Euthanasia
Science and technology has allowed humans to treat a myriad of diseases that were previously terminal. This is no longer a question of whether prolonging life is possible. Instead, physicians and scientists must grapple with a more difficult dilemma - whether life should be artificially prolonged in the first place.
Despite the passing of the Physician Assisted Law (PAS) in Oregon and the legality of assisted suicide in the Netherlands, people generally frame euthanasia as a moral instead of a legal issue.
Terry Golway, frames the issue in its larger effects of society. Euthanasia threatens the current way of life of people of are "God fearing and life-affirming" (629). It threatens to erode the respect and compassion traditionally accorded to the elderly, who are now merely "people who want to be gotten rid of" (629).
Furthermore, together with abortion,...
On a dramatic note, he even takes these as "signs that the forces of
darkness are gathering" (631).
Golway's comments regarding "a culture of death" and threats to the "God fearing and life-affirming" peoples reveal an implicit intolerance of any contradicting views. He fails to address how euthanasia is often prompted by compassion, that not every "church-going American" equates assisted suicide with "ridding themselves of the old and the handicapped" (629).
Golway's account also fails to address how euthanasia affects individuals, particularly the old and the handicapped whose interests he supposedly upholds. Instead, Golway simply frames the issue in stark absolutes, that all forms of killing and
murder are wrong, regardless of method and motive.
Ellen Goodman tries to address both moral and individual questions by looking at the cases of Earle Spring and Karen Ann Quinlan. For Goodman, the
morality of euthanasia springs from individual free will. While Quinlan's brain
death precluded her from having a will to live, Spring presented a more difficult gray area. Despite Spring's supposed senility and his reliance on a dialysis machine, a
physician and a nurse testified that Spring made "a weak expression of his desire to live" (Goodman 627).…
