Exposition--a Disease of the Disabled

Dhruv Kumar
English communications: exposition
Imagine if while sitting outside in the verandah reading a book, an annoying fly lands on your nose. Imagine it crawling all over your face, wouldn’t that be irritating? Now imagine if you couldn’t even lift your hand and shoo it away. Imagine how it would feel if you couldn’t feel any of your toes and fingers, if you couldn’t control any muscle in your body voluntarily. This is exactly how a paralysed person or a patient suffering from a neuro-muscular disorder feels. In such cases euthanasia is the best gift anyone can give these patients, causing an end to all their suffering. Euthanasia refers to the process of clinically terminating life in a less painful way to relieve unmanageable suffering. It is unobjectionable for a patient to refuse treatment which has no curative effect and does not affect their quality of life; they should be given the liberty to choose induced death. Legalizing euthanasia would help alleviate suffering of terminally ill patients. It would be inhuman and unfair to make them endure the unbearable pain. People must learn to accept reality and medical practitioners should be allowed to discontinue useless treatment for a patient when there is no hope for recovering.

The United Nations’ Declaration on the Rights of Disabled persons states that “disabled persons have the inherent right to respect for their human dignity. Disabled persons, whatever the origin, nature and seriousness of their handicaps and disabilities, have the same fundamental rights as their fellow-citizens of the same age which implies first and foremost the right to enjoy a decent life as normal and full as possible.” Maintaining life support systems against the patient's wish is simply unethical. If the patient has the right to discontinue treatment why would he not have the right to shorten his lifetime to escape the agony? Isn’t the pain of waiting for death frightening and traumatic? Therefore it is appropriate if a...