Title: Euthanasia Fact Sheet - The World Federation of Right to Die Societies
Headings: Euthanasia Fact Sheet
Euthanasia Fact Sheet
Introduction
Voluntary, non-voluntary and involuntary euthanasia
Active and passive euthanasia
Actions and omissions / Killing and letting die
Ordinary and extraordinary means
Intending death and foreseeing that death will occur
Conclusion
References
Further reading

Content: To take an innocent human life is, in these traditions, to usurp the right of God to give and take life. It has also been seen by influential Christian writers as a violation of natural law. This view of the absolute inviolability of innocent human life remained virtually unchallenged until the sixteenth century when Sir Thomas More published his Utopia. In this book, More portrays euthanasia for the desperately ill as one of the important institutions of an imaginary ideal community. In subsequent centuries, British philosophers (notably David Hume, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill) challenged the religious basis of morality and the absolute prohibition of suicide, euthanasia and infanticide. The great eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, on the other hand, whilst believing that moral truths were founded on reason rather than religion, nonetheless thought that ‘man cannot have, the power to dispose of his life’ (Kant, 1986, p.148). Mercy for a hopelessly ill and suffering patient and, in the case of voluntary euthanasia, respect for autonomy, have been the primary reasons given by those who have argued for the moral permissibility of euthanasia. Today, there is widespread popular support for some forms of euthanasia and many contemporary philosophers have argued that euthanasia is morally defensible. Official religious opposition (for example, from the Roman Catholic Church) does, however, remain unchanged, and active euthanasia remains a crime in every nation other than the Netherlands. There, a series of court cases, beginning in 1973, have established the conditions under which doctors, and only doctors, may practise euthanasia: