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Date Submitted: 03/27/2011 03:23 AM
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,...