Euthanasia is the practice of painlessly putting to death persons who have incurable, painful, or distressing diseases or handicaps. It comes from the Greek words for "good" and "death", and is commonly called mercy killing. Voluntary euthanasia may occur when incurably ill persons ask their physician, friend or relative, to put them to death. The patients or their relatives may ask a doctor to withhold treatment and let them die. Many critics of the medical profession contend that too often doctors p

People have a right to die with dignity. Nobody wants to end up plugged into machines and wired to tubes. Who wants to spend their last days lying in a hospital bed wasting away to something that's hardly recognizable as a human being, let alone his or her former self? Nobody. The very thought insults the whole concept of what it means to be human. People are entitled to dignity, in life and in death. Just as we respect people's right to live with dignity, so we must respect their right to die with dignity. In the case of the terminally ill, that means people have the right to refuse life-sustaining treatment when it's apparent to them that all the treatment is doing is destroying their dignity, and reducing them to some subhuman level of humanity.

Both the Dutch and the California proposals list sets of precautions designed to prevent abuses. They acknowledge that such are a possibility. The history of legal "loopholes" is not a cheering one. Abuses might arise when the patient is wealthy and an inheritance is at stake, when the doctor has made mistakes in diagnosis and treatment and hopes to avoid detection, when insurance coverage for treatment costs is about to expire, and in a host of other circumstances. (Maguire 321) Both sets of proposals seek to limit the influence of the patient's family on the decision, again acknowledging the risks posed by such influences. Families have all kinds of subtle ways, conscious and unconscious, of putting pressure on a patient to request euthanasia and relive them of the financial and social burden of care. Many patients already feel guilty for imposing burdens on those on those who care for them, even when the families are happy to bear the burden. To provide an avenue for the discharge of that guilt in a request for euthanasia is to risk putting to death a great many patients who do not wish to die.

No individual has absolute freedom. Even the patient's Bill of Rights, which was drawn up by the American Hospital Association, recognizes this. Although it acknowledges that patients have the right to refuse treatment, the document also realizes that they have this right and freedom only to the extent permitted by law. Maybe people should be allowed to die if they want to. (Brock 73) Only a fool would minimize the agony that many terminally ill patient endure. And there's no question that by letting them die on request we shorten the period of suffering.

Courts and moral philosophers alike have long accepted the proposition that people have a right to refuse medical treatment they find painful or difficult to bear, even if that refusal means certain death. But an appellate court in California has gone one controversial step further. (Chapman 176) It ruled that Elizabeth Bouvia, a cerebral palsy victim, had an absolute right to refuse a life-sustaining feeding tube as part of her privacy rights under the US and California constitutions. This was the nation's most sweeping decision in perhaps the most controversial realm of the rights explosion: the right to die...

Some common words found in the essay are:
Dutch California, Elizabeth Bouvia, , Morphine Thiopental, Hospital Association, South Africa, terminally ill, Bill Rights, nurses hospital administrators, doctors nurses hospital, financial social burden, social practice, terminal cancer, deliberate life, period suffering, death patients, life death, putting death, voluntary euthanasia, allowed die,
Approximate Word count = 2273
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)