Countless debates have been conducted in recent years regarding euthanasia. It is a topic of great significance and sensitivity, because in the simplest terms, it is a debate about someone’s right to take his/her own life. Ultimately the legalization of euthanasia is a matter of human rights, and therefore the outcome of its debate has great implications on how humans define those inalienable rights. The arguments against euthanasia are numerous, and many of them are valid, good, humanitarian points. After all, euthanasia has been used to justify some of history’s most horrific and terrible genocides and injustices throughout the world. However, the debate of euthanasia, like life, is very complicated. It is very opaque, not black and
Another important argument for legalizing euthanasia is the cost of keeping patients alive. It is common for a terminally ill patient to lose all their savings while sitting helplessly in the hospital, against their will, with no hope of recovery. This is especially true for people without health insurance. A patient in this situation must sit passively, as they suffer in helpless pain, while the money of their families and loved ones is drained for a hopeless cause, for the maintaining of the misery and terror that life is for them. They take up time, resources of the hospital and its staff, and taxpayer dollars. All a patient in this circumstance wants is to end it all. Yet somehow, by denying them their wish to end it all, the suffering of that individual is spread like a virus, and becomes a collective suffering, shared by all and alleviated by nothing but that which the government and “law” denies them. As Taylor (2005) reported that “Some 28 percent of this year's Medicare budget of $290 billion (projected to grow to $649 billion by 2015) will be spent on people in their last year of life. In many cases, the main effect will be to prolong the pain of impending death” (p. 958). Not only does this money go to a “lost cause” whereby the beneficiary of the law and resources is only made to suffer by those same offerings, others who want to choose life are further denied in their options