosen families. There, too, it is the burdening that makes the bonds secure.

I recently had a conversation with a Canadian friend who told me that he and his three siblings had not been particularly close as adults. Then their aging dad grew gravely ill. His care became a burden they all shared, and that shared burden brought them closer. Their father died but their closeness remains. Their father bestowed many gifts upon his children, but the final one was the gift of being a burden on his family.

Autonomy-based liberalism imposes unrealistic expectations. Each individual is supposed to define their own values, their own choices. Each individual, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in Planned Parenthood v. Casey , is left to come up with their own “concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, of the mystery of human life.” If your name is Aristotle, maybe you can do that; most of us can’t. Most of us are left in a moral vacuum, a world in which the meaning of life is unclear, unconnected to any moral horizon outside the self.

Jeffrey Rosen: The Supreme Court justice who believed in America

Autonomy-based liberalism cuts people off from all the forces that formed them, stretching back centuries, and from all the centuries stretching into the future. Autonomy-based liberalism leaves people alone. Its emphasis on individual sovereignty inevitably erodes the bonds between people. Autonomy-based liberalism induces even progressives to live out the sentence notoriously associated with Margaret Thatcher: “There is no such thing as society . ” Nearly 200 years ago, Alexis de Tocqueville feared that this state of affairs not only makes

men forget their ancestors, but also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries. Each man is forever thrown back upon himself alone and there is a danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.

As Émile Durkheim pointed out in 1897, this is pretty much a perfect recipe for suicide. We now live in societies in which more and more people are deciding that death is better than life. In short, autonomy-based liberalism produces the kind of isolated, adrift people who are prone to suicide—and then provides them with a state-assisted solution to the problem it created in the first place.

Gifts-based liberalism, by contrast, gives you membership in a procession that stretches back to your ancestors. It connects you to those who migrated to this place or that, married this person or that, raised their children in this way or that. What you are is an expression of history.

This long procession, though filled with struggles and hardship, has made life sweeter for us. Human beings once lived in societies in which slavery was a foundational fact of life, beheadings and animal torture were popular entertainments, raping and pillaging were routine. But gradually, with many setbacks, we’ve built a culture in which people are more likely to abhor cruelty, a culture that has as an ideal the notion that all people deserve fair treatment, not just our kind of people.

This is progress. Thanks to this procession, each generation doesn’t have to make the big decisions of life standing on naked ground. We have been bequeathed sets of values, institutions, cultural traditions that embody the accumulated wisdom of our kind. The purpose of life, in a gifts-based world, is to participate in this procession, to keep the march of progress going along its fitful course. We may give with our creativity, with our talents, with our care, but many of the gifts people transmit derive from deeper sources.

A few years ago, the historian Wilfred McClay wrote an essay about his mother, a mathematician, in The Hedgehog Review . One day he mentioned to her that H. L. Mencken had suffered a stroke late in life that left him unable to read or write and nearly unable to speak. His mother coolly remarked that if such a fate ever befell her, he should not prolong her life. Without a certain quality of life, she observed, there’s no point in living.

A couple of years later, she suffered a near-fatal stroke that left her unable to speak. She cried the most intense sobs of grief McClay had ever heard. It might have appeared that her life was no longer worth living. But, McClay observed, “something closer to the opposite was true. An inner development took place that made her a far deeper, warmer, more affectionate, more grateful, and more generous person than I had ever known her to be.”

Eventually McClay’s mother moved in with his family. “It wasn’t always easy, of course, and while I won’t dwell on the details, I won’t pretend that it wasn’t a strain. But there are so many memories of those years that we treasure—above all, the day-in-and-day-out experience of my mother’s unbowed spirit, which inspired and awed us all.”

She and her family devised ways to communicate, through gestures, intonations, and the few words she still possessed. She could convey her emotions by clapping and through song. “Most surprisingly, my mother proved to be a superb grandmother to my two children, whom she loved without reservation, and who loved her the same way in return.” McClay noted that her grandkids saw past her disability. They could not have known how they made life worth living for her, but being around her was a joy. After she died, McClay writes that “it took a long time to adjust to the silence in the house.” He concluded, “Aging is not a problem to be solved, my mother taught us. It is a meaning to be lived out.”

Read: Why disability-rights advocates are fighting doctor-assisted suicide

Sometimes the old and the infirm, those who have been wounded by life and whose choices have been constrained, reveal what is most important in life. Sometimes those whose choices have been limited can demonstrate that, by focusing on others and not on oneself, life is defined not by the options available to us but by the strength of our commitments.

If autonomy-based liberals believe that society works best when it opens up individual options, gifts-based liberals believe that society works best when it creates ecologies of care that help people address difficulties all along the path of life. Autonomy-based liberalism is entrenching an apparatus that ends life. Gifts-based liberalism believes in providing varieties of palliative care to those near death and buttressing doctors as they forge trusting relationships with their patients. These support structures sometimes inhibit choices by declaring certain actions beyond the pale. Doctors are there for healing, at all times and under all pressures. Patients can trust the doctor because they know the doctor serves life. Doctors can know that, exhausted and confused though they might be while attending to a patient, their default orientation will be to continue the struggle to save life and not to end life.

John Stuart and Harriet Taylor Mill believed in individual autonomy. But they also believed that a just society has a vision not only of freedom but also of goodness, of right and wrong. Humans, John Stuart Mill wrote, “are under a moral obligation to seek the improvement of our moral character.” He continued, “The test of what is right in politics is not the will of the people, but the good of the people.” He understood that the moral obligations we take on in life—to family, friends, and nation, to the past and the future—properly put a brake on individual freedom of action. And he believed that they point us toward the fulfillment of our nature.

The good of humanity is not some abstraction—it’s grounded in the succession of intimates and institutions that we inherit, and that we reform, improve, and pass on. When a fellow member of the procession is in despair, is suffering, is thinking about ending their life, we don’t provide a syringe. We say: The world has not stopped asking things of you. You still have gifts to give, merely by living among us. Your life still sends ripples outward, in ways you do and do not see. Don’t go. We know you need us. We still need you.

This article appears in the June 2023 print edition with the headline “The Canadian Way of Death.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The Controversy over Euthanasia

How it works

Euthanasia, as defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, is the act or practice of killing or permitting the death of hopelessly sick or injured individuals (such as persons or domestic animals) in a relatively painless way for reasons of mercy. The growing euthanasia epidemic has raised a profusion of controversy in recent years due to the legal and moral implications. Although described as relatively painless,euthanasia is something that should be methodically and thoroughly thought through because of the permanent effect it has on not only the patient, but everyone one around them.

Euthanasia is illegal in most parts of the United States; however, not everyone is in favor of this ruling. Although many people have strong opinions in favor of one side of the debate, many remain ambivalent. Nevertheless, the history of euthanasia, the reasons why people go through with euthanasia, and the procedure itself are really opening the eyes of many.

Euthanasia is a topic that has been debated for centuries. The word euthanasia comes from the Greek term easy death. The Greek believed that euthanasia was morally reasonable and just another mode of dying. In an early account of euthanasia a French surgeon named Ambroise Par?© who happened upon three gravely wounded soldiers. An uninjured soldier asked the surgeon if they would live, to which he responded they would not. The uninjured soldier proceeded to slit their throats (Hiatt 1). Established in 1938, the Euthanasia Society of America tried to change the law, allowing euthanasia to be legal; however, they did not succeed. Later in 1997, America did allow eight states to do physician assisted suicide. The Nazi’s on the other hand had a much more dark and twisted view on euthanasia and when it was acceptable. They believed it was admissible to euthanize those with physical disabilities, mental retardation, and the mentally ill, but many times they did it in a way that was far from humane. In more recent years euthanasia has been legalized in the Netherlands, Columbia, Belgium, and Luxembourg; yet, the euthanasia discussion is far from over.

The debate over euthanasia is one that is talked about all over the world. Different countries have different laws over euthanasia and limits on who can receive it. In France, both euthanasia and physician assisted suicide are illegal. However, in Belgium euthanasia has been legal since 2002, but recently added that children under the age of 18 also have a right to die. Belgium is the first country to legalize the right of children to have this option, but they do say that that have to be able to understand what euthanasia means. Consent of parent or guardians must also be given, (Smith-Spark and Magnay 1). Many parents there struggle to watch their kids in so much pain and believe that children should have a choice, (Smith-Spark and Magnay 1). In America, things are a little different. Euthanasia is illegal, but some states do allow physician assisted suicide, which is very similar. Physician assisted suicide is done through a prescription that the patient themselves take, while euthanasia is done through an injection by a doctor. Physician assisted suicide is legal in seven states: Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, Montana, and California. However to receive it individuals must have a terminal illness as well as a prognosis of six months or less to live, (Physician-Assisted Suicide Fast Facts, 1). Germany and Switzerland also follow America, in that they do not have euthanasia. This is due to the complications, injustices, and abuse that the nazis gave to the term euthanasia.

Assisted suicide is the most serious step that an ailing patient can make; however, what most people don’t see is the reasons why the patients come to this serious procedure. One major reason that people see this as their only option is the relative next to nothing cost to help them with their ailment. At little more than 250 dollars, assisted suicide is a low-cost treatment for any fatal ailment ¦ With these prices, no persuasion is needed to convince patients to pick the cheaper option, compared to the helpful medicine that is very pricey, (Golden 1). Financial burden of themselves and their family trying to afford life sustaining medicine is also one of the major drives that people look at when considering the procedure. Research shows that it is not the effects of the disease that people decide to take this path, it’s the effects on the patients relatives, (Golden 2). With such a small cost that leaves loved ones and family with little to no debt, patients naturally would want to choose this procedure. It also helps that the decision making process that pressure from doctors and medical aid providers often leads patients seeing this as their only option. In the late 2000’s, cancer patient Barbara Wagner discovered that her medicine was not going to be funded by her physician; however, her assisted suicide would be, (Golden 1). These types of scenarios are seen often in medical practices and the patients lives, all leading to the patients serious decision to end their life.

There are two different types of Euthanasia: active euthanasia and passive euthanasia. Active euthanasia is the kind of euthanasia where someone is killed by lethal drugs, as requested by the patient or the person in charge of taking care of the patient’s wishes. Passive euthanasia; however, is when someone refuses medical treatment. This form of euthanasia is legal because the illness, if it continues naturally, will eventually result in death. In the U.S. it is usually accepted that a person, no matter how sick, has the right to refuse medical treatment. The procedure used to perform active euthanasia is not very difficult. It is performed by a physician who gives a fatal dose of a suitable drug. The drug the physicians use on humans is called Pentobarbital, it is used on animals as well in certain situations. The administration of the drug is not painful in any way. Though not painful, there are also many dangers to Euthanasia. Some people who want this are not in their right mind when requesting it. Depression is a big reason why many people are requesting this procedure and why more and more people want Euthanasia to be made illegal. People on the other side of the debate would argue that A life of pain and suffering is no life at all, (euthanasia 3).

Assisted suicide affects more than just the patient, assisting someone into ending their life affects the doctors, the families and the mental health of the patient. Terminating someone’s life may cause many problems, such as . long term guilt on the family of the patient. A terminally ill family member gets pretty costy, with the expensive treatments that are only slowing the painful process down. Assisted suicide drugs cost less than $300. Compare that with the cost of treating a terminal illness. (Who’s really hurt by assisted suicide? 1). What kind of morals does this family have? Does this family have the best interest for the patient or themselves? If the patient wants the drug to end their life that is one thing, but for the family to take the decision out of their hands is not their choice, and they are committing murder on their own family, imagine the guilt you will have for the rest of your life knowing you took someone’s life. If the patient is in extreme pain, and is ready to cross over then that is another case, but only depending on their mental state. What kind of mental health condition are they in when they ask to pull the plug. Anyone dying in discomfort may legally today, in all 50 states, receive palliative sedation, wherein the patient is sedated and discomfort is relieved while the dying process takes place peacefully. This legal solution does not raise the very serious difficulties that legalizing assisted suicide poses. (Who’s really hurt by assisted suicide? 1) The mental state of a patient is to be highly taken into consideration. The patient who is in no condition to make a logical decision. People who have disabilities may chose to end their own life because of all of the obstacles that comes with being disabled. Medical bills can be outrageous and some medical care is not provided by health care companies meaning that the disabled patient is out of pocket their own money for their million dollar medical treatments, and services. A patient’s mental state needs to be evaluated before making any final decisions on terminating, But when you examine how legalization affects to vast majority of us — especially those most vulnerable — the dangers to the many far outweigh any alleged benefits to a few. (Who’s really hurt by assisted suicide? 2)

Euthanasia for centuries has caused many debates over the legal and moral implications over the procedure. Before any patient or family comes to the conclusion of whether or not they should go through with the procedure, they and the doctor should methodically and thoroughly think about the consequences. Many implications go along with euthanasia, such as the next to nothing cost of the procedure, pressure from doctors, the mental state of both patient and loved ones, and not wanting to leaving the patients families with any type of financial burden. Although euthanasia continues to be a controversial topic, it is a conversation that we as a nation should be having.

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Euthanasia: Right to life vs right to die

Suresh bada math.

Department of Psychiatry National Institute of Mental Health & Neuro Sciences (Deemed University) Bangalore 560 029, India

Santosh K. Chaturvedi

The word euthanasia, originated in Greece means a good death 1 . Euthanasia encompasses various dimensions, from active (introducing something to cause death) to passive (withholding treatment or supportive measures); voluntary (consent) to involuntary (consent from guardian) and physician assisted (where physician's prescribe the medicine and patient or the third party administers the medication to cause death) 2 , 3 . Request for premature ending of life has contributed to the debate about the role of such practices in contemporary health care. This debate cuts across complex and dynamic aspects such as, legal, ethical, human rights, health, religious, economic, spiritual, social and cultural aspects of the civilised society. Here we argue this complex issue from both the supporters and opponents’ perspectives, and also attempts to present the plight of the sufferers and their caregivers. The objective is to discuss the subject of euthanasia from the medical and human rights perspective given the background of the recent Supreme Court judgement 3 in this context.

In India abetment of suicide and attempt to suicide are both criminal offences. In 1994, constitutional validity of Indian Penal Code Section (IPC Sec) 309 was challenged in the Supreme Court 4 . The Supreme Court declared that IPC Sec 309 is unconstitutional, under Article 21 (Right to Life) of the constitution in a landmark judgement 4 . In 1996, an interesting case of abetment of commission of suicide (IPC Sec 306) came to Supreme Court 5 . The accused were convicted in the trial court and later the conviction was upheld by the High Court. They appealed to the Supreme Court and contended that ‘right to die’ be included in Article 21 of the Constitution and any person abetting the commission of suicide by anyone is merely assisting in the enforcement of the fundamental right under Article 21; hence their punishment is violation of Article 21. This made the Supreme Court to rethink and to reconsider the decision of right to die. Immediately the matter was referred to a Constitution Bench of the Indian Supreme Court. The Court held that the right to life under Article 21 of the Constitution does not include the right to die 5 .

Regarding suicide, the Supreme Court reconsidered its decision on suicide. Abetment of suicide (IPC Sec 306) and attempt to suicide (IPC Sec 309) are two distinct offences, hence Section 306 can survive independent of Section 309. It has also clearly stated that a person attempts suicide in a depression, and hence he needs help, rather than punishment. Therefore, the Supreme Court has recommended to Parliament to consider the feasibility of deleting Section 309 from the Indian Penal Code 3 .

Arguments against euthanasia

Eliminating the invalid : Euthanasia opposers argue that if we embrace ‘the right to death with dignity’, people with incurable and debilitating illnesses will be disposed from our civilised society. The practice of palliative care counters this view, as palliative care would provide relief from distressing symptoms and pain, and support to the patient as well as the care giver. Palliative care is an active, compassionate and creative care for the dying 6 .

Constitution of India : ‘Right to life’ is a natural right embodied in Article 21 but suicide is an unnatural termination or extinction of life and, therefore, incompatible and inconsistent with the concept of ‘right to life’. It is the duty of the State to protect life and the physician's duty to provide care and not to harm patients. If euthanasia is legalised, then there is a grave apprehension that the State may refuse to invest in health (working towards Right to life). Legalised euthanasia has led to a severe decline in the quality of care for terminally-ill patients in Holland 7 . Hence, in a welfare state there should not be any role of euthanasia in any form.

Symptom of mental illness : Attempts to suicide or completed suicide are commonly seen in patients suffering from depression 8 , schizophrenia 9 and substance users 10 . It is also documented in patients suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder 11 . Hence, it is essential to assess the mental status of the individual seeking for euthanasia. In classical teaching, attempt to suicide is a psychiatric emergency and it is considered as a desperate call for help or assistance. Several guidelines have been formulated for management of suicidal patients in psychiatry 12 . Hence, attempted suicide is considered as a sign of mental illness 13 .

Malafide intention : In the era of declining morality and justice, there is a possibility of misusing euthanasia by family members or relatives for inheriting the property of the patient. The Supreme Court has also raised this issue in the recent judgement 3 . ‘Mercy killing’ should not lead to ‘killing mercy’ in the hands of the noble medical professionals. Hence, to keep control over the medical professionals, the Indian Medical Council (Professional Conduct, Etiquette and Ethics) Regulations, 2002 discusses euthanasia briefly in Chapter 6, Section 6.7 and it is in accordance with the provisions of the Transplantation of Human Organ Act, 1994 14 . There is an urgent need to protect patients and also medical practitioners caring the terminally ill patients from unnecessary lawsuit. Law commission had submitted a report (no-196) to the government on this issue 15 .

Emphasis on care : Earlier majority of them died before they reached the hospital but now it is converse. Now sciences had advanced to the extent, life can be prolonged but not to that extent of bringing back the dead one. This phenomenon has raised a complex situation. Earlier diseases outcome was discussed in terms of ‘CURE’ but in the contemporary world of diseases such as cancer, Aids, diabetes, hypertension and mental illness are debated in terms best ‘CARE’, since cure is distant. The principle is to add life to years rather than years to life with a good quality palliative care. The intention is to provide care when cure is not possible by low cost methods. The expectation of society is, ‘cure’ from the health professionals, but the role of medical professionals is to provide ‘care’. Hence, euthanasia for no cure illness does not have a logical argument. Whenever, there is no cure, the society and medical professionals become frustrated and the fellow citizen take extreme measures such as suicide, euthanasia or substance use. In such situations, palliative and rehabilitative care comes to the rescue of the patient and the family. At times, doctors do suggest to the family members to have the patient discharged from the hospital wait for death to come, if the family or patient so desires. Various reasons are quoted for such decisions, such as poverty, non-availability of bed, futile intervention, resources can be utilised for other patients where cure is possible and unfortunately majority of our patient's family do accordingly. Many of the terminally ill patients prefer to die at home, with or without any proper terminal health care. The societal perception needs to be altered and also the medical professionals need to focus on care rather in addition to just cure. The motive for many euthanasia requests is unawareness of alternatives. Patients hear from their doctors that ‘nothing can be done anymore’. However, when patients hear that a lot can be done through palliative care, that the symptoms can be controlled, now and in the future, many do not want euthanasia anymore 16 .

Commercialisation of health care : Passive euthanasia occurs in majority of the hospitals across the county, where poor patients and their family members refuse or withdraw treatment because of the huge cost involved in keeping them alive. If euthanasia is legalised, then commercial health sector will serve death sentence to many disabled and elderly citizens of India for meagre amount of money. This has been highlighted in the Supreme Court Judgement 3 , 17 .

Research has revealed that many terminally ill patients requesting euthanasia, have major depression, and that the desire for death in terminal patients is correlated with the depression 18 . In Indian setting also, strong desire for death was reported by 3 of the 191 advanced cancer patients, and these had severe depression 19 . They need palliative and rehabilitative care. They want to be looked after by enthusiastic, compassionate and humanistic team of health professionals and the complete expenses need to be borne by the State so that ‘Right to life’ becomes a reality and succeeds before ‘Right to death with dignity’. Palliative care actually provides death with dignity and a death considered good by the patient and the care givers.

Counterargument of euthanasia supporters

Caregivers burden : ‘Right-to-die’ supporters argue that people who have an incurable, degenerative, disabling or debilitating condition should be allowed to die in dignity. This argument is further defended for those, who have chronic debilitating illness even though it is not terminal such as severe mental illness. Majority of such petitions are filed by the sufferers or family members or their caretakers. The caregiver's burden is huge and cuts across various domains such as financial, emotional, time, physical, mental and social. Hence, it is uncommon to hear requests from the family members of the person with psychiatric illness to give some poison either to patient or else to them. Coupled with the States inefficiency, apathy and no investment on health is mockery of the ‘Right to life’.

Refusing care : Right to refuse medical treatment is well recognised in law, including medical treatment that sustains or prolongs life. For example, a patient suffering from blood cancer can refuse treatment or deny feeds through nasogastric tube. Recognition of right to refuse treatment gives a way for passive euthanasia. Many do argue that allowing medical termination of pregnancy before 16 wk is also a form of active involuntary euthanasia. This issue of mercy killing of deformed babies has already been in discussion in Holland 20 .

Right to die : Many patients in a persistent vegetative state or else in chronic illness, do not want to be a burden on their family members. Euthanasia can be considered as a way to upheld the ‘Right to life’ by honouring ‘Right to die’ with dignity.

Encouraging the organ transplantation : Euthanasia in terminally ill patients provides an opportunity to advocate for organ donation. This in turn will help many patients with organ failure waiting for transplantation. Not only euthanasia gives ‘Right to die’ for the terminally ill, but also ‘Right to life’ for the organ needy patients.

Constitution of India reads ‘right to life’ is in positive direction of protecting life. Hence, there is an urgent need to fulfil this obligation of ‘Right to life’ by providing ‘food, safe drinking water and health care’. On the contrary, the state does not own the responsibility of promoting, protecting and fulfilling the socio-economic rights such as right to food, right to water, right to education and right to health care, which are basic essential ingredients of right to life. Till date, most of the States has not done anything to support the terminally ill people by providing for hospice care.

If the State takes the responsibility of providing reasonable degree of health care, then majority of the euthanasia supporters will definitely reconsider their argument. We do endorse the Supreme Court Judgement that our contemporary society and public health system is not matured enough to handle this sensitive issue, hence it needs to be withheld. However, this issue needs to be re-examined again after few years depending upon the evolution of the society with regard to providing health care to the disabled and public health sector with regard to providing health care to poor people.

The Supreme Court judgement to withhold decision on this sensitive issue is a first step towards a new era of health care in terminally ill patients. The Judgment laid down is to preserve harmony within a society, when faced with a complex medical, social and legal dilemma. There is a need to enact a legislation to protect terminally ill patients and also medical practitioners caring for them as per the recommendation of Law Commission Report-196 15 . There is also an urgent need to invest in our health care system, so that poor people suffering from ill health can access free health care. Investment in health care is not a charity; ‘Right to Health’ is bestowed under ‘Right to Life’ of our constitution.

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In the pandemic, we were told to keep 6 feet apart. There’s no science to support that.

In a congressional appearance, infectious-disease expert Anthony S. Fauci characterized the recommendation as “an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data.”

The nation’s top mental health official had spent months asking for evidence behind the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s social distancing guidelines, warning that keeping Americans physically apart during the coronavirus pandemic would harm patients, businesses, and overall health and wellness.

Now, Elinore McCance-Katz, the Trump administration’s assistant secretary for mental health and substance use, was urging the CDC to justify its recommendation that Americans stay six feet apart to avoid contracting covid-19 — or get rid of it.

“I very much hope that CDC will revisit this decision or at least tell us that there is more and stronger data to support this rule than what I have been able to find online,” McCance-Katz wrote in a June 2020 memo submitted to the CDC and other health agency leaders and obtained by The Washington Post. “If not, they should pull it back.”

The CDC would keep its six-foot social distance recommendation in place until August 2022, with some modifications as Americans got vaccinated against the virus and officials pushed to reopen schools. Now, congressional investigators are set Monday to press Anthony S. Fauci, the infectious-disease doctor who served as a key coronavirus adviser during the Trump and Biden administrations, on why the CDC’s recommendation was allowed to shape so much of American life for so long, particularly given Fauci and other officials’ recent acknowledgments that there was little science behind the six-foot rule after all.

“It sort of just appeared, that six feet is going to be the distance,” Fauci testified to Congress in a January closed-door hearing, according to a transcribed interview released Friday. Fauci characterized the recommendation as “an empiric decision that wasn’t based on data.”

Francis S. Collins, former director of the National Institutes of Health, also privately testified to Congress in January that he was not aware of evidence behind the social distancing recommendation, according to a transcript released in May.

Four years later, visible reminders of the six-foot rule remain with us, particularly in cities that rushed to adopt the CDC’s guidelines hoping to protect residents and keep businesses open. D.C. is dotted with signs in stores and schools — even on sidewalks or in government buildings — urging people to stand six feet apart.

Experts agree that social distancing saved lives, particularly early in the pandemic when Americans had no protections against a novel virus sickening millions of people. One recent paper published by the Brookings Institution , a nonpartisan think tank, concludes that behavior changes to avoid developing covid-19, followed later by vaccinations, prevented about 800,000 deaths. But that achievement came at enormous cost, the authors added, with inflexible strategies that weren’t driven by evidence.

“We never did the study about what works,” said Andrew Atkeson, a UCLA economist and co-author of the paper, lamenting the lack of evidence around the six-foot rule. He warned that persistent frustrations over social distancing and other measures might lead Americans to ignore public health advice during the next crisis.

The U.S. distancing measure was particularly stringent, as other countries adopted shorter distances; the World Health Organization set a distance of one meter, or slightly more than three feet, which experts concluded was roughly as effective as the six-foot mark at deterring infections, and would have allowed schools to reopen more rapidly.

The six-foot rule was “probably the single most costly intervention the CDC recommended that was consistently applied throughout the pandemic,” Scott Gottlieb, former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, wrote in his book about the pandemic, “Uncontrolled Spread.”

It’s still not clear who at the CDC settled on the six-foot distance; the agency has repeatedly declined to specify the authors of the guidance, which resembled its recommendations on how to avoid contracting the flu. A CDC spokesperson credited a team of experts, who drew from research such as a 1955 study on respiratory droplets . In his book, Gottlieb wrote that the Trump White House pushed back on the CDC’s initial recommendation of 10 feet of social distance, saying it would be too difficult to implement.

Perhaps the rule’s biggest impact was on children, despite ample evidence they were at relatively low risk of covid-related complications. Many schools were unable to accommodate six feet of space between students’ desks and forced to rely on virtual education for more than a year, said Joseph Allen, a Harvard University expert in environmental health, who called in 2020 for schools to adopt three feet of social distance.

“The six-foot rule was really an error that had been propagated for several decades, based on a misunderstanding of how particles traveled through indoor spaces,” Allen said, adding that health experts often wrongly focused on avoiding droplets from infected people rather than improving ventilation and filtration inside buildings.

Social distancing had champions before the pandemic. Bush administration officials, working on plans to fight bioterrorism, concluded that social distancing could save lives in a health crisis and renewed their calls as the coronavirus approached. The idea also took hold when public health experts initially believed that the coronavirus was often transmitted by droplets expelled by infected people, which could land several feet away; the CDC later acknowledged the virus was airborne and people could be exposed just by sharing the same air in a room, even if they were farther than six feet apart.

“There was no magic around six feet,” Robert R. Redfield, who served as CDC director during the Trump administration, told a congressional committee in March 2022. “It’s just historically that’s what was used for other respiratory pathogens. So that really became the first piece” of a strategy to protect Americans in the early days of the virus, he said.

It also became the standard that states and businesses adopted, with swift pressure on holdouts. Lawmakers and workers urged meat processing plants, delivery companies and other essential businesses to adopt the CDC’s social distancing recommendations as their employees continued reporting to work during the pandemic.

Some business leaders weren’t sure the measures made sense. Jeff Bezos, founder of online retail giant Amazon, petitioned the White House in March 2020 to consider revising the six-foot recommendation, said Adam Boehler, then a senior Trump administration official helping with the coronavirus response. At the time, Amazon was facing questions about a rising number of infections in its warehouses, and Democratic senators were urging the company to adopt social distancing.

“Bezos called me and asked, is there any real science behind this rule?” Boehler said, adding that Bezos pushed on whether Amazon could adopt an alternative distance if workers were masked, physically separated by dividers or other precautions were taken. “He said … it’s the backbone of trying to keep America running here, and when you separate somebody five feet versus six feet, it’s a big difference,” Boehler recalled. Bezos owns The Washington Post.

Kelly Nantel, an Amazon spokesperson, confirmed that Bezos called Boehler and said the Amazon founder’s focus was the discrepancy between the U.S. recommendation and the WHO’s shorter distance. The company soon said it would follow the CDC’s six-foot social distancing guidelines in its warehouses and later developed technologies to try to enforce those guidelines. “We did it globally everywhere because it was the right thing to do,” Nantel said.

Boehler said he spoke with Redfield and Fauci about testing alternatives to the six-foot recommendation but that he was not aware of what happened to those tests or what they found. Fauci declined to comment. Redfield did not respond to requests for comment.

But challenging the six-foot recommendation, particularly in the pandemic’s early days, was seen as politically difficult. Rochelle Walensky, then chief of infectious disease at Massachusetts General Hospital, argued in a July 2020 email that “if people are masked it is quite safe and much more practical to be at 3 feet” in many school settings.

Five months later, incoming president Joe Biden would tap Walensky as his CDC director. Walensky swiftly endorsed the six-foot distance before working to loosen it, announcing in March 2021 that elementary school students could sit three feet apart if they were masked. Walensky declined to comment.

The most persistent government critic of the social distancing guidelines may have been McCance-Katz, who did not respond to requests for comment for this article. Trump’s mental health chief had spent several years clashing with other Department of Health and Human Services officials on various matters and had few internal defenders by the time the pandemic arrived, hampering her message. But while her pleas failed to move the CDC, her warnings about the risks to mental health found an audience with Trump and his allies, who blamed federal bureaucrats for the six-foot rule and other measures.

“What is this nonsense that somehow it’s unsafe to return to school?” McCance-Katz said in September 2020 on an HHS podcast, lamenting the broader shutdown of American life. “I do think that Americans are smart people, and I think that they need to start asking questions about why is it this way.”

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Guest Essay

A Chill Has Fallen Over Jews in Publishing

By James Kirchick

Mr. Kirchick is a contributing writer to Tablet magazine, a writer at large for Air Mail and the author of “Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington.”

This month, an account on X with the handle @moyurireads and 360 followers published a link to a color-coded spreadsheet classifying nearly 200 writers according to their views on the “genocide” in Gaza. Titled “Is Your Fav Author a Zionist?,” it reads like a cross between Tiger Beat and “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

The novelist Emily St. John Mandel, the author of “Station Eleven” and “Sea of Tranquility,” earned a red “pro-Israel/Zionist” classification because, according to the list’s creator, she “travels to Israel frequently talks favorably about it.” Simply for posting a link to the Israeli chapter of the Red Cross, the novelist Kristin Hannah was deemed a “Zionist,” as was the author Gabrielle Zevin for delivering a book talk to Hadassah, a Jewish women’s organization. Needless to say, the creator of the list — whose post on X announcing it garnered over a million views within a few days — encourages readers to boycott any works produced by “Zionists.”

The spreadsheet is but the crudest example of the virulently anti-Israel — and increasingly antisemitic — sentiment that has been coursing through the literary world since the Hamas massacre of Oct. 7. Much of it revolves around the charge of genocide and seeks to punish Zionists and anyone else who refuses to explicitly denounce the Jewish state for allegedly committing said crime. Since a large majority of American Jews (80 percent of whom, according to a 2020 poll , said that caring about Israel is an important or essential part of their Judaism) are Zionists, to accuse all Zionists of complicity in genocide is to anathematize a core component of Jewish identity.

Over the past several months, a litmus test has emerged across wide swaths of the literary world effectively excluding Jews from full participation unless they denounce Israel. This phenomenon has been unfolding in progressive spaces (academia, politics, cultural organizations) for quite some time. That it has now hit the rarefied, highbrow realm of publishing — where Jewish Americans have made enormous contributions and the vitality of which depends on intellectual pluralism and free expression — is particularly alarming.

As is always and everywhere the case, this growing antisemitism is concomitant with a rising illiberalism. Rarely, if ever, do writers express unanimity on a contentious political issue. We’re a naturally argumentative bunch who — at least in theory — answer only to our own consciences.

To compel them to express support or disapproval for a cause is one of the cruelest things a society can do to writers, whose role is to tell society what they believe, regardless of how popular the message may be. The drawing up of lists, in particular, is a tactic with a long and ignominious history, employed by the enemies of literature — and liberty — on both the left and the right. But the problem goes much deeper than a tyro blacklist targeting “Zionists.”

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I was a law clerk for Justice Alito. He must recuse himself from hearing cases involving Donald Trump.

Flying the U.S. flag upside down, once a signal of distress, has become a symbol of those who reject the results of the 2020 presidential election. When Alito did so, it was indeed a distress call.

As a former law clerk to Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., I often admired him as a person for his integrity and honesty. As a progressive liberal, however, I vehemently disagreed with the approach he takes to reading the Constitution, the narrow interpretation he adopts, and his reverence for the framers’ restrictive intent.

Over the years, I became increasingly distressed with the results of his decisions. And then came Dobbs .

By striking down the rights of women to choose whether to terminate a pregnancy, the decision last year in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization , which he wrote , eviscerated women’s fundamental right to self-determination. Dobbs is not just about abortion; it is about setting the clock back and undermining the core protections enshrined within the Constitution of liberty, equality, and access to justice.

And then came the flag.

Flying the American flag upside down, formerly a signal of distress, is now understood to unequivocally telegraph support for those who have co-opted and corrupted its original intent . It has become the symbol of those who attacked the U.S. Capitol in a violent insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, who challenged — and continue to deny — the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election. It is the emblem for the “Stop the Steal” Trump factions , the symbol now held hostage by those who attacked our democracy at its very core.

The New York Times reported earlier this month that Justice Alito flew an upside-down flag at his home in Fairfax, Va. , and another controversial flag at his beach house on Long Beach Island — acts that are widely accepted as an abhorrent affront to anyone who respects our constitutional democracy. So, when that flag is flown upside down by a member of the nation’s highest court, it is indeed a distress call.

The U.S. Supreme Court is currently deciding whether a president’s actions while in office are absolutely immune from criminal prosecution , irrespective of whether they concern the legitimate business of the office. Donald Trump has been indicted in state and federal courts in Washington, D.C., Florida, Georgia, and New York, alleging fraud as well as crimes in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection, the mishandling of classified documents , election interference , and more.

If the Supreme Court decides that he has blanket immunity — a decision expected any day now — these criminal charges, and any others, disappear. This means a president could commit serious crimes while in office, having nothing to do with the legitimate function of government, without facing any consequences. A president could theoretically hire an assassin to kill a competitor with impunity.

Justice Alito must recuse himself from having any role in the decision of these cases.

Federal law requires a justice, judge, or magistrate to disqualify themself in proceedings in which their “ impartiality may reasonably be questioned .” Judges routinely recuse themselves from cases where the mere hinted appearance of impropriety is enough to warrant stepping away from a case.

Flying the flag, upside down, at your home is more than a hint of political impropriety — it irrefutably calls into question impartiality and bias toward the former president. It is a tangible demonstration of support for those who continue to assert that the election was stolen from him. It is the chosen insignia of those who tried to hijack the election by attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6 and gut the very constitutional democracy that established the Supreme Court.

The flag flying over Justice Alito’s home casts a shadow over his ability to be impartial.

This is not the first time the “Stop the Steal” specter has arisen at the court. Revelations and allegations about Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife’s communications with White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows , allegedly supporting the disruption of the results of the November 2020 election, raised the appearance of political impropriety. So, too, does the flag flying over Justice Alito’s home cast a shadow over his ability to be impartial.

It is precisely to guarantee independence from political pressure that Supreme Court justices (and all federal judges) serve for life. They do not need to run for reelection, nor curry favor with politicians to ensure their reappointment. But this same guarantee of political independence engenders a lack of meaningful oversight, creating an opportunity to make decisions based on personal, political persuasions.

Moreover, with a majority of Supreme Court justices largely understood to have a conservative agenda, much of which aligns with a Republican platform, the fear that civil rights are in jeopardy is tangible. Now more than ever, there is no place for politics on the court.

Justice Alito may or may not be biased in favor of the former president, but the flag flying upside down at his home in the past unequivocally telegraphs reasonable questions about his impartiality in cases involving Trump. These questions, separate and apart from the crisis in confidence that such conduct may raise for the court, mandate Justice Alito’s recusal from these cases.

The gravity of the implications of Justice Alito’s refusal to recuse himself from these decisions cannot be understated. At stake is not only the independence of the court itself, but also its credibility, and its role as a protector of our constitutional democracy.

Susan Sullivan is a professor in the political science department at Temple University and served as a law clerk to Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.