Euthanasia Should Become Legal In America
Just picture yourself fighting for each breath you take; you can’t even move your muscles without excruciating pain shooting through your limbs. Imagine your family members sitting in a small enclosed hospital room watching you suffer day after day with multiple tubes entering and exiting your body with strong medicines flowing through them just to keep you alive. Just to keep the pain at ease; even though they’re barley helping. Would you want to live you remaining life like that? To have your family watch you deteriorate with each passing day. Would you want that, or would you rather just be peacefully euthanized without any pain, into a deep slumber? I, for one, would rather be “put to sleep” and watch over my family from above. To start off, people should not have to suffer through intolerable pain and live a lifeless life. They should have the right to end their life when and how they want. Euthanasia is the best moral action. Virginia Ironside once said, “It is morally repressible to keep alive someone who cannot see, move, speak, or hear” (Ironside p.22). People should have the right to stop all of the pain they are having. It is their body. It is a crime to let those people who are suffering live through all of that harsh pain occurring throughout themselves on a daily basis. Keeping really sick people alive is not a right when they do not want to live their life on life support. Even though there are many sides to this topic of Euthanasia, whether is it right or wrong, I believe that it should become legal in America for multiple reasons. Nelson 2
A 2006 Gallup poll shows that 75% of Americans support “allowing a doctor to take the life of a patient who is suffering from a disease and who wants to die” (Gale 2007 print). Doctors just want to help ease the pain, and the person in pain could really want to be dead. As in an illustration, a lady named Theresa Marie Schindler- Schiavo where at age 26 had a random heart attack (cardio respiratory arrest) which then was diagnosed with hypoxic encephalopathy which is where she did not have enough oxygen in the brain (Schiavo). She was in a severely neurological state, which is where your nerves are not working, so she was put on a PEG tube (feeding tube) so she could get her nutrients and hydrations. Her husband was her guardian, and he had told the doctors he wanted the feeding tube to be taken out. Terry had died 13 days later from dehydration and starvation. Doctors say if she had the right treatment while she was in the hospital she could have lived a normal life (Schiavo). What happened in that situation is passive euthanasia; Passive Euthanasia is to end a person life by not taking the necessary and ordinary action to maintain life. This can be done by withdrawing water, food, drugs, medical and/or surgical procedures.
Truly, death is not always bad. Family/friends do “cave in” and have their loved one get the plug pulled, have the breathing machine shut off, and/or have that person be euthanized. “To respect life, you have to honor death; it is this fear of death that fuels their obsession with it” (Werbirnox Taylor). It should not be up to someone else of when that person should die. If that person wishes to die because they are in a vegetative state or very ill and unhealthy they should be able to wish it upon themselves. It is not someone else’s responsibility if that person Nelson 3 should die or not. It is the person who is passing’s wish which would be called a living will. A living will is a document that is telling what is going to happen if that person would to go into a vegetative state or gets a terminal illness and it determines if that person would want to be euthanized or have anything else done to them.
Second of all, any age should be able to get euthanized. “Children that are born severely ill will hardly ever live a real life (Holt).” Some