Death with dignity

A guillotine is an apparatus used for the beheadings of prisoners during the French Revolution. It is known as a symbol of politics of terror, but it is devised for humanitarian executions by Joseph Ignace Guillotin, a professor of anatomy at the Paris University Medical School. If you think about the Islamic radicalists’ barbaric beheadings today, you could easily understand how humanitarian it is to cut off heads with a sharp blade at once. Death is fearful but the pain leading to death is also dreadful.

Modern medicine has extended people’s life span, but also is presenting a new challenge on how to die. Families with a terminally-ill cancer patient would know how painfully a cancer patient dies. As pain grows, morphine injection increases, and the patient gets half-asleep and half-awake. At some point, the patient become unconscious and passes away. Anyone who sees this would feel sorry about not being able to suffer the pain on behalf of one’s loving person and at the same time would think about “death with dignity.”

U.S brain cancer patient Brittany Maynard, 28, ended her life with pills prescribed by her doctor before her family on the date she said on her Facebook page. She agreed on euthanasia before witnesses several times and was prescribed with a lethal medication after diagnosis by multiple doctors. She considered delaying her death after visiting the Grand Canyon, a destination on her "bucket list," but she decided to end her life as she got worse. Nobody wants to die. How would she have felt when she decided to end her life and when she tried to swallow the pills in her bed?

Death with dignity is not clearly defined. Korea and many other countries see only passive euthanasia such as taking no action to save life to a patient who has no chance of recovery as death with dignity. Voluntary euthanasia, which ends a patient’s life with the patient’s consent and helps the patient be free of pain, is included as death with dignity in some countries including the Netherlands and some states in the U.S. and Canada. Korea might need to consider on expanding the scope of the definition of death with dignity.