|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Assisted Suicide And Determining When To Die
Islam Online, Germany Recently the German Society for Humane Death published the results of a study on how Germans view the possibilities of choosing when to die and active help for others in doing so. The numbers speak for themselves, but the issue at stake is a disturbing one. Eighty-one percent of the respondents said they supported active measures to help willing people to die. Fifty percent declared that they would choose to commit suicide in the event of an ultimately fatal or very painful disease. At present German law does not allow active help with suicide and punishes such attempts with up to five years in jail. Of course there is a large gray zone of activity, especially for doctors who choose whether or not to prolong the life of sick and old people with all means of modern medical technology and knowledge. Seventy percent of the respondents asked for a new law on this issue, thirteen percent more than last year. According to the representative of the Society, Kurt F. Schobert, 850,000 die annually each year in Germany - 220,000 alone from different forms of cancer. The Society, founded in 1980 and which counts 40,000 members in Germany, promotes discussion on active help to die and wants to raise public awareness of the problem to ultimately press for new laws regarding the issue. In Germany the question is an especially sensitive one. It is little-known about the Fascist rule that one of Hitler's projects was to create the perfect Arian healthy people by defining and erasing all unworthy life from the 'Volkskoerper', the body of the German people. In the process, thousands of old and retarded people, and mentally or physically disabled children were killed. Poor, asocial and criminal individuals were either jailed or sterilized. This 'Euthanasia' as an ideology and practice is part of the German heritage and should remind us to be very careful in discussing the issue. But what are we really talking about here? Different problems come to mind. For example, who would decide that a person who is in pain or even unable to communicate with others due to disease wants to die? Should we all sign an agreement defining at what stage or under what conditions we want to die? Do we actually have a right to determine when to leave this life, given to us by God? Who is to exercise this help with suicide? What tells us that it would not be collective murder to facilitate this kind of 'help'? We have on the one hand individual responsibility and choice about life and death. It is for a reason that a failed attempt to commit suicide is considered a punishable crime in most societies. In modern societies people are increasingly scared of the mere issue of death, as modern life requires only young, healthy and dynamic people. Old and sick people are confined to special places such as hospitals and nursing homes, so they are conveniently out of sight and the rest of society is not pushed to bother with them or take them as a catalyst to think about the ultimate reality of death or the uncomfortable thought of suffering and sickness. In a society were death is absent as a reality of daily life, except on the TV-screen, most people constantly push the thought of it out of their minds, pretending their active and healthy life will last forever. Ultimately it is the lack of awareness about the meaning of our life on this earth that makes it impossible to humanely deal with this issue. The other side of the coin is economic and political. Care for sick and elderly people is expensive, and especially the social systems in European countries spend enormous amounts of money on this care. It becomes a very cynical question whether or not an 80-year old man needs or deserves a new heart device considering that he might die during or shortly after the operation. In the future, with the gradual privatization of the German health care system it might also increasingly become a matter of money as to who gets how much, and what care, for how long. It is easier to say than to live that human suffering in its different forms is a part of human life, but it is God who gives life and takes it for His reasons and I cannot agree that we are able to know of all these reasons and take a decision for Him and in His name. I would not want to be in the place of the doctor or nurse who turns off the machines or signs the paper that decides about the life and death of a human being
|
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
