Euthanasia: Murder Or Moral Responsibility?

Can we kill for merciful reasons? Can people decide when and how to end their lives? Some people believe that as our bodies belong to us, we should be allowed to decide the time and the manner of our death, especially if we are suffering from unbearable pain and have no prospects of recovery. The right of people to decide what to do with their lives sometimes can reach a controversial point whenthese people demand a dignified death as exercising their rights and independence autonomy.
According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, euthanasia is the act of killing or permitting the death of a hopelessly sick or injured individual in a painless way for reasons of mercy. Hence, the term “mercy killing” is often used to refer to this practice.
Euthanasia can beclassified in different ways. It can be practised against or on somebody’s free will; it can also be active, which implies the act of killing somebody, or passive, which implies the act of letting somebody die. As this is a controversial issue which sparks off intense debate among people, it is necessary to analyse all the different views in detail.
In Cuestiones Morales (1996), Martín Farrel statesthat “it is difficult to find moral arguments against euthanasia except for religious principles.” (p. 259) This is because the majority of the objections against this practice stems from different religions. Catholicism, for example, states that all those who are in favour of euthanasia have a serious moral problem as this practice is a form of murder. The act of killing a person, whether in avoluntary way or not, means killing a son of God. God creates the man and, therefore, He is the only one who can decide when a life reaches its end. In Euthanasia y Cultura (1952), Gonzalez Bustamante says, “God is the Master of our lives and has complete control over the beginning and end of His creation.” (p. 63)
In this way, euthanasia is an act which is against both human life and God’srule. The Church says that Christian people should adopt a particular attitude towards euthanasia which includes accepting pain and death as a way of a communion with God since through suffering, we are closer to Him and remembering that after death, God’s hug is waiting for us and that He will comfort us in heaven. Thus, Catholics should see death as the final encounter with God; that is why, weshould not be afraid of death since it is not the end of our lives but the beginning.
Although euthanasia can be seen as a moral practice exercised to reduce somebody’s suffering, it can also be a way to end a person’s life for other particular reasons. For instance, a person who looks forward to inherit his relative`s fortune, or people who do not want to have a burden of an ill or insanerelative on their shoulders. In all these cases, euthanasia is seen as a practice used for eugenic ends. In his book, Farrel (1996) explains that the individual's will must be analysed in detail in order to prevent the use of euthanasia for other reasons. Among several examples, he says that “in 1933, Hitler practised euthanasia by killing 275,000 mental handicap people and others who suffer fromabnormalities” (p. 261).
This example is related to the “Theory of Selection” that Iglesias explains in his book, “Aborto, Eutanasia y Fecundación Artificial”(1959) This theory states that insane people, and those who suffer from abnormalities or who have deformations should be killed as they constitute a burden to society. The fact that people suffer from a mental illness or that they havesome malformations does not mean that they cannot have a normal life. The decision to die can also be instigated by someone else, that is why it is very important to verify if the individual really wants to undergo this procedure.
There were some cases in which people were denied this right and some others in which people were granted the right to die. The following ones are some of the most...