logical wonders tap into his brain, stepping around the decaying body that is now down to one movable finger joint and haunting, roving eyes.
But what of the less iron-willed, or less fortunate: The woman whose life centers around mothering, nurturing others, now reduced by progressive Alzheimer's Disease to watching her own dwindling capacities reduce her family's finances to zero and their love to a tattered sense of "duty?" Or the Hawking-brilliant scientist so twisted by stomach cancer that every ounce of his will must be bent to suppressing screams - unless he wants to be drugged into vegetable unconsciousness? Or the idiot-child with half a brain, no spinal cord and the prospect of existence only as a scientific anomaly, linked to I.V.s, electrodes, oxygen tents - "Hurry, hurry! Step right up and see how we keep him A-Live! Only two million dollars a year that could feed three dozen families!" These are not the ones to thank contemporary medicine for the "miracle" of a prolonged life - these are the ones who consider euthanasia the only miracle held out to comfort them; a miracle, like most miracles, most often denied believers and disbelievers alike.
"Euthanasia" comes from the Greek word meaning "easy or good death;" it refers specifically to the practice of one person taking another's life for reasons of mercy - or so it was introduced into general usage in the English language by the British historian W. E. H. Lecky in 1869 (Wennberg, 1989, pp. 3-4). There are older connotations of the word, from the ancient Greeks, and contemporary perversions of the term, via National Socialist policy of Adolph Hitler's Third Reich; but the general impression conveyed by usage of the word "euthanasia" basically continues to follow the parameters of Lecky's definition: it is a "mercy killing."
Within that definition, as expounded, denounced or debated by advocates of all sides, there are two major divisions of the term: ...