Colonial Period

Wikipedia definition of euthanasia is the practice of terminating the life of a person in a painless or minimally painful way in order to stop suffering or other undesired conditions in life. Recently, this interpretation has been taken to the extremes with discussions centering on weather euthanasia should be available to elderly people who are healthy but tired of life. Aggressive euthanasia, which is when lethal substances or focus is used to aid in killing, has become wildly popular in are world as a means to end a quality of life no longer acceptable to the individual. In simple words, doctors are now aiding patients in committing suicides, "an act of medical killings" (Nunberg). Since the conditions of aggressive euthanasia are relative to each patient and invoke murder from a physician, it should not be allowed by absolute law.

Promoters of euthanasia list many benefits such as relieving financial burden and respecting the choice of the patient, but ultimately euthanasia is no more than suicide for the patient and homicide for the physician. Suicide by definition is "the act of killing oneself intentionally," and homicide by definition "the killing of one person by another." Regardless of whether or not the physician carries out the final task which will ultimately kill the patient, they still facilitated the otherwise unlikely mode of death.

Legalizing euthanasia would legalize both a form of suicide and one of homicide because of emotions relative to each human being. Emotions are not absolute and law, based on absolutes, blacks and whites, cannot function in a gray state where the feelings of a person can govern that law. If one law can be made allowing death because of pain, then why not another based on anger? Physician assisted suicide cannot be legalized without correctly justifying homicide or suicide, both acts greatly condoned by law.

Aggressive euthanasia is not a natural way to end a life. It's a method of infusing a lethal chemical into the blood stream to disrupt and destroy, to eliminate. Promoters justify it has an act of compassion for the patient, but instead they cut the normal biological life of the patient down to their own choice.

Fidel Rodriguez is an example of a patient that could have easily qualified for euthanasia, but instead he opted to try and live through the maelstrom of pain. He had incurred brain cancer at 28, and was given two months to live, but through a miracle was cured