安乐死论文 英文版

Advantages of the Implementation of Euthanasia

Euthanasia, originated from the Greek, formerly refers to "happy death" or "dignified death". In several English dictionaries, it is explained as 〝painless death of a person with an incurable and miserable disease or of an aging person〞, or 〝the practice of killing without pain a person who is suffer from a disease that cannot be cured〞. Chinese scholars define euthanasia like this "to an incurable patient in critically ill critical condition, due to his physical and spiritual suffering, with the patient’s and their relatives’ request and after the doctor's approval, the operation of the method which lead the patient to die without pain〞(1).

In the 1930s, in American and some European countries scholars began to promote euthanasia. In American people established the "death without pain" society and British a "voluntary analogue death" community was built, people started activities related with euthanasia in order to achieve the legal admission.

Afterwards, legal issues about euthanasia have been discussed over the whole world; hence much progress has been achieved. Since 1980s, some developed western countries gradually passed some laws and regulations related to euthanasia. In China, June 1986, the first euthanasia case happened Shaanxi province, Hanzhong city. And in 1992, June 25, Shaanxi provincial higher people's court upheld this case in the second final -- not guilty plea (2). This case caused quite a sensation at that time, and proposed the issues of Chinese euthanasia. From then on, discussions about the issue have never stopped.

Virtually there are many advantages of implementing euthanasia, in terms of social, family, and the patients themselves. In this essay all the benefits will be elaborated respectively as follows. With regard to the social benefits, if the euthanasia is applied legally, not only the large amount of medicinal expense, but the medicinal resources can be saved reasonably.

Firstly, the implementation of euthanasia can reduce the social burden of medical expenses. According to statistics, there are 5 ~ 7 million vegetative patients in current China, consequently, in order to maintain these patients of medical expenses of the first year cost in hospital the cost is 10 to 30 million Yuan, and after hospitalization it costs about 6 ~ 9 million each year(5). Meanwhile every year the total money that needs to spend on the home treatment and nursing costs at least 1.5 million. Thus to maintain such is two much expensive and the big deal of money can be used in other more useful fields.

Secondly, euthanasia helps save more medicine resources and thus realizes a more reasonable distribution of them. As a developing country, all sorts of medical resources in the domestic market are still relatively in deficiency. However, patients without survival hope occupy medical equipment and medical personnel in long term, and they use a lot of medical drugs to continue a meaningless hope. This apparently is a serious waste to limited health resources. If these resources can be used for those more urgent and hopeful patients, they will receive an effective utilization. Thirdly, euthanasia does much good to the transplant of human organ. At present each country is faced with the human organ source shortage predicament. Since there are no enough organ sources, many patients die. If those seriously ill patients without curable hope can denote their organs after euthanasia, more alive patients will recover.

However, some people are against the implantation of euthanasia in the view that those hopeless patients have their own right to live and the society should not sacrifice their common rights. But as far as laws are concerned, euthanasia is implemented according to the patient, their