week eleven_about euthanasia

Euthanasia, in Chinese it is translated into 安樂死,means getting dead in peace. This translation may give the public an impression that euthanasia is something positive or at least not so unacceptable as what it really is. However whether to make euthanasia legal is still a rather difficult problem to governments throughout the world, for this is a critical topic concerning life and death and also the limitation of human being, in the perspective of population with some religious belief.

Even in some developed countries, the legalization of euthanasia is still at a very beginning stage. Netherlands is the first country that made positive euthanasia legal, and most countries are still holding a hesitating attitude towards this issue or just making passive euthanasia legal: perhaps out of the reason that passive euthanasia is closer to natural death, and either the hospital or relatives of the one receive euthanasia may feel less guilty of allowing patients to make this decision.

In my opinion, patients with no possibility of being rescue-able should be given the right to decide their life and death, this also fits the situation where people regard their life has been broken due to either diseases or accident. But making decision of euthanasia casually, though not too much influence would happen on the one decide to do so in voluntary cases, trauma may happen on relatives or even medical professionals. Still, to societies without an open enough attitude towards the turning from alive to dead, let alone services like Euthanasia take-away, the legalization of even passive euthanasia should be considered really carefully. Without a solid base of understanding the meaning of death, euthanasia may be modified or even lost its original humanized meaning.