Euthanasia
The term Euthanasia also known as’ assisted suicide’ is painless killing of a patient suffering from an incurable and painful disease or in an irreversible coma which can only be prescribed by a doctor however the legalisation of Euthanasia is very low, only a few countries and a few states in the USA have legalised it.
A chemistry professor at Leuven University College in Flanders, Belgium, going by the name of Tom Mortier, 38, says his country has gone overboard. Mortier’s mother, 65 year old Godelieva De Troyer was put to death on April 12th 2012 for what doctors described as “untreatable depression”. Mortier was unaware of his mother’s death until he received a phone call the next day asking him to retrieve her body. Oncologist
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I will identify many issues regarding Euthanasia through 65 year old Godelieva De Troyer’s case and apply two ethical theories to the dilemma at hand. I will argue for and against the topic of Euthanasia and what society sees it as. The first ethical theory will be Kantian ethics; the second will be utilitarianism, repeating the same arguments. I will conclude with a statement/evaluation on whether I believe Euthanasia is ethical or not and whether the doctor should be punished for assisting Tom Mortier’s mom’s euthanasia without having any experience on how to deal with mental health patients and also whether depressed patients such as Troyer who was physically healthy should be able to make the choice of wanting to end their life, or should they suffer in silence until one day they decide to commit suicide themselves. I can say this without any hesitation because if we were to look at the statistics, most cases of deep depression eventually lead to suicide. In the US, approximately five thousand people between the ages 15 – 24 and 40 – 80 take their own life (http://caps.ucsc.edu/resources/depression.html#Chapter5). There is no doubt that Distelmans put Tom Mortier’s mom out of her misery and made her happy but the fact that the doctor wasn’t qualified to kill a healthy woman without