Euthanasia
“Let me paint a dramatic, yet a non-fictional picture for you. It is my mom’s 89th birthday. She stays in an old-home (senior citizen institute). As children, we were taught it was a nursing home and that’s how we referred to it. It is an amazing place surrounded by parks and filled with truly kind individuals who give my mom extraordinary care and attention. She has broken her hips, broken her pelvis, and gone blind in the past couple of years. She has not recognized my siblings and I or reacted to us for more than 2 years; her dementia started 17 years ago”, said Ola Abu Ramadan, a 52-year-old Palestinian mother living in Dubai, reminiscencing about her life.
“She is never awake when I visit. Imagine this: mouth wide open, teeth no longer sticking out, and always snoring. Both my grandparents passed away before she could get braces and her teeth somewhat just always protruded. She was always proud of her teeth and she cared for them until Alzheimer’s crawled over her. They are now broken and have obviously crumbled. However it isn’t really a big deal since she does not need them anymore. She is given a protein puree, which she swallows, just like she did as a baby”, she continued.
Two months before Mrs. Abu Ramadan’s mom passed away, she developed glaucoma, causing her to continuously see only painfully glimmering lights. “She would request that we go to a spot in the room and put out the flames by stomping our feet because she thought she was seeing fire. We all made a joke out of this for a while, however not long after that she became fully blind and stopped seeing her little flames. My mom’s reaction was to repeat what turned into a regularly heard request, ‘in the event that I ever get like that I need you to put a cushion over my head.’” Added Mrs. Abu Ramadan.
Not long ago, a 70-year-old man in the UK was arrested for doing exactly that to his wife who he deeply cherished. He said that his partner was in a ”horrible, appalling pain” and he could no longer live with the guilt of not being able to put her misery to rest.
“Euthanasia is used in medicine and it basically means the planned accelerating of the passing of an individual”, said Dr. Hany Shafey who works in the psychiatry department of Emirates Hospital. “Euthanasia is currently the topic of a huge debate worldwide and everyone seems to be looking for answers”, he added.
The moral and legal features of the idea of Euthanasia are still being discussed in numerous nations around the world, including UAE. Québec is the most recent region to pass an enactment, authorizing the so-called ‘assisted suicide’. As of recently, Euthanasia has become a topic of serious controversy; it has been a relevant issue in human rights talk as it influences cultural, ethical and religious issues relating to both patients and health care providers.
Because withholding the treatment of any patient is never simple and can’t be summed up without contemplating moral, social, and religious components, the numbers of assisted deaths differ from nation to nation. Other places that have legalized euthanasia include: Belgium, Colombia, India, Luxemburg, Ireland, Mexico, and the Netherlands. Furthermore, several states in the US, including Oregon, Washington, Montana, and Vermont, have legalized it.
In fact, in Switzerland there is an assisted dying organization called Dignitas, which is filled with qualified doctors and nurses that help those with terminal illness and severe physical and mental illnesses to put an end to their lives
Fatemeh Nabavizadeh, a specialist cardiologist at Emirates Hospital in Dubai said, “ There are actually different types of euthanasia, passive and active. Active euthanasia is when a patient is given medication that will kill them, while passive euthanasia is basically just stopping the treatment for the ill person and leaving them to die; fortunately, both types of euthanasia are not legal in Dubai”.
In our world today, regardless of the innovative and investigative advancements, particularly in the field of law, regulations linked to human wellbeing are still ambiguous and problems over the idea of assisted suicide remain unable to be solved. ” The ethical dilemma caused by this concept puts so many doctors at legal and ethical risk; once we become doctors we swear an oath to never intentionally kill people “, said Dr. Shafey.
However, according to the Statistic Brain Research Institute, the percentage of doctors worldwide who support euthanasia is 54.
Different people have different opinions due to personal and religious beliefs. Therefore, researchers and specialists are as of yet still hoping to achieve an agreement on this moral problem.
“In Islamic nations there are many negotiations and debates about withholding or pulling back the life support treatments or permitting a patient to choose euthanasia towards the end of their life. Taking into account Islamic law, medical service providers here are not secured and have no immunity if they were to help patients die; in fact, euthanasia is not legal in any Muslim country”, stated Dr. Hassanein Ali, a Professor of Islamic studies at the Institute for Islamic World Studies in Zayed University in Dubai.
“Growing up, one of the major concept that was rooted within us was the whole idea of God, and only God, being in control of the human life. Our religion teaches us to always trust God with our lives and not take it upon ourselves to decide when we should die. Life is a gift and euthanasia only degrades the value of it; it has become such a norm”, said Hala Al Assi, a 20 year-old Muslim student at the American University in Dubai.
In the Netherlands, for example, research finds that nine percent of all deaths in 1990 were due to Euthansia (Remmelink, et al. 1991). Furthermore, according to the Daily Mail, deaths caused by euthanasia have increased by 151 per cent in just the last seven years.
According the US National Library of Medicine and the US National Institutes of Health, “ In all jurisdictions, the request for euthanasia has to be voluntary, well-considered, informed, and persistent over time. The requesting person must provide explicit written consent and must be competent at the time the request is made. Despite those safeguards, more than 500 people in the Netherlands are euthanized involuntarily every year. In 2005, a total of 2410 deaths by euthanasia were reported, representing 1.7% of all deaths in the Netherlands. More than 560 people (0.4% of all deaths) were administered lethal substances without having given explicit consent”.
“In Islam, it is not right for a patient to have the privilege to die willfully in light of the fact that life is a divine trust. Thus, nobody has the privilege to stop human life through any type of obstruction with dynamic help”, added Dr. Ali.
Similarly, Christianity and Judaism do not support euthanasia either and actually refer to it as murder. Sara Beirouti, a Christian student at the American University in Dubai said, “The Bible lets us know that it is God who chooses how long people can live. Basically, euthanasia is an endeavor to deny God His sovereign right to choose who should die, how they should die, and when they should die. It is not up to us to choose to do something that is basically a right that belongs to God, and only God”.
Other common non-religious arguments against euthanasia include: when a patient is severely ill, they are not in the right state of mind to take a decision as big as this one, many patients actually change their minds or even recover after being “written off” by their doctor, and how disposable does euthanasia make life look, giving it little to no value.
Jody Tompkins, a psychologist from the American Centre for Psychiatry and Neurology in Dubai said, “A mentally unstable person experiencing severe depression commonly experiences extreme emotional strain. This physical and emotional depletion impedes essential comprehension, leads to a lot of self-blame, and for the most part brings down general self-regard, all of which effortlessly prompt distorted judgments.”
A recent American Study shows that less than 4% of 886 suicide attempters actually went on to kill themselves in the 5 years following their initial attempt. A Swedish study published in 1977 showed that between 1933 and 1942, out of all the individuals who attempted suicide, only 10.9% eventually went on to kill themselves in the subsequent 35 years.
Furthermore, there have been several cases over the past few years where autopsies done on euthanasia patients proved that these victims were completely healthy at the time of death. An autopsy report of Nancy Crick, an Australian woman who was in critical condition and died with medical help (euthanasia) on May 22, 2002, uncovered that she was completely healthy when she passed away.
On the other hand, some people strongly support the notion. These arguments include, as Mrs. Abu Ramadan believes, giving someone the right to die with dignity, something her mother was not given. Furthermore, others believe that euthanasia is better than watching a loved one suffer in pain for a pro-longed period of time before death, each person should have the right to choose how they want to die, death is very personal and therefore the state should not interfere in it. Some people even argue that keeping someone with no potential alive is a waste of money because the money can be used to save someone else who wants to stay alive.
As for religious arguments for euthanasia, a Muslim student studying at the American University in Dubai, who asked to remain anonymous, said, “ God and Islam are all about love, and so are other religions; keeping someone alive while they suffer in pain is not love, it is actually pure evilness”.
The US National Library of Medicine states, “Denying euthanasia in the Netherlands is now considered a form of discrimination against people with chronic illness, whether the illness be physical or psychological, because those people will be forced to “suffer” longer than those who are terminally ill”.
“Self-determination is one of the key components that make us human. It is the capacity to decide our fate as people and is encouraged by our capacity to think for ourselves. Envision an existence where a disease has left you unequipped for directing the essentials of life; you can’t inhale, move or even think for yourself. You do not have the capacity to self-decide, a noteworthy component in being ‘human’”, said Mrs. Tompkins.
“Until euthanasia is legal, we are denied the right to make a choice. I do not wish to follow in my mother’s footsteps, and make a definite plea that if I succumb to dementia I want some kind soul to enable me to go peacefully. Or, failing that, to put a pillow over my head”, concluded Mrs. Abu Ramadan.
