On the other hand the Roman Catholic Church is of the Christian faith but they do have a slightly different opinion. Although they are very pro-life, they do not believe in pro-longing life by treatment which will prolong suffering.
However the government is concerned that if euthanasia were legalised then the amount of suicides in our country will rise considerably. This has not been entirely proven in the few countries that have legalised euthanasia, but it is also worried that more and more Doctors would perform euthanasia without the patients consent if voluntary euthanasia were legalised. In the Netherlands were voluntary euthanasia is legal it is believed that in 2000, 1200 people were euthenised without the consent of the patient.
In addition to the argument that pro-longing life by treatment can prolong suffering it can also be argued that the psychological effects of long-term suffering have been studied and researched by psychoanalysts over the past ten years and it has been proved that long-term suffering can cause great psychological damage to a terminally ill patient. Allowing mental and physical suffering to continue for a long period of time is possibly worse than death.
However there are altruistic concerns which link these cases to the programme introduced by Hitler in 1939. In this incident however 250,000 people were gassed, mostly the physically or mentally sick or the elderly. They however were not killed to relieve suffering, but because they were unable to work.
Contrary to this Hitler was not trying to relieve the terminally ill of pain and suffering. He was a fascist and wanted to rid Germany and then the World, of people who he considered “different”. Nowadays euthanasia is used to relieve terminally ill patients who have an exceedingly poor quality of life. Some terminally ill patients have compared there lives to that of being trapped in purgatory.
Lastly, it is against the law in the U.K. and against the oath which every Doctor must take for a Doctor or any one else for that matter to kill anyone. Doctors also swear that they will do everything in their power to help their patients. It could be argued that euthanising a terminally ill patient would be helping by releasing them from the pain that they were in.
However a lot of Doctors support euthanasia paradoxically, but most refuse to perform it because if they were discovered then they would be imprisoned. A few Doctors have been charged with murder for performing euthanasia. In the U.S, a physician nicknamed by the media ‘Dr Death’ was arrested and charged with first degree murder in 1998. He had attended the suicides of twenty eight people. He believed that what he was doing was right and he gave the prosecution a video tape of himself administering a lethal injection to a terminally ill man who wished to die.
In conclusion I believe that voluntary euthanasia should be legalised because if you have a very poor quality of life then you should be able to have the right to end it. I agree with the Roman Catholic opinion that there is no need to prolong life by treatment which will only prolong the suffering. I also think that only Doctors should be allowed to assist with euthanasia, otherwise euthanasia may be used lightly when it is not necessarily the only option. Until euthanasia is legalised there will continue to be unnecessary arrests of people who thought that they were helping, by euthenising terminally ill people who had little or no chance of ever recovering from their illness, and may have had to suffer for a great deal longer.