the withholding of life preserving procedures and treatments that would prolong the life of one who is incurably and terminally ill and couldn't survive without them. The word euthanasia becomes a respectable part of our vocabulary in a subtle way, via the phrase "death with dignity".
             Tolerance of euthanasia is not limited to our own country. A court case in South Africa, State vs. Hatmann (1975), illustrates this quite well. A medical practitioner, seeing his eighty-seven year old father suffering from terminal cancer of the prostate, injected an overdose of Morphine and Thiopental, causing his father's death within seconds. The court charged the practitioner as guilty of murder because "the law is clear that it nonetheless constitutes the crime of murder, even if all that an accused had done is to hasten the death of a human being who was due to die in any event". In spite of this charge, the court simply imposed a nominal sentence; that is, imprisonment until the rising of the court. (Friedman 246)
             Courts and moral philosophers alike have long accepted the proposition that people have a right to refuse medical treatment they find painful or difficult to bear, even if that refusal means certain death. But an appellate court in California has gone one controversial step further. (Chapman 176) It ruled that Elizabeth Bouvia, a cerebral palsy victim, had an absolute right to refuse a life-sustaining feeding tube as part of her privacy rights under the US and California constitutions. This was the nation's most sweeping decision in perhaps the most controversial realm of the rights explosion: the right to die...
             As individuals and as a society, we have the positive obligation to protect life. The second rule is that we have the negative obligation not to destroy or injure human life directly, especially the life of the innocent and invulnerabl
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