THE hospital was silent and dreary, filled with an air of devastation. I was sitting in the long, endless corridor. The only sound was the ticking of the clock. Sunrise was expected anytime. Dawn was to bring never-ending darkness in my life. “We will pull the plug in the morning,” were the words that were jarring my nerves. My best friend was in deathly sleep. After her accident, she was lying comatose. Her body was dead but her brain was alive. With the consent of the family, the hospital’s ethics committee decided that there was no point in keeping her alive on life-support.
“But this is murder” was all that reverberated through my mind.
How can all these professional and competent doctors deprive a 20-year-old girl of another chance at life? But they had a very decent terminology for this brutal act: euthanasia, or mercy killing! One way or the other, euthanasia is practised in the many countries of the world, and not just Third-World countries.
Euthanasia literally means “dying well”. It is, in layman’s terms, considered to be a “death of mercy” or “good death”. To really understand the meaning and the purpose behind practising euthanasia, we would have to understand its two basic forms: active euthanasia and passive euthanasia.
Both the American Medical Association and the American judicial system recognize a sharp distinction between active and passive euthanasia. The first of these terms, active euthanasia, refers to any action that directly contributes to the death of someone who is terminally ill or in great pain. Passive euthanasia, on the other hand, refers to a decision not to treat a life-threatening condition on the grounds that no extraordinary measures should be taken to save the life of someone who is either terminally ill or in great pain. Legally, the difference between active and passive euthanasia is the difference between killing and allowing to die — the first is punishable by strict penalties in our legal system, while the second is not even a misdemeanour.
One of the most referred contemporarily discussions on the subject of euthanasia is Active and Passive Euthanasia (1975) by the professor of Philosophy of University Of Alabama, James Rachel. Rachel signifies the fact that there is no moral difference between actively killing a person and passively allowing the person to die. It is observed by Rachel that people think people are of the view that actively killing a person is more morally unethical and brutal than passively allowing him to die. However, there is no wide difference between both because both of the result in death of the patient on humanitarian grounds. The difference between the two is emphasized because we often hear of cases of active killings, but not of passive killings.
Twenty years ago, when a dying patient was kept alive through a respiration machine, it was considered to be something like playing God. Many caring individuals have expressed deep sentiments on the right-to-die debate on euthanasia. What if euthanasia is carried out on a patient suffering from a terminal illness and the family finds out immediately afterwards that a cure has been found. Can there be any measure of the amount of the family’s desolation that has lost their loved one?
The practice of euthanasia is not about relieving the patient of pain, but the ultimate sign of not having faith in God. Doctors forget that there is a bigger and more supreme power hat has everything is His hands. He alone can change things for the better or the worse in an instant, and we are to repose our firm faith and trust in Him. So, the act of administering euthanasia is in complete defiance to it.
