ssionto rally in defense of its fundamental moral principles, to repudiate anyand all acts of direct and intentional killing by physicians and theiragents. We call on the profession and its leadership to obtain the bestadvice, regarding both theory and practice, about how to defend theprofession's moral center and to resist growing pressures both from withoutand from within. We call on fellow physicians to say that we will notdeliberately kill. We must say also to each of our fellow physicians thatwe will not tolerate killing of patients and that we shall takedisciplinary action against doctors who kill. (Chapman 209) Are there no conditions when life is meaningless and should be quietlyended? If a person is subject to pain that won't stop as a result of adisease that can't be cured, must he or she suffer that pain as long aspossible when there are gentle ways of putting an end to life? If a personsuffers from a disease that deprives him or her of all memory and makes himor her a helpless lump of flesh that may live on for years.If euthanasia were legalized, it should be admitted that there mightbe some abuses of virtually every social practice. There is no absoluteguarantee against that. But we do not normally think that a socialpractice should be precluded simply because it might sometimes be abused.The crucial issue is whether the evil of the abuses would be so great as tooutweigh the benefit of the practice. In the case of euthanasia, thequestion is whether the abuses, or the consequences generally, would be sonumerous as to outweigh the advantages of legalization. The choice is notbetween a present policy that is benign and an alternative that ispotentially dangerous. The present policy had it's evils, too. We spend more than a billion dollars a day for health car while ourteachers are underpaid, and our industrial plants are rusty. This shouldnot continue. There is something fundamentally unsustainable about asoc...
