h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

or

Euthanasia, for he who is ignorant, is where a person may take their own, or someone else's, life in a gentle means due to some disease that may be present in their body and can't be cured.However, is this ethical? Yes. I think it is, anyway.

Many people may say otherwise, but, when a person sees an animal dying on the side of the road or somewhere else, they will stop to put it out of its misery (even the royal family did). So, when a fellow human is lying in a bed and waiting for their painful end to come from an incurable disease, why shouldn't we make it easier for them by means of Euthanasia. Could you imagine lying in a bed in complete agony and unable to do anything that you like (eg: sport, watching TV, reading, walking etc) waiting to die?

Note: In Australia, where I live, it is currently illegal to carry out Euthanasia.

If this in any way causes offence, grief and so forth, I make my dearest apologies to those concerned.

Well, it seems like a good idea to let people choose to do what they want (unless you have religious objections of course).

There is an objection that says that if you allow euthanasia you run the risk of it becoming used routinely, and that doctors will begin to see euthanasia as an alternative to treatment and push it on their patients. The objection runs that this would happen unconsciously, that doctors would underplay the alternatives (which are much more expensive), that they would give the impression that the alternatives are worse than they really are. Since the patients would, at the time, be in a very vulnerable and painful state, the argument runs, they would be more open to suggestion and could be easily pressurised into accepting an alternative they wouldn't have wanted if they could have considered it in a calmer state of mind.

Whatever you think of this objection as a reason not to allow it, it has at least some force. At the very least, legalised euthanasia would have to be very, very carefully regulated and subject to public scrutiny, etc.

true, euthanasia needs to be carefully regulated, but not much more so than the use of "no heroic measures" being marked on patients records.

Both are equally open to abuse, mainly in the same ways.

so either both should be legal and carefully regulated, or neither should be.

also, it is common practice for terminal patients to have their pain killers dosage increased repeatedly until it causes the death of the patient as a side effect.

as you aready have "no heroic measures", and death by overdose of pain killers, I see no problem with formallising the process.