Morality of Suicide and Active Euthanasia

Morality, Suicide and Euthanasia

There are always important questions to be asked -- and answered -- when a child is very ill and healthcare decisions have to be made by the family. In the case of 11-year-old Jimmy, who suffers from an incurable neurological disease in addition to the deadly cancer known as lymphoma, this paper uses helpful, scholarly information from the literature to point out how the parents should respond to Jimmy's health problems and to his decision not to have the chemotherapy. Jimmy is very religious and says he wants to "go to God" but he is not in a position to make that decision independent of his parents.

Should minors be permitted to participate in decisions of the magnitude that Jimmy and his family are faced with? The answer is yes, of course in this case Jimmy should be involved and have his say. His parents will listen to him and it's his right to have input. However, at the age of 11 he will not be making the decision in this case, and it's only right that the decision is not left up to him. It is well-known in Western society that parents have the "…responsibility and authority to make medical decisions on behalf of their children," according to Dr. Diekema, professor in the University of Washington's Department of Bioethics and Humanities. The parents of an 11-year-old child know him best, care most about him, and providing that they are mentally and socially stable, they have the social and moral responsibility to make the best decisions for him.

"Furthermore," Diekema adds, "since many medical decisions will also affect the child's family, parents can factor family issues and values into medical decisions about their children" (Diekema, 1998, p. 2).

Meanwhile professor Raymond Devettere (who teaches healthcare ethics at Boston College) writes in his book (Practical Decision Making in Health Care Ethics: Cases and Concepts) that "…most children younger than twelve years of age" are not fully developed intellectually to be given "decision-making" authority vis-a-vis their own healthcare (Devettere, 2009, p. 106). In the case of children under 12, their illnesses may very well "…retard mental and moral development," Devettere explains.

Whose decision (parents or child) should be the decisive one? The answer is the parents with input from the child because children aren't ready to make those decisions at the age of 11. As a general rule -- using Piaget's schema of formal reasoning -- around the age of twelve, cognitive development begins to develop, at least in abstract sense (Devettere, 107). Some children do achieve a level of cognitive development around the age of twelve; in fact some can form hypotheses and they can make decisions based on those hypotheses as regards their health needs, Devettere explains (107). However, that doesn't "guarantee that they will make morally mature decisions," the professor asserts; and a decision about living or dying is moral in nature.