Thursday, April 16, 2015

Does no one love us enough?

January 2015

I think that society needs to show a lot more compassion to terminally ill people who face terrible suffering before they die, by giving them the option of an assisted death before that suffering becomes unbearable. There is no dignity in a human screaming in unbearable pain. We have legalised abortions. That is the murder of an unborn child. We have places in the world where a death sentence is still legal and it is done humanely by injection. (I never could understand how you can kill a person to teach a person not to kill a person). When our beloved pets are suffering, we do the “kind” thing and have them euthanized. But us, we living, breathing human beings are kept alive, irrespective of the amount of suffering we endure.

A hundred years from now we will look back and shake our heads at the shame for allowing and preserving life almost at all costs, irrespective of the amount of suffering the person is enduring. There can be dozens of legal hoops to go through to ensure that doctor-assisted suicide is not abused. So if a patient is of sound mind, the condition is incurable, the pain is not manageable; the patient should have the right to choose his or her own death without anyone else getting charged with assisting the patient. There is no sense and no purpose to suffering.

Who decided that suicide was a sin or evil? The Church?

Who decided that we have to keep people going irrespective of their pain? The Medical Profession?

People can have a living will in which they can state that they do not want to be resuscitated, but nowhere has a person the right to decide to take his or her life. We all have a right to life, as does the foetus, but laws say that this right does not belong to the unborn child. The law says that the person condemned to death can choose the way he or she dies, and the lethal injection has been decided by law and society that this is the most humane thing to do. And the animals – they also have the right to life, but when a pet owner loves his pet dearly, he has the right to take that decision for his pet and have to animal euthanized to stop unnecessary suffering. Why can we not be helped to leave this earth in as human as possible way, with doctor assistance, so that the unbearable suffering can stop. Does no one love us enough?