Persuasive Essay On Euthanasia

request it. Support for the concept of euthanasia by lethal injection came from the growing perception that people were living longer and more and more were dying lingering deaths, as well as the publicity surrounding the increasing medical use of subcutaneous injections with syringes for the relief of pain. Th en, in the post–World War II era, the accepted defi nition of euthanasia broadened to include the withdrawal of life-prolonging medical treatment for dying adults or infants with severe defects, or physician-assisted suicide

(PAS)—the act of providing a terminally ill patient with the drugs to kill himself or herself. Th ese changes refl ected sweeping shift s in personal values, as well as a host of demographic, scientifi c, medical,

Th e upshot by the dawn of the twenty-first century was that euthanasia in its varying forms had become a highly emotional issue for partisan groups with firmly dissimilar moral viewpoints about the policy future of America. Th is article argues that the history of America’s post–World War II debate over euthanasia is rooted in a paradox: on the one hand, the history of euthanasia is a good example of sociologist James Davison Hunter’s thesis that twentiethcentury

America was wracked by “culture wars,” a hotly-contested “struggle over national identity” whose impact has been felt by “virtually all of the major institutions of American society.” Hunter’s description of the “cleavages at the heart of the contemporary culture war”—“the impulse toward progressivism and the impulse toward orthodoxy”—closely resembles the moral fault line that divides the vocal adversaries in the confl ict over euthanasia. 2 On the other hand—and in sharp contrast to hot-button moral issues such as abortion or same-sex marriage—euthanasia has seldom been a signifi - cant factor in electoral politics. For example, despite polling that suggests that support for various forms of euthanasia conforms closely to political