4. It Saves Lives
Not only does legalizing euthanasia not significantly shorten life, it’s been proven to actually save lives. Don’t believe me? Well, you’ve only got to look to the Netherlands, where they’ve had progressive laws on assisted dying for over a decade now. In 2005, a study by the New England Journal of Medicine found that only 0.4 percent of all euthanasia procedures were carried out without the patient’s explicit permission. You might argue that that’s 0.4 percent too many, but get this: A 1991 report—written a decade before euthanasia was legalized—put the number at 0.8 percent. In other words, giving a nationwide go-ahead for doctors to legally end their patient’s lives actually halved the number of unwanted deaths. But hey, that’s just Holland, right? They do things differently there. Doctors in a less-hippie-liberal culture would never kill off patients without their consent, right? Well think again. In Britain, a 2012 study discovered that as many as 57,000 patients each year die without being told that efforts to keep them alive have been stopped. Instead, they’re just shoved onto a “death pathway” designed to alleviate suffering without ever being told. So basically, doctors in the UK are already practicing euthanasia—only without any of the legal framework to check abuses that would come from legalizing it.
3. It Makes Economic Sense
Most people would be shocked to think economics factored into their life-or-death decisions, and rightly so. However, there’s no getting around how absurdly expensive end-of-life care is in America: According to CNN, one in every four Medicare dollars spent goes to the five percent of beneficiaries in the last year of their life. The upshot of this is often crippling debt for the families of terminally ill patients, with the care of a single individual at the end of their life costing an estimated $39,000. For 40 percent of households, the bill exceeds their financial assets. This might be acceptable if end-of-life care was worth the money, but it’s objectively not. Doctors will readily attest to the ability of modern medicine to slightly prolong life—at the cost of totally destroying its quality. If you can’t be bothered to read that last link, I’ll sum it up here: End-of-life care is often brutal, nasty, traumatic, and very expensive, putting patients through long stretches of unnecessary suffering just to give them an extra month or two. And when the terminally ill patient undergoing these nasty, expensive treatments has repeatedly insisted that they’d rather be dead, you have to start wondering who all this expenditure is really benefiting.
2. It Won’t Target The Vulnerable
One of the big myths about legalizing assisted dying is that it will lead to pressure on the old, disabled, and infirm to end their lives. It’s an understandable fear and one we shouldn’t take lightly: However, it also has absolutely no basis in fact.Take Oregon. In 1994, it became the first state in America to legalize assisted dying, with the law going into effect in 1998. Ten years later, the number of doctor-assisted suicides stood at 341—not 341 per year, but 341 per decade. That works out at about 0.2 percent of all patient deaths—a number so tiny it hardly seems worth mentioning. In 2007, the Journal of Medical Ethics analyzed the cases of every single patient who’d opted for the service and found poor, elderly, minority, or otherwise “vulnerable” groups were represented as infrequently as everyone else. In other words, the vulnerable were no more likely to receive assisted death than anyone else, with the sole exception of young white men—who were the primary users of the service. And if there’s one group that doesn’t need classifying as “vulnerable,” it’s young white men.
1. The Hippocratic Oath
The famous maxim “do no harm” is a summation of the Hippocratic Oath—an ancient code designed to guide doctors in their actions. Many people interpret this to mean “do nothing to harm the patient’s chances of survival.” But, taken literally, it could just as easily mean “don’t artificially keep someone alive when death is preferable.”It all comes down to what we believe constitutes “harm.” When a patient is in intense pain or suffering severe mental anguish, our society could be doing more harm by keeping them alive than allowing them to die. In extreme cases, such as those of Tony Nicklinson and Paul Lamb above, it could be argued that any physician who didn’t alleviate their suffering when asked was violating the principles of their oath—and allowing both great harm and a great injustice to occur on their watch. At the end of the day, it’s up for us to decide whether we can sit back and watch people suffer, or choose to do something about it. Until we make up our minds, that suffering will continue.
http://listverse.com/2013/09/12/10-arguments-for-legalising-euthanasia