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Naia Mitchell

Mr. Choi

English 9

05 December 2017

Euthanasia

What if you were diagnosed with Stage 4 Breast Cancer, literally sitting in ​agony​ on your

deathbed, ​imprisoned​ in a hospital, knowing you only have a few more days of life. You are

decomposing, and your family is watching. You are dying from the inside-out. You are helpless.

So, you have come to this conscious decision that you would like to die with dignity, which if I

may add is a basic human right, a liberty right. You would like to be settled in a place that is past

this torturous fight. But, you have been denied. For, euthanasia isn’t legal where you are. You

are going to live out the few days that you have in harrowing pain because it is against other

people’s religion, the government’s religion, and the countries’ religion, to supply you with this

procedure. Imagine being told this by a doctor whose job it is to “save lives”.

Euthanasia is the painless killing of a patient suffering from an incurable and painful

disease or an irreversible coma. It has also been called assisted suicide or mercy killing.

Euthanasia is a choice that should be available for suffering patients. It ​is not ​murder. Murder is

something that comes under the heading of involuntary, meaning no one gave consent for their

death, it wasn’t being asked for. Euthanasia is voluntary meaning that the patient gave their
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consent and is fully ready and accepting of what is going to happen next. Why is it that capital

punishment is legal in some countries but euthanasia isn’t? I could easily argue that capital

punishment is more murderous than euthanasia is. How is it that a person can have their life

decided upon by other people, but a person who is terminally ill can’t decide to take their own

life? That seems a little messed up to me.

A fisherman named Ramon Sampedro was one of those terminally ill people who was

denied because euthanasia wasn’t legal where we he was. Ramon was paralyzed from the neck

down after taking a dangerous dive in shallow waters in 1968. In 1993, he decided he was ready

to die. He looked at his life as a burden, and his injury, slavery. He said that if he could have, he

would’ve taken his own life but of course he couldn’t due to his paralysis. He couldn’t find

anyone to do it for him either as assisted suicide was illegal in Spain at the time, carrying a 20

year penalty. So, he ended up finding a way to take his own life by drinking water mixed with

cyanide. When someone is poisoned with cyanide, their death is equivalent to that of suffocating.

I don’t know about you, but that’s a pretty harsh way of going out.

So, why illegalize it if it allows for a painless death? Well, some people argue that

euthanasia violates the hippocratic oath. The hippocratic oath is an oath written by greek

philosopher Hippocrates. This oath would then be taken by physicians, just to supply some

context as to what i’m talking about. While euthanasia may have violated the oath before, most

medical schools as of now are using the modified version of The Hippocratic Oath. “Most

especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is given to me to save a life, all
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thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life; this responsibility must be faced with

great humbleness and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at god.” This is

the part of the hippocratic oath that I selected for the sake of my argument but there is a lot more

to this oath.

I truly believe that euthanasia should be legalized everywhere. Some families don’t have

insurance or the financial means to keep their loved ones alive and if euthanasia was legal

everywhere then families everywhere in this position could possibly be saved from financial

catastrophe. If euthanasia was legal everywhere then those suffering could have an option to help

them end their suffering. If euthanasia was legal everywhere than those suffering wouldn’t have

to find alternative, painful ways to end it. It should be considered as much of a crime to force

someone to live who with justification doesn’t wish to continue as it is to take life without

consent. Don’t you think it is more inhumane to force someone to live in a life of suffering then

to end a life of suffering that wants to be gone?