Active Help to death – A human right?

Active Help to death - A human right?

Does someone have the right to take his or her own life, with legal help? It is a human right to live our own lives, therefore, should we not have the legal right to end our lives when we want to? On the other hand, is it a decision only you should take, or should a doctor be involved? In addition, should your relatives be involved in your decision?  Is it just people with diseases that should be able to be helped to die in a legal way? Or anyone who does not want to fulfill their lives? Today, active help to death is illegal in Sweden, therefore, people that do not want to commit suicide, go to other countries, like Switzerland or the Netherlands, to end their lives.

This issue, about a person's right to decide when he or she should end their life, is a very debated topic. The discussion started in 1973, and has been going on ever since.  Articles have been published in morning magazines in Sweden and political parties have been discussing it.

There are two different kinds of helping a patient to die.

Passive help to death is when you avoid medical help to keep a person from dying. An example of that would be if a patient is in a coma and the doctor turns the medical equipment off that is keeping the patient alive. This is accepted in most countries, of course with the support from close relatives.

Active help to death is when a doctor shortens the life of a patient. Either with morphine or a mixture of different preparations. This is illegal in almost all countries. Only Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands and the state of Oregon allow this.

Pros

You should be able to decide over your own life or death

It is more respectful to die in a peaceful way instead of dying in hard pains.

People who want to die are not forced to commit suicide or go to another country.

Cons

If we would accept active help to death, the faith to the hospitals and doctors will decrease.

The right to die in a legal way, accepted by the government, can become a duty for disabled persons, because they do not want to be a burden for the society. 

Legal responsibilities would increase for hospitals and doctors, who may not want to be given that authority to decide over life or death. The question remains, who should make the final call. Should it be the patient, doctors or relatives? 

There are many reasons why active help to death should be legal, just as many as there are why it should not be accepted. 

As I said before, it is a human right to live your life the way you want; therefore, you should have the right to end it.

Opponents say that it is not ethical or moral to take a people's lives; even tough is it what the patient wants. They say that you are not showing respect to life itself by legislate active help to death. But is not death a part of life? And should we not thereby give the possibility to die in a respectful way without physical pain?

Is it just people with diseases that should have the right to die by their own choice in a legal way? But who should decide who is sick and who is not?

My point of view is that we should allow active help to death. Why should we keep a person alive as long as possible? Why should we not end their physical or mental suffering? This is not something you decide in just five minutes. In order to make this work, I believe there should be an extended process to think, discuss and decide what you really want and why. In addition, your doctor should come up with suggestions, how they can make the patient's life easier and less painful. If the patient is not in pain, physically, the doctor should have the right to make the patient go to a psychiatrist and then continue the discussion if they still do not want to fulfill their lives.

This is a really hard discussion to take a stand to, because the negative aspects are really important almost as reasonable as the arguments why we should accept active help to death. In spite of the good arguments, there are also problems with active help to death, such as if we get a non democratic government, and it is legal to kill people, we maybe soon have the system that was used in Nazi Germany. But right now, with the strong democratic scores we have in Sweden, I do not think it will happen in the closest future.

The reason why I want to legislate active help to death is because of my grandmother. She got Alzheimer's disease when I was young. This affected her really bad, and also of course her relationship to her son and her daughters. Even tough I was young I saw how bad my dad felt every time we visited her. The last couple of years were the worst. She could not recognize her own children, was constantly in pain, and all of us could see that she just wanted to end her life. My grandmother lived twelve years with Alzheimer's, five of them without the fire in her eyes both me and my dad knew so well. Why should she suffer when nothing will make her better? So that her relatives can have more time with her? I do not want to remember my grandmother the way she was at the end of her life. I want to remember her for the happy and positive woman she really was. I do not want to see her suffer for no reason.

In the future, I believe that we have to accept active help to death. I think that this is a question that should be getting more attention from the politicians. I think that they are afraid to take a stan...