Word: euthanasias
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...Euthanasia, the environment and the question of exactly what makes someone human are just some of the other issues Robocop II effectively tackles in the guise of a technoblitz tour-de-force...
...this case neither doctor nor patient works very well as a symbol for the euthanasia debate. Adkins, a 54-year-old Portland schoolteacher, was suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer's. A strong, lively woman who loved hang gliding and mountain climbing and playing her flute, she was not yet very sick; the week before her suicide she beat her 32-year-old son in a tennis match. It was more her dread than her disease that drove her to seek Kevorkian's help. Even before her illness she had joined the Hemlock Society, a group that supports terminally...
Purely economic arguments for euthanasia can sound brutally calculating. But as health-care costs rise annually at double and triple the rate of inflation, and as new technologies promise ever higher bills for ever older patients, the questions grow about how to ration medical care. In 1987 the Oregon legislature voted to deny organ transplants under its Medicaid program and to use that money instead for prenatal care. It is only a matter of time before the issue of continuing care for patients in a vegetative state comes under similar scrutiny...
...some stage a life is no longer worth sustaining, patients are suddenly vulnerable. "We would begin with competent people making their own choice," warns Daniel Callahan, director of the Hastings Center and an authority on ethical issues in medicine, "but we would be too easily led into involuntary euthanasia -- either manipulating people into asking for suicide or actually doing it to them without their permission because they have become too burdensome or costly." The haunting precedent, of course, is the Nazi Holocaust, during which the chronically ill, then the socially unacceptable, and finally all non-Germans were viewed as expendable...
Both the medical and economic arguments for euthanasia are rejected by the powerful right-to-life movement, which commands hundreds of thousands of supporters nationwide. And as on the abortion issue, their stance against mercy killing is based on a theology that places the entire debate in a different context, that of a family of faith that tends most lovingly to its weakest members. The sanctity of a human existence, they argue, does not depend on its quality or its cost. What God gives only he can take away, and to usurp that right is an act of grave hubris...