TRANSLATION

Public opinion has not yet reached a definitive conclusion on certain exceptional cases of infanticide, the killing of elderly or sick people, and suicide. It is entirely possible that the law will undergo significant changes in these areas in the near future.

Specifically, it is generally assumed that in cases of human monstrosity, the attending physician takes the law into his own hands and ensures that such mistakes of nature do not live. Nevertheless, many children are born so malformed and conspicuously disabled that it would be a mercy for them and their parents if they did not live. But now they must go on living if medical science can keep the spark of life alive. At the other end of the life spectrum are the frail elderly, including those suffering from painful and incurable diseases of all ages, who long for death and of whom their dearest friends say, ‘It would be a blessing if they could be put out of their misery.’ Keeping such people alive to suffer hopelessly seems to be the exacerbation of cruelty, a cruelty that is often prolonged by advances in medical science, which enable the skilled practitioner to prolong life when he cannot save it or even make it bearable.

Let us consider the most difficult case, the deliberate administration of a lethal opiate or poison as an act of mercy by a friend or relative who is no longer able to bear the misery, witness the agony of a slow death, and resist the pleas of the sufferer. Several recent cases have shown that when the facts are undisputed, juries acquit the so-called “mercy killers” without resorting to insanity. Euthanasia, a ‘happy or easy death or death for a good cause,’ therefore requires legal recognition. It has already been recognised in the new criminal codes of Denmark and Czechoslovakia. In addition, the Prussian Ministry of Justice has just recommended a law whereby licensed doctors, with the certification of two public health officers and the consent of the patient and his family, can end the lives of terminally ill persons. All this shows that modern opinion, in certain situations that are by no means rare, not only does not condemn murder, but even praises it, regardless of any laws to the contrary.

The situation is similar with suicide, which used to be forbidden by both the Church and society. Since the suicide was above any earthly punishment, he was generously showered with abuse and shame after death. According to ancient custom, the corpse must be buried at a crossroads with a stake through its chest. Thanks to the charitable fiction of temporary insanity, a more liberal view now prevails, although it is still a crime to attempt suicide, and although the Roman Catholic Church can still exclude the bodies of suicides from consecrated ground. More than a generation ago, Reverend Thomas K. Beecher, a prominent clergyman of the congregation, caused a stir when he proposed legalising suicide. Recognising that most suicides occur during a temporary emotional crisis and are therefore not morally or socially reprehensible, he believed that self-destruction was justifiable. His plan was for the potential suicide to present his case to a carefully selected committee. Undoubtedly, many lives that are now taken prematurely could be saved by the advice and counsel of such a committee, while the hopelessly afflicted would be enabled to escape further misery without the stigma now attached to suicide.

Fragment z W.W. Gregg: The Right to Kill. North American Review nr 237, 1934, s. 242.