Word: euthanasia
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...there is general agreement that it is morally permissible to allow a person to die if therapy would not lead to recovery. Views diverge, however, when this principle is applied to specific situations. The Roman Catholic Church has the most explicit position. The Vatican's 1980 declaration on euthanasia clearly permits an end to treatment that would only "secure a precarious and burdensome prolongation of life" when death is imminent. Says Rabbi Seymour Siegel of New York's Jewish Theological Seminary: "It is the individual's duty to live as long...
There is only one prospect worse than being chained to an intolerable existence: the nightmare of a botched attempt to end it." So Arthur Koestler wrote in his 1981 preface to A Guide to Self-Deliverance, a suicide manual distributed to the 8,000 members of the British Voluntary Euthanasia Society. When the famed 77-year-old writer (Darkness at Noon), who suffered from Parkinson's disease, decided two weeks ago that his life was intolerable, he reportedly swallowed the finely calibrated dose of drugs prescribed by the society. Sharing the fatal potion was his wife Cynthia...
...growing number of proponents of "self-deliverance," the Koestlers' suicides seemed to epitomize the "gentle, easy" death celebrated by the Voluntary Euthanasia Society and 18 similar groups that have sprung up in Europe, Asia, Australia and the U.S. Still, the sensational case raised some disturbing ethical questions about suicide pacts in particular and, more generally, about the fast-growing movement that aims to facilitate the suicide of the terminally...
...Koestler have a moral obligation to dissuade his apparently healthy wife from ending her life? Are organizations like the Voluntary Euthanasia Society encouraging suicide by presenting the act as dignified, respectable, even attractive? Koestler's effusion in the how-to book for which he wrote the preface was characteristic of the movement's publications: "The prospect of falling peacefully, blissfully asleep is not only soothing but can make it positively desirable to quit this pain-racked mortal frame...
...father-in-law suggests that he join the Nazi Party, so he does. An old World War I buddy (Pip Miller) suggests that he join the SS elite corps, so he does. The uniform thrills him, as does a written plaudit from the Führer on his pro-euthanasia novel: "The surge of pride in me! Reading that scrawled sentence in Adolfs shaky hand-It said: 'Written from the heart...