Doesn’t modern medicine keep people alive who would have died in the past?
True. What was incurable some 20-30 years ago is now curable and I don’t need to elaborate more on that. But what we are talking about with respect to euthanasia are diseases like multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, terminal cancer, etc. for which modern medicine has no cure, and does little to alleviate suffering. The supporters of euthanasia say that in these cases approaches like artificial respiration, nutrition, dialysis, etc. using state-of-the-art machines are only ways of prolonging the death of the terminally ill patient rather than prolonging his life. They argue that the quality of the patient’s life in these cases is so compromised that he is better dead than alive. But this of course, does not justify saying that a patient should have died of this disease. The question is how long should the lifesaving effort continue; how long is it before the quality of life is said to be worse than death?
