Should Euthanasia Be Legal?

Anonymous
Should Euthanasia Be Legal?

What business is it of mine if you decide to end your own life? That is a real question. When people even outside of the realm of terminal illness kill themselves, it is not as if any of us have any real choice in the matter. They have decided for themselves that they want to end their own lives, and though you may try to talk them out of it, that frequently does not prevent them from doing so because we are autonomous and we are allowed to make decisions concerning our own health and our own life and those determined few who want to end their lives, will do it.

Yes, life...we can choose only life according to many laws around the country and around the world, but as with the abortion issue, or the death penalty issue, many of these detractors are simply only thinking of themselves or what they would do and not someone in the case of most euthanasia cases, who isn't living any sort of life outside of an everyday onslaught of pain and sickness. It's one thing to talk about the virtues of life when you are healthy and happy and productive, but it's another when everyday the pain is worse and worse and you have doctors repeatedly telling you and your family that there is nothing you can do about it, and there is no medicine that may help or cure what ails you.

Should Euthanasia Be Legal?

My friends mother spent 30 years dealing with complications due to AIDS which she contracted after her husband, who died years before of the disease, cheated on her, and infected her with the virus. For all the years I've known my friend and her mother, her mother's life has been fret with life more in than outside of a hospital. She would literally wither as her kidneys shut down, as a normal infection would wreak havoc on her immune system, as she would have several issues just related to the disease in general. It did come to a point where she would tell my friend that the pain was too much and that she just didn't want to live like that anymore. How can you stand by and allow someone to suffer like that who does not by choice decide they want to go on (my friends mom died under hospice care).

Should Euthanasia Be Legal?

Someone who cannot do more than exist, is not living. We do try to save those young and healthy people who try and commit suicide because we know there is potential hope in their situations, but not so for the terminal patients. You are literally just waiting for them to die at their expense. I don't think you know what it's like until you're in a position where you are staring someone in the eyes who is suffering or being made to suffer or it is you in the hospital bed not wanting to wake up each morning because you know what it's going to be like. I cannot in good faith just say, we shouldn't allow Euthanasia because it is and should be an individuals right to choose to do what they want to their own body.

I experienced this very real choice when my grandmother had an unexpected aneurysm. It left her brain dead a few hours after she was life flighted from her home into a hospital in the city. There was the choice: keep her on life support with no hope of her ever essentially coming back to herself or choose to end her life. Our family each said their peace, and ultimately we all chose to not have her live as a shell in a room full of tubes until she fully succumbed to the damage. Once you're sitting across from someone and in that position, you know what its like to see someone suffering or to envision a life where there isn't a life of any quality for them. No one wants to have to make a decision like that for someone else, which is why in cases where people do have the ability to choose for themselves, we must let them chose to either stay and fight until the end, or go as peacefully as possible on their own terms.

Should Euthanasia Be Legal?
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