My initial position Euthanasia is wrong and should never be legalized

Laws against euthanasia and assisted suicide are in place to prevent abuse and to protect people from unscrupulous doctors and others. They are not, and never have been, intended to make anyone suffer. Activists often claim that laws against euthanasia and assisted suicide are government mandated suffering. This claim would be similar to saying that laws against selling contaminated food are government mandated starvation. In a society as obsessed with the costs of health care and the principle of utility, the dangers of the slippery slope are far from fantasy.

Assisted suicide is like a half-way house, or a stop on the way to other forms of direct euthanasia. If …show more content…

The mere possibility that such consequences might occur does not constitute such evidence. We need the evidence that shows that horrible slope consequences are likely to occur. Especially with regard to taking life, slippery slope arguments have long been a feature of the ethical landscape, used to question the moral permissibility of all kinds of acts. The situation is not unlike that of a doomsday cult that predicts time and again the end of the world, only for followers to discover the next day that things are pretty much as they were. These intensely personal and socially expensive decisions should not be left to governments, judges or legislators better attuned to highway funding. We'll all die, but in an age of increased longevity and medical advances, death can be suspended, sometimes indefinitely, and no longer slips in according to its own immutable timetable.

Real decisions are demanded for both patients and their loved ones. When do we stop doing all that we can do? When do we withhold which therapies and allow nature to take its course? When are we, through our own indecision and fears of mortality, allowing wondrous medical methods to perversely prolong the dying rather