The right to die
It is your 189th day in hospital; 4536 hours looking at the same lemon-coloured walls, the same 30 uneven ceiling tiles, the same blinking florescent light. You are barely able to move, talk or even look at your family. Every second of your life is spent in unimaginable pain and there is nothing you can to do to stop it. From now on, every single day for the rest of your life you will be waiting for the release of death to finally take the agony away. You can see the stress and financial burden on your family that your suffering is causing, and you wish there was a way to make it all stop.
Euthanasia is defined as the painless killing of a patient suffering from an incurable and painful disease or in an irreversible coma. And what you were imagining is unfortunately the harsh reality for many people. These people have lost the right to their choice; choice a basic human right in our society, well supposedly.
I think a large majority of you will agree with me that it is up to the individual to decide many important life choices so why can’t they have power over the most important one- their own life? With cases such as terminal cancer when the patient is in endless pain and doctors are fully aware, why we should ignore a more rational option like euthanasia. If a dog is hit by a car and there is no reasonable solution, a vet will put it down as it is in the best interest of the dog but when a human is in the same situation they are forced to endure a life time of misery, torment and despair. We like to consider ourselves the most intelligent race but how can we call ourselves this when we are knowingly putting thousands of our people through torture. This is immoral.
In Europe, Belgium are lowering their legal euthanasia age down to 12. Of course, there has been an outcry against to this brave decision, but this clearly reflects the fact that Belgium officials are willing to place greater faith in their citizen’s ability to make their own decisions. The main argument against this decision is “how are they allowing children to die just because they are disabled” But abortions are legal in the UK if the babies’ quality of life is impaired. 2,692 abortions were carried out in 2012 under the grounds that there was a risk that the child would be born handicapped, and both of these are taking a child’s life so how can one be justified and not the other? Why are we letting terminally ill children go through an anguish that no child should feel, being segregated from their friends and living a life that only brings them hurt. These patients have deemed their lives to be worthless yet you are letting them spend every day of their lives with this self-loathing and hatred building more and more, and you consider this to be ethical?
Medication and drugs for prolonging a terminally ill patient’s life can do more harm than good. You are giving them false hope that they are getting better and that everything will be okay when in fact you know they won’t be. You think you are doing it for the best, letting them see their family for longer or making sure they have done everything in life they wanted to, but really you are paying to see the pain they have been put through to go on for longer. If you are paralysed, you already know that you are a burden for your family, you are unable to