a." The first is that the word is a synonym for "mercy killing," or "the act of putting to death painlessly or allowing to die, as by withholding extreme medical measures, a person or animal suffering from an incurable, esp. a painful, disease or condition." The second is that the term means "painless death."
The word derives from the Greek for "easy death," based on eu for easy and thanatos for death. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) offers a more extensive history of the word based on the same Greek roots. The OED also offers three definitions for the word. The first is that the word means a "gentle and easy death"; the second, the "means of bringing about a gentle and easy death"; and finally, "the action of inducing a gentle and easy death," said to be recent use of the word.
Euthanasia is a political issue in America today, though the term that has come to be used more commonly is "assisted suicide," which could be differentiated from the more general idea of euthanasia in that assisted suicide implies the active participation of the afflicted individual, while euthanasia could be accomplished in other ways. Euthanasia implies the participation of medical personnel in some manner, though strictly speaking this might not be the case. Society faces a number of issues of life and death, and because of developments in medicine and technology, these issues become more difficult all the time. We can keep people alive when in the past they might have died, but should we? Because we have to ask this question, the idea of euthanasia has also become more important--should we "pull the plug" on people whose quality of life will never be "normal" again, who may be suffering great pain, or who cannot continue to live without being attached to machines? Recently, Pope John Paul II stated that we are creating a "culture of death" by deciding that there are times when euthanasia is acceptable, and he instead believes there is ...