Euthanasia - Whose right to choose?
...ion, I believe that it is difficult to find out whose right it is to decide, whether a person is uncurably ill or not. Diagnoses can be inaccurate, also prognoses done by groups of doctors have sometimes turned out to be incorrect. Furthermore, new methods of treating diseases and alleviating their pains are constantly being developed, so that, an illness incurable today may be curable tomorrow. So how can a doctor take the responsibility and tell a person that he or she is “qualified” for being killed and moreover, who should be chosen to help the incurable person to get out of his or her misery. The task of doctors and nurses is to cure people not to kill them. It almost seems that we would need new professional men or women who are trained to kill terminally ill people. People pro euthanasia often argue that euthanasia should be legalized because terminally and incurably ill persons are being killed for their own good but they do not realize that eutanasia concerns human beings and not animals, which are killed if they are incurably ill. Let’s just imagine how it would be if euthanasia was legal and it was pratised like an everyday operation. With time, the patients would lose their trust in the hospital staff because in every well organized hospital errors can happen, so that, innocent patients could be harmed. Another problem would be that in the course of time the legislation of mercy killing could be abused. Therefore, euthanasia, which is on a voluntary basis, could be extended to include also compulsory euthanasia, in particular for those who are unable to decide their own fate like people that are mentally deranged, old or senile. We should not underestimate such actions; a few years ago this had happened to people in a hospital of Vienna where nurses killed incurable especially old people without a legislation for euthanasia. Such events should give us an idea how easily the so called mercy killing can get out of hand. Many people claim that euthanasia is a form of “mercy killing”, which helps terminally ill people to die gently without pain, but for me any kind of kill...