Euthanasia

“There is a thin line between life and death… and it keeps getting thinner everyday.” With the advancement of life-support systems, the black-and-white of the living and the dead has been smudged with a lot of grey; we are daily pushing the limits of life. Conditions once considered indicative of death are now reversible. Proper help can revive, or at least stabilize, the most far gone cases. So, the same person who would be pronounced dead in a small town may be pronounced alive if taken to a good institute.

Ironically, the more improvements we make in the field of healthcare, the more difficult it gets to define the very basic foundation of healthcare: Life, and its opposite, Death. Death was earlier defined as the stopping of respiration but that got outdated by the introduction of ventilators and heart-lung machines. Death is now defined as the cessation of mental activities, for whatever reason it may be. It is also called brain death. But nowadays we have equipments that can keep a person far beyond our help lingering on to life by some feeble impulse of his brain. This is where euthanasia or ‘mercy killing’ comes into picture.

Only a few decades ago, mercy killing would have meant squishing an ant that was writhing in pain after tearing one of its legs but now, due to the advancement of technology, the same concept has to be applied to humans too.

Let’s face it, when a member of the family is in the hospital, the whole family is like in a limbo. Time is divided into visiting hours and non-visiting hours. If, on top of that, no one is sure whether the person is dead or alive or how long they will stay in the current state, it is even more difficult for the family. In that case, they can neither stay put nor move on. However cruel or heartless it may sound, I firmly believe that it is good for everyone if they are allowed to move on in such cases.

Moreover, if the patient himself is in terrible pain or discomfort with only a negligible chance of revival, is it not only human to try to relieve him of the suffering? How often have you said to yourself while reading about such cases – “It would have been better if he had died.” ? If we can’t deliver cure to a person why should we tie up our hands and sit silently listening to his cries of pain? It is an act of compassion, not brutality. Recently there was a case where a terminally ill patient travelled all the way from the UK to USA so that his son could pull the plug on him without it being a crime.

But there are lots of questions and lots of clarifications that will have to be addressed before any such thing can be implemented. Some of them being: Who will decide whether a person is dead or alive when even the doctors have not been able to agree on a definition of death and when the definition can be neutralized suddenly by another invention? Whose decision should it be to pull the plug when the time comes? Euthanasia can also lend itself to misuse very easily and there would have to be an extremely tight check so that no one is able to do so.

Despite all these drawbacks, euthanasia is a very humane concept and has been slowly gaining acceptance worldwide.