Is euthanasia acceptable?

Setanta, my guess is that Rockpie is too young . . .

i'm 17, from wales and male. thats about all you need to know.

what are your opinions on euthanasia? for me, i think it should not be allowed because it is my belief that it is morally, medically and socially wrong. but i'd like to hear some other views on this contraversial topic.

what are your opinions on euthanasia? for me, i think it should not be allowed because it is my belief that it is morally, medically and socially wrong. but i'd like to hear some other views on this contraversial topic.

rockpie wrote:

what are your opinions on euthanasia? for me, i think it should not be allowed because it is my belief that it is morally, medically and socially wrong. but i'd like to hear some other views on this contraversial topic.

And keeping them artifically alive while they suffer and die painfully is not morally or socially wrong?

Bella Dea wrote:

rockpie wrote:

what are your opinions on euthanasia? for me, i think it should not be allowed because it is my belief that it is morally, medically and socially wrong. but i'd like to hear some other views on this contraversial topic.

And keeping them artifically alive while they suffer and die painfully is not morally or socially wrong?

Putting them to death against their will, or while pretending to speak for them, would be wrong, would it not?

This would include all active or passive methods that bring about their deaths.

Putting them to death against their will, or while pretending to speak for them, would be wrong, would it not?

This would include all active or passive methods that bring about their deaths.

Fisher:`Aid in dying' a kinder image than suicide
By Patty Fisher
Mercury News

<snip>

``We're not talking about suicide, when a depressed person or a mentally ill person ends a life that could go on,'' said the Rev. John Brooke. ``A person who is terminally ill is already in the dying process.''

Brooke, 75, is a United Church of Christ minister who got into what I'll call the aid-in-dying movement nearly 20 years ago, after watching a good friend die slowly and painfully from AIDS. I first got to know him in 1992, when he was pastor of Congregational Church of Belmont and campaigning for a ``death with dignity'' ballot measure in California. We talked for hours then about how technology aimed at prolonging life was actually prolonging death and about the right of the terminally ill to end their suffering.

The initiative would have made California the first state to legalize physician aid in dying, but it failed. In those days, crackpot Jack Kevorkian was the public face of the right-to-die movement. And powerful opponents like the Roman Catholic Church and the California Medical Association campaigned aggressively against it.

Two years later, Oregon passed a similar law -- but with more safeguards -- and it took effect in 1997. This year, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld it despite the Bush administration's efforts to kill it.

Oregon's law has worked as Brooke and others hoped it would. Some people who are near death -- 64 of them in 2005 -- get lethal prescriptions from their doctors, and about half of those die from their diseases without ever taking the pills.

Last year, I heard from Brooke again. He'd retired from his Belmont church but not from his cause. The California Legislature was considering AB 651, a new death-with-dignity bill, and he was pushing it. By that time, Terri Schiavo had replaced Kevorkian as the issue's public face. Polls showed that 70 percent of Californians supported the right to die.

In an age of marketing slogans and sound bites, he's alarmed that ``physician-assisted suicide'' is the most common term for his cause.

``The word `suicide' is such a pejorative term,'' he said. ``It makes a lot of difference in the public perception.''

His allies have watched conservatives define what it means to be a patriot and a Christian. They have seen abortion-rights advocates struggle to prove they weren't pro-abortion or anti-life. Now the aid-in-dying forces have gone on the offensive.

In Oregon, the advocacy group Compassion & Choices recently persuaded the state to remove the word ``suicide'' from all references to the Death With Dignity law. Others have appealed to the Associated Press to make ``aid in dying'' the preferred term in its stylebook.

<snip>

Death by any other name is still death. It's hard to look at, hard to talk about. Leaders of the death-with-dignity movement have forced us to talk about the importance of giving dying people comfort and, in the end, the right to end their pain.
And now they've given us the words we need.

real life wrote:

Putting them to death against their will, or while pretending to speak for them, would be wrong, would it not?

This would include all active or passive methods that bring about their deaths.

What if it is not against their will? What if someone has made their wishes very clear in this matter, not to be kept alive by machines?

Would you let them die with dignity or would you force measures on them that they they did not want?

Have you ever had to make this decision?

P