hat their God of Life is also God of Death, and that the reluctance to accept dying as part of life borders on hypocrisy!Nancy Cruzan was a 32-year old Missouri woman who was in a persistent vegetative state for seven years after being in a severe auto accident. Her parents fought all the way up to the Supreme Court to finally win permission to shut off her artificial nutrition and hydration. When the day came to take her off artificial life support, nineteen people stormed the facility to try to put the tubes back in. They were arrested and placed in jail. Now that’s “playing God”! Also, the religiously inclined extend their beliefs on others when they argue that God’s will is not being fulfilled through euthanasia. Should people belonging to different faiths follow the perceived “will of God” assertion of a different religion? Should the personal beliefs of the religious decide public policy for all adults, including religious liberals, Humanists, Atheists, or Agnostics? In the Declaration of Independence, it states “[t]hat all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness . . .” Under these basic principles under which our country was founded, any free citizen has the right to determine their own fate. But a person who is terminally ill, in a hospital setting, or is disabled may not be able to exercise their “God-given” rights. A competent, terminally ill adult, having lived nearly the full measure of his life, has a strong liberty interest in choosing a dignified and humane death rather than being reduced at the end of his existence to a child-like state of helplessness, diapered, sedated, and incompetent.Another reason this violation of human rights is often not recognized is the gradual nature of the increasing power of medical technology to maintai...
