Those who believe in euthanasia advocate the right to die with dignity, without suffering. In many countries throughout the world, assisted suicide is legal and the practice of euthansia or assisted suicide is limited by law to the termainlly ill or those who suffer terrible pain.

Unfortunately, the laws aren't effective.

Today, the line between euthanasia and assisted suicide is bent and blurred. In real life, "assisted suicide" now includes a class of people the law was intended to protect. The mentally ill, the severely depressed, the disabled, the elderly, and the poor cannot be protected agains abuse by practitioners who exercise independent decision making, and evidence from Switzerland and Holland make this abundantly clear. Nations that have legalized euthanasia or assisted suicide have opened a shadowy pathway to the involuntary termination of innocent lives, while speaking of mercy and dignity.

There is a grey area between assisted suicide, euthanasia, and involuntary death to those who are to weak to speak of their own desires or wishes. Once laws authorizing euthanasia or assisted suicide have been passed, it is all too easy to stray into that gray pathway, and to blur the line between euthanasia....and the premature ending of a life that may not meet our personal ideas of a quality of life.

And that, dear reader, is murder.

Learn more about this author, Kate Oliver.
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