Euthanasia, Your Right To Die

8 Pages 1973 Words

morals of euthanasia.
Even if America legalized euthanasia, it is not like it is a new issue, euthanasia been publicly debated and rejected for many years prior to recent occurrences with the subject, a fact that courts and newspapers failed to mention. Interest in euthanasia in the United States began in 1870, when a commentator, Samuel Williams, proposed to the Birmingham Speculative Club that euthanasia been permitted "in all cases of hopeless and painful illness" to bring about "a quick and painless death." The word "painless" is important. The idea of euthanasia began gaining publicity in modern times not because of new technologies for agonizingly prolonging life but because of the discovery of new prescription drugs, such as morphine and various anesthetics for the relief of pain, that could also painlessly cause death. Over the next thirty years, Williams's proposal was reprinted in popular magazines and books, discussed in the pages of prominent literary and political journals, and debat!
ed at the meetings of American medical societies and also at non-medical professional associations. The debate culminated in 1906, after the Ohio legislature took up "An Act Concerning Administration of Drugs to Mortally Injured and Diseased Persons" which was a bill to legalize euthanasia. The merits of the act were debated for months and were the main topics in the pages of The New York Times, which vigorously opposed legalizing euth...