I wonder if by let's say maybe age 5 if it is determined that a child has the physical disability of parapalegia, that perhaps euthanasia would be fair.
I do like to believe that most less than average medical conditions can be tended to for healing in holistic manner, as I like to believe average trying conditions are tendable to, to achieve healthful status. Parapalegia is one of the more intense physical burdens..does anyone else think that euthanasia for the condition of parapalegia is perhaps an ethical o.k.?
I don't disagree with you in principle. We abort fetuses with major defects. But we focus on defects that will result in a baby being born with such overwhelming abnormalities that he would barely qualify as a "person" (such as major brain defects) or that he would have a very short life full of agony (such as missing organs).
But you're talking about paraplegia??? This is the 21st century, dude! We spend most of our life sitting down! An ever-increasing segment of the population perform their "work" on a computer, and have to be reminded to get up and walk around once or twice an hour to keep their bodies healthy. Being a paraplegic is not a major impediment to being a productive, fulfilled member of society. Most of the things the average person does in an average day are not significantly impeded by the inability to walk.
Help for the walking-impaired is light-years beyond its status when I was a kid in the 1950s, and my paraplegic friend needed somebody to push his wheelchair from one classroom to the next and then into the parking lot at the end of the day. Even then, they made a big game out of it: the pusher would get it going really fast down a long, deserted hallway, and then hop on the rails and ride to the end. Sure there were a few crashes, but the rest of us were out on the playground being hit in the head by baseballs and falling off of the monkey bars!
Today my adult paraplegic friend (not the same person, I don't know what happened to that kid) can ride his electric wheelchair down a ramp from his house into his garage, get into his car and stow the wheelchair
with absolutely no help and then drive to work with the hand controls. Once he's at work he sits in front of his computer all day--just like the rest of us!
Yes, when you see a man with no impediments suddenly becoming a paraplegic, you feel sorry for him because
the change is so hard on him. But people who were born that way have nothing to miss!
If you're born without
hands, well that's a much bigger problem. Still, there are lots of people who have learned to do everything with their feet, even eating and
painting pictures.
As I said at the start, I agree with you
in principle, feeling sympathy and pity for someone with a seriously degraded quality of life. But we have to be careful
how we judge that quality. The fact that you haven't even given a single thought to the millions of paraplegic people out there who live perfectly happy, productive, fulfilling lives, is rather scary! It certainly shows how difficult it is for one person to make decisions for another.
This is why our legal system does not allow euthanasia for any reason at all. Each of us can only imagine how we would feel if we woke up one morning with the other person's affliction. We have no idea how
the other person feels about it.
How common is it for handicapped people to commit suicide?
Have you even tried to find the statistics on this? Before you start pontificating, wouldn't it be wise to gather all the information available on the subject?
Have you even interviewed just one paraplegic to find out how he feels?
I have. He's happy.
