Should the Practice of Euthanasia Be Allowed or Should It Be Prohibited?
             Euthanasia is defined as the practice of ending a life so as to release an individual from an incurable disease or intolerable suffering. There are actually two forms of euthanasia, passive and active. Passive euthanasia is an accepted medical practice where the terminally ill patient is allowed to die, when the patient refuses treatment. In practice, this means that the dying patient is not given any cure that would keep him alive. Active euthanasia, on the other hand, is the taking of one¡s own life, or dying for example, by lethal injection.
             The issue of euthanasia is not a recent one. Euthanasia has actually been practiced for thousands of years. We can trace euthanasia all the way back to the ancient Egyptians, who practiced euthanasia in many sorts of ways.
             Later on, the issue has been brought up again in the medieval times. People who were terminally ill were given a cup filled with a poison and they drank it. In this case it could actually be called an assisted suicide because nobody had given them the lethal drug.
             In today¡s society, euthanasia is legally practiced only in a few countries for example, the Netherlands and Finland. In the Netherlands, the practice is to make the patient comatose by the first injection, which is followed by another one, which contains the lethal drug, potassium phosphate. There are of course many procedural guidelines that have to be considered. Substantive Guidelines:
             „h Euthanasia must be voluntary; the patient's request must be seriously considered and enduring.
             „h The patient must have adequate information about his or her medical condition, the prognosis, and alternative methods of treatment (though it is not required that the patient be terminally ill).
             „h The patient's suffering must be intolerable, in the patient's view, and must also be irreversible.
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