person. Negative euthanasia is defined as
             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, s. v. 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
             Once any group of human beings is considered unworthy of living, what
             is to stop our society from extending this cruelty to other groups? If the
             mongoloid is to be deprived of his right to life, what of the blind and
             deaf? and What about of the cripple, the retarded, and the senile?
             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.
             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 rea...