Sample Research Paper

Sample Research Paper

Sehome High School Library

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Knight 1

Mary Knight

Mr. Clark

Current Issues 302

5 October 2000

Euthanasia: When life is to be feared more than death

	...the elderly patients...are comatose.  They weigh

	practically nothing.  Their skin hangs in heavy 

	folds on their skeletons.  ‘These patients must be
 
	fed through gastric tubes pushed down their throats,’

	Dr. Peter Haemmerli explains, and that can make even

	comatose patients retch and vomit’ (Culliton 1273).

Thus, according to Barbara J. Culliton, many severely ill patients must endure much pain.

Not a very pretty scene, is it? Is it right to keep them living in this pain? Wouldn't it be

more humane to give them a painless release from their agony? For this irreversibly comatose

patient euthanasia would be justified. Now consider the patient suffering from malignant cancer

or some other terminal disease.

How "right" is it to keep injecting drugs and performing small operations to keep the

patient alive, only to lengthen his suffering? As in the case of the irreversibly comatose

patient, euthanasia is not only morally justified, it is the only alternative for those truly

concerned with the patient's welfare.

Euthanasia is clinically defined as an "act or practice of painlessly putting to death

persons suffering from incurable conditions or diseases (Bok 1). The word "euthanasia" is

generally also applied to cases in which the doctor withdraws the machines or drugs which are

keeping the patient alive and thus allows the patient to die naturally.

Knight 2

Euthanasia ends pain mercifully and easily. It is used when the pain of degradation of

life or the pain of a terminal disease is greater than the pain of death (Heifetz 5). In these

cases death is not the nightmare experienced in war, but rather an alternative to endless pain.

"At times we must look at death as a welcome release from an untenable life. Death need not be

a source of horror. It can be freedom, a release from agony" (Heifetz 5). This observation by

Dr. Milton D. Heifetz encompasses the purpose of euthanasia: to provide " a welcome release

from an untenable life" (5).

One such "untenable life" would be that of the irreversibly comatose patient. The most

widely accepted definition of an irreversible coma states that the patient displays total

"unreceptivity and unresponsivity...even the most painful stimuli evoke no...response...,"

according to the Committee of the Harvard Medical School (The Dilemmas of Euthanasia 162). This

includes "No movements of breathing...No reflexes...Flat electroencephalogram..." (The Dilemmas

of Euthanasia 162-163).

Knight 3

These are characteristics of a permanently nonfunctioning brain. These is no brain

activity; thus, there is no thought, and without thought there can be no mind, no "being," no

life. And yet, through the use of respirators, the heart and lungs can be kept pumping

indefinitely. There was a case in which a patient was maintained in a state of no mental

response for eight years (Maguire 13).

Knight 4

Works Cited

Culliton, Barbara J. "The Hammerli Affair: Is Passive Euthanasia Murder?" Science. December 1995: 1271-1275.

The Dilemmas of Euthanasia. Ed. John A. Behnke and Sissela Bok. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1995.

Heifetz, Milton D. The Right To Die. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1995.

Maguire, Daniel C. Death by Choice. New York: Doubleday and Co., 1994.

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