Arguments have prevailed for years between the different doctrines or viewpoints regarding an individuals "right-to-die." However, they have become more strident and more shaded as public opinion begins to shift away from America's growing dependence on modern medicine technology and back to the historical roots of euthanasia: A dying person has the right to have his or her life ended by another if that is necessary to avoid suffering (Callahan, 1988, p. 398). The purpose of this paper will be to review the issues involved in euthanasia and the right-to-die movement, arguing that legal guarantees are needed to ensure its implementation it so desired.
To dramatize this new shift in public opinion, a Harris Poll in 1973 found that 53 percent of those polled opposed actively ensuring euthanasia. In 1985, 61 percent of those polled supported it. The Western tradition that has rejected this belief is breaking down (Callahan, 1988, p. 397). California, in 1987, got as far as defeating an initiative to put a euthanasia referendum on the ballot, and the Netherlands now can legally give life-terminating drugs to terminal patients at their request.
While passive euthanasia, which allows people to die without heroic, life-sustaining, death-prolonging efforts, is already legal and being practiced in most of the United States, active euthanasia, the taking of some kind of action such as turning off a respirator, is finding support in public debate as a result of the following trends. First, 80 percent of the public now die in hospitals cared for by strangers and, as a result, are subjected to aggressive technological care to extend life for a few more hours or days (Colen, 1986, p. 243). Second, when people used to die from simple illnesses such as pneumonia and influenza, dying was fairly inexpensive. With antibiotics, these illnesses now have been replaced by cancers and heart diseases which can generate astronomical medical bill...