Euthanatia

April 2005

IS EUTHANASIA A CRIME?

By Dr. Lionel C.M. VonFrederick Rawlins, President & CEO, The VonFrederick Group

The war on terrorism has been temporarily overshadowed by the Teri Schiavo

case in Florida. As a criminologist, this debacle has intrinsic value to the criminal

justice system and to society as a whole. Questions about the morality of

euthanasia are not new but they are debated with a new intensity, especially since

the feeding tube was ordered removed from Teri Schiavo.

Recent advances in biomedical technology have made it possible to

prolong human life in ways undreamed of by past generations. As a result, it is

not unusual to find individuals who have lived a long and useful life now

permanently incapable of functioning in any recognizably human fashion.

Biological life continues; but some find it tempting to say that human life, in any

meaningful sense, has ceased. They argue that there is no longer any capacity for

creative employment, intellectual pursuits, or the cultivation of interpersonal

relationships.

Discussions of the moral justifiability of euthanasia often involve

distinctions, which are themselves controversial. Such distinctions include that

between ordinary and extraordinary means of prolonging life, and that between

killing and allowing to die. In accordance with a “narrow construal of

euthanasia,” euthanasia is equivalent to mercy killing. If a physician administers

a lethal dose of a drug (on grounds of mercy), this act is a paradigm of euthanasia.

If, on the other hand, a physician allows the patient to die by ceasing to employ

“extraordinary means” (such as a respirator, or the feeding tube in the Schiavo

case), this does not count as euthanasia, or does it?

In contrast, on a “broad construal of euthanasia,” the category of

euthanasia encompasses both killing and allowing to die (on grounds of mercy).

Those who adopt a broad construal of euthanasia often distinguish between active

euthanasia,...