e right to decide about their own lives and deaths. What more basic right is there than to decide if you're going to live? There is none. A person under a death sentence who's being kept alive, through so called heroic measures certainly has a fundamental right to say, "Enough's enough. The treatment's worse than the disease. Leave me alone. Let me die!". Ironically, those who deny the terminally ill this right do so out of a sense of high morality. Don't they see that, in denying the gravely ill and suffering the right to release themselves from pain, they commit the greatest crime? The period of suffering can be shortened. If you have ever been in a terminal cancer ward, It's grim but enlightening. Anyonewho's been there can know how much people can suffer before they die. And not just physically. The emotional, even spiritual, agony is often worse. Today our medical hardware is so sophisticated that the period of suffering can be extended beyond the limit of human endurance. What's the point of allowing someone a few more months or days or hours of so-called life when death is inevitable? There's no point. In fact, it's downright inhumane. When someone under such conditions asks to be allowed to die, it's far more humane to honor that request than to deny it.(Barry 405) People have a right to die with dignity. Nobody wants to end up plugged into machines and wired to tubes. Who wants to spend their last days lying in a hospital bed wasting away to something that's hardly recognizable as a human being, let alone his or her former self? Nobody. The very thought insults the whole concept of what it means to be human. People are entitled to dignity, in life and in death. Just as we respect people's right to live with dignity, so we must respect their right to die with dignity. In the case of the terminally ill, that means people have the right to refuse life-sustaining treatment when it's apparent to them that all th...
