Legalise euthanasia

OH dear, the lengths to which some of those opposed to the legalisation of euthanasia will go in their attempts to try to stop the slow march of public opinion towards the acceptance of the idea that the medical profession has a right, indeed an obligation, to help anyone to a beautiful and humane termination of their life when that life has become intolerable to them.

To describe as “truly shocking” the recent allowing of euthanasia to a 17-year-old in Belgium (as the UK-based Care Not Killing campaign group has done, according to the Mail On Sunday report reprinted in Monday’s Cape Times), is itself shocking, and as for “Some churches and paediatricians question(ing) whether children would be able to make such a choice…”

It may be a delusion of some adults that wisdom arrives with a bang the day we become adults, but it doesn’t! There are plenty of even 14-year-olds who are wiser and more capable of making better decisions than some 70-year-olds.

As the great humanitarian missionary Albert Schweitzer so truly said: “If we could all become what we were at fourteen, what a different place the world would be.”

To condemn a young person of 17 (or of any age) to suffer a life which has become intolerable to them until they reach 18 (or does adulthood only arrive at the age of 21?) is cruel and indefensibly stupid.

And as Schweitzer once further remarked: “It is not death, but suffering which is the great enemy of mankind.”

The sooner euthanasia – with the safeguards now in place in a growing number of countries – is legalised in South Africa, the better for all of us. Richard Oxtoby Constantia