INTRODUCTION
Death is the only certainty in this uncertain world,
because, of the fact everyone knows that death will occur eventually whether one
likes it or not. We all know that death happens to both the rich and the poor,
and death becomes more fearsome, impregnable, and poignant when one realize
that one will eventually come to face to face with one’s own death, yes death
is present in the world and yet again it is obvious that everyone does not die
in the same manner, some people die in warfare being blown into bit by nuclear
weaponry, others die in their sleep full of life and hope for the next day,
others are poisoned to death by loved ones, some drown in gulps of their
drinking water while others die being eaten by wild animals. but the concept
death should be looked at more critically when the way a person dies or choose
to die is called Euthanasia.
EUTHANASIA
DEFINING THE
CONCEPT OF EUTHANASIA:
According to
medicine. Missouri.edu, the world Euthanasia comes from the Greek words “eu”
which means good and “thanatos” which means death, literally meaning good
death. And in our contemporary times Euthanasia is seen as “the practice of
ending the life of a patient to limit the patient’s suffering” where he patient
or person in question must typically be terminally ill or experiencing great
pain.
While according to Wikipedia.org, “Euthanasia is the act of
intentionally ending life to relief pain and suffering”.
Euthanasia was practice in ancient Greece and Rome, in those
times, Euthanasia was seen as deliberately hastening the death of a person and
this act that was backed by law in the Greek civilization was supported by the
likes of Socrates, Plato, and even Seneca who is considered an elder in the
ancient world and even so not everyone in the ancient world agreed on the
nature of Euthanasia as it Hippocrates had once said that “I will not prescribe
a deadly drug to please someone, nor give advice that may cause death”.
The concept of Euthanasia when it is conceived as
alleviating the death process is dated back to the medical historian Karl
Friedrich Heinrich Marx (1796), but before Marx, Francis Bacon in his work
Euthanasia medica conceived Euthanasia for the first time as supporting someone
when they died, He wrote : “Euthanasia :
a very gentle and quite death, which happens without painful convulsions”.
Marx saw euthanasia in a more contemporary sense when he
stated that a doctor had a moral duty to ease the suffering of death through
encouragement, support and mitigation using medication”
TYPES OF EUTHANASIA
From antiquity, man has always seen death to be too complex
for his conscious contemplation and understanding and that is why it has been
difficult for communities to agree on the manner in which human life should be
taken by the courts of law or if it should be taken at all from this point of
analysis, we can say that Euthanasia can be classed in three distinct
categories.
i.
Voluntary Euthanasia: from the word ‘voluntary’
we can ordinarily articulate that this type of euthanasia allows the patient a
choice to end his or her own life as a result of growing and unbearable pain in
other to find relief in death, this type of euthanasia is considered legal in
most countries as it is backed by law.
ii.
Non-voluntary Euthanasia: in this type of
euthanasia, the patient does not give his or her consent for their life to be
relieved of them, this type of Euthanasia is legal in some countries buy only
in limited conditions. In this we see that it is the care givers of the patient
that decide the fate of the patient of the laws that provide for such
procedures of ending human life.
iii.
Involuntary Euthanasia: this type of Euthanasia
happens without the patient and most times it’s against the patients will it is
illegal in all countries and is usually considered as murder.
THE CONCEPT OF EUTHANASIA IN ETHICS
Euthanasia is an issue in the field of Bioethics. Bioethics
is a branch of Ethics which deals with ethical issues emerging from advances in
biology, medicine and technologies. Bioethics proposes to advance the
discussion about moral discernment in society and Bioethics is often related to
medical policy and practice, Bioethics also covers areas such as human
well-being the state of the human environment.
From a more general point of view according to the
“Bioethics journal ” on Wikipedia.org, Bioethics is concerned with the ethical
questions that arise in the relationship among life sciences, biotechnology,
medicine, politics, law, theology and philosophy.
THE DEBATE AGAINST EUTHANASIA
In it’s more modern sense, Euthanasia has always been
strongly opposed especially in the judeo-Christian tradition for example,
Thomas Aquinas argued that the practice of euthanasia contradicted our natural
instinct for survival, and some scholars think that the act of Euthanasia as an
act that is against the laws of God and nature as the methods with which it is
being achieved can be seen as ungodly methods such as
i. Bleeding the patients to death
ii. Suffocating the patients to death
iii. Removing the patients from their beds to be
placed on cold grounds till they die
iv. Removing the pillow from the heads of the
patients knowing that doing so would kill them slowly
This debate against Euthanasia is supported by the likes of Philipp Jakob
Spener, Veit Riedlin and Johann George Krunitz but despite the opposition
suffered by Euthanasia, Euthanasia is still being practiced.
Reasons for Euthanasia or why people want euthanasia
1.
Most people think unbearable pain is the main
reason people seek euthanasia, but according to some surveys in USA and the
Netherlands showed that less than a third of requests for euthanasia was
because of severe pain. Terminally ill people can have their quality of life
severely damaged by physical conditions such as nausea and vomiting,
breathlessness, paralysis and difficulty in swallowing.
2. Psychological factors: these factors cause people to think of euthanasia include depression, feeling a burden or dislike of being dependent.
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
Although there are debates both
for and against Euthanasia, it is obvious that in dealing with this ethical
issue, philosophers and scientists are only trying to understand the nature of
death and how the contemporary mind relates to it, and although there are laws
in lands both in favour and against Euthanasia, we as humans beings must
consider the fact that there are certain illness that one suffers from which
the best treatment would be to give that person an opportunity to find relief
from the pangs of such illness, on a social level Euthanasia may seem wrong to
some based on the self-image projected by a people at a certain time but on a
more individual level a person has the right to promote their well-being at all
cost provided he or she does not do any harm to any other human being, and as
such the act Euthanasia in the medical practice only gives a fair chance to a
patient who is unable commit suicide to be aided by another in dying.
But on a group level as regards to this presentation, we are pointing to the fact that euthanasia negates the value of human life and therefore should be condemned in it’s entirety and that people who have slime chances of survival with illness should be allowed to exhaust their life span till they give up their last breath.
Great work.
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