When Death Is Not Always a Devil

When Death Is Not Always a Devil

"Against all the injuries of life, I have the refuge of death. If I can choose between a death of torture and one that is simple and easy, why should I not select the latter? As I chose the ship in which I sail and the house which I inhabit, so will I choose the death by which I leave life. In no matter more than death should we act according to our desire ... Why should I endure the agonies of disease ... when I can emancipate myself from all my torments?" (qtd. in Wennberg 42-43)

The passage was written two centuries ago by Seneca, a Stoic philosopher of Rome, expressing clearly the real meaning of euthanasia. Euthanasia, a Greek word that means "good death," is a controversial issue that provokes moral arguments about whether letting terminally ill patients die quicker is an act of killing or not. While passive euthanasia, which involves withdrawal of life support, is legal, active euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, an act of ending dying patients' lives by giving them prescriptions of lethal medicine, is prohibited in most states of America. It is just a matter of time that we will all die. The question for terminally ill patients is not to life or death, but to die now or later. Therefore, legalizing euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide is an ethical action that will end their suffering in both mental and physical conditions, giving them a suitable choice in financial matters and guaranteeing them freedom of choosing a peaceful death.

People are human beings, not saints. Truthfully, not many of us are kind-hearted enough to take care of someone who will lie on a bed for the rest of their life. Terminally ill patients not only die because of the illness, but also because of the mental pain caused by the neglect of their own families. Thus, euthanasia becomes a suitable choice that ends patients' lives with love and caring. Steven H. Miles, M.D., an associate director of the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago has written, "families get discouraged by this kind of situation [giving care for terminal ill patients, who just lie on beds] and stop coming after a while...Some of the comatose, without loving families, depend entirely on the charity of strangers." It is understandable that not only terminal ill patients suffer, but also their families, who bear the responsibility of time-consuming care giving. The burdens of providing care or even just supervision twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week are often overwhelming. When this kind of care giving lasts for years, it leaves the caregiver exhausted, stressful and isolated from society. Then when chances of curing the illness are almost nonexistent, the hope for the recovery of patients fades as time goes on, becoming an irritating duty and then pitiless abandon. Would it be better to end ones' lives at the time when they have lived fully and been loved fully than the time when they have lived tiresome and been left with no relatives beside him? It is a mercy decision that lets the patients die when they know that they are loved, rather than die on cold beds with the faces of strangers.

Terminally ill patients not only die with mental pain, but more often, with physical pain. Most patients suffer torturous pain from expensive treatments and end up dying shortly thereafter. They live, but endure agonizing pain. Therefore, euthanasia or assisted suicide can be considered not a means to end life, but a means to make death become gracious. In "Dying Your Way," Thomas A. Preston, a professor of medicine at the University of Washington, has written, "the dying process is now extended with operations, multiple rounds of chemotherapy or other treatments that do not cure but only prolong dying ... Worse yet, a majority of dying patients experience severe, under treated pain in the last stages of dying." (32) When living but not appreciating life, life becomes torture. With terminally ill patients, living is not living, but suffering to delay death. There is nothing more dreadful and terrified than bearing a physical pain. We only can bear it if we know that it will be gone. For dying patients, the pain will persist until their last minute. So why do we want to keep a life that looses its own meaning and becomes a nightmare that seems to last forever? Euthanasia, therefore, is an ethical way not to promote death, but to release pain.

Besides the care giving issue, financial considerations are also a reason that euthanasia should be legalized. In the Study to Understand Prognoses and Preferences for Outcomes and Risks of Treatments (SUPPORTt) And Hospitalized Elderly Longitudinal Project (HELP), 1989-1997 of William Knaus and Joanne Lynn, to be able to pay for the treatments for patients whose less than 50 percent chance to live up to six months, "20 percent of cases a family member had to quit work, almost one third of these families lost all of their savings." It means in order to keep them alive suffering pain for less than six months, their families have to sacrifice their jobs, their needs, and many other opportunities to have better lives. It is immoral for them to die and cause a financial burden, but it is also nonsense to spend a lot of money for the reason of prolonging death with the result of painful suffering and making others' lives become unfortunate. It is illogical; and absurd, because it requires other people's sacrifice for irrational reasons. For love, we can forfeit our needs and wants. However, if we sacrifice to prolong our loved one's death and make them suffer unbearable pain, our sacrifice becomes brutal. We can pay money to cure the illness, but if we pay money to endure the pain caused by the illness, that money is wasted.

The pain-bearing issues lead to arguments that euthanasia cannot be legalized. Some people fear that legalizing euthanasia would make patients thoughtlessly decide to die because of the fear of suffering pain before actually suffering. However, in reality, euthanasia turns out to be only an option to secure peaceful deaths for patients, not a way to avoid the pain. In "Choosing Their Time," Margot Roosevelt has reported "in seven years, according to the Oregon Department of Human Services, 208 people took legal, lethal overdose prescription, out of 64,706 Oregonians who died of the same disease."(32) The numbers show clearly that in Oregon, the only state in the U.S. that legally permits assisted-suicide, even though dying patients can decide to take lethal drugs that help them die peacefully, not many choose to do that. The drugs become a form of insurance that if the pain becomes too severe, they can take the medicine to stop the