preserving procedures and treatments that wouldprolong the life of one who is incurably and terminally ill and couldn'tsurvive without them. The word euthanasia becomes a respectable part ofour vocabulary in a subtle way, via the phrase ' death with dignity'. Tolerance of euthanasia is not limited to our own country. A court casein South Africa, s. v. Hatmann (1975), illustrates this quite well. Amedical practitioner, seeing his eighty-seven year old father sufferingfrom terminal cancer of the prostate, injected an overdose of Morphine andThiopental, causing his father's death within seconds. The court chargedthe practitioner as guilty of murder because 'the law is clear that itnonetheless constitutes the crime of murder, even if all that an accusedhad done is to hasten the death of a human being who was due to die in anyevent'. In spite of this charge, the court simply imposed a nominalsentence; that is, imprisonment until the rising of the court. (Friedman246) Once any group of human beings is considered unworthy of living, whatis to stop our society from extending this cruelty to other groups? If themongoloid is to be deprived of his right to life, what of the blind anddeaf? and What about of the cripple, the retarded, and the senile? Courts and moral philosophers alike have long accepted the propositionthat people have a right to refuse medical treatment they find painful ordifficult to bear, even if that refusal means certain death. But anappellate court in California has gone one controversial step further.(Walter 176) It ruled that Elizabeth Bouvia, a cerebral palsy victim, had anabsolute right to refuse a life-sustaining feeding tube as part of herprivacy rights under the US and California constitutions. This was thenation's most sweeping decision in perhaps the most controversial realm ofthe rights explosion: the right to die... As individuals and as a society, we have the positive obligation toprotect li...
