Euthanasia

From Philosopedia

EUTHANASIA

Euthanasia involves permitting a hopelessly sick or injured human, or animal, to be put to death as painlessly as possible.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1994), however, states that “sick or handicapped persons should be helped to lead lives as normal as possible. Whatever its motives and means, direct euthanasia consists in putting an end to the lives of handicapped, sick, or dying persons. It is morally unacceptable.”

It was not morally unacceptable to Sigmund Freud, who in 1939 ended his pain-filled life with morphine.

Nor in the 1950s to the humanist minister Charles Frances Potter, who was president of the New York Euthanasia Society.

The legality of euthanasia has been and continues to be tested in diverse places around the world. Derek Humphry, founder of the Hemlock Society (USA) and author of Final Exit (1992), assisted his own wife, Jean, to die.

Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a retired pathologist, challenged the State of Michigan to legalize euthanasia by assisting individuals there to die by the use of his home-made “suicide machine,” and successfully completed several dozen euthanasias before being jailed. His confinement, to many, has made him a martyr.

Physicians, it is generally agreed, have for centuries eased patients out of their final days of physical misery, but always with the threat of litigation and possible punishment—Freud’s own physician provided him with morphine.

The Netherlands reportedly has the most liberal legal system for allowing euthanasia. In 1994, 1424 cases (roughly 2.1% of annual deaths) were reported there. Meanwhile, as they sometimes point out, viewers of horse racing on television have seen horses mercifully shot after breaking their legs in an accident, and they also have seen human beings kept alive for years in a state of vegetation. Bertrand Russell, in Unpopular Essays (1959), wrote as follows:

The whole conception of “Sin” is one which I find very puzzling, doubtless owing to my sinful nature. If “Sin” consisted in causing needless suffering, I could understand, but on the contrary, sin often consists in avoiding needless suffering. Some years ago, in the English House of Lords, a bill was introduced to legalize euthanasia in cases of painful and incurable disease. The patient’s consent was to be necessary, as well as several medical certificates. To me, in my simplicity, it would seem natural to require the patient’s consent, but the late Archbishop of Canterbury, the English official expert on Sin, explained the erroneousness of such a view. The patient’s consent turned euthanasia into suicide, and suicide is sin. Their Lordships listened to the voice of authority and rejected the bill.

EUTHANASIA IN THE NETHERLANDS

“Active euthanasia has been practiced in The Netherlands for more than twenty years,” according to Pieter V. Admiraal, considered by many to be the world’s leading spokesperson for the right to physician-assisted suicide. “Today the total number is estimated as 3,500 to 4,000 cases a year.”

{Free Inquiry, Winter 1996-1997}