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By Ian Dowbiggin
Whereas it will probably look that debates over euthanasia all started with Jack Kervorkian, the perform of mercy killing extends again to historic Greece and past. In the USA, the controversy has raged for good over a century. Now, in A Merciful finish, Ian Dowbiggin deals the 1st full-scale ancient account of 1 of the main arguable reform routine in the USA. Drawing on exceptional entry to the data of the Euthanasia Society of the United States, interviews with very important figures within the move at the present time, and flashpoint circumstances comparable to the tragic destiny of Karen Ann Quinlan, Dowbiggin tells the dramatic tale of the boys and girls who struggled through the 20th century to alter the nation's attitude--and its laws--regarding mercy killing. In tracing the background of the euthanasia move, he files its intersection with different revolutionary social motives: women's suffrage, contraception, abortion rights, in addition to its uneasy pre-WWII alliance with eugenics. Such hyperlinks introduced euthanasia activists into fierce clash with Judeo-Christian associations who fearful that "the correct to die" may possibly develop into a "duty to die." certainly, Dowbiggin argues that via becoming a member of a occasionally overzealous quest to maximise human freedom with a wish to "improve" society, the euthanasia move has been dogged by way of the phobia that mercy killing can be prolonged to folks with disabilities, handicapped newborns, subconscious geriatric sufferers, lifelong criminals, or even the bad. Justified or no longer, such fears have stalled the stream, as increasingly more americans now favor higher end-of-life care than wholesale alterations in euthanasia legislation. For somebody attempting to make a decision even if euthanasia deals a humane replacement to lengthy anguish or violates the "sanctity of life," A Merciful finish offers attention-grabbing and much-needed historic context.
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Extra resources for A Merciful End: The Euthanasia Movement in Modern America
Sample text
Discontent with the economy motivated 900,000 Americans to vote for socialist Eugene Debs in 1912. Dissatisfaction with the lack of women’s rights drove thousands of suffragettes to campaign for the vote. Racial tensions mounted as discrimination against blacks became institutionalized throughout the South. W. 72 Amid this unsettling strife and acute hardship, Progressives worked diligently to improve conditions. Grounds for optimism could be found in medical researchers who were discovering the microbes responsible for infectious diseases.
39 With that statement, Darwin declared that the human mind—and by implication the soul—rather than being prior to things, was emergent in nature. Mind was naturalized, and for phi- A Merciful End | 10 losophers such as Dewey, this was the most revolutionary message of the theory of evolution. After Darwin, it was perfectly logical to conclude that the moral instinct in human beings was a product of natural selection and there were no immutable laws governing ethical behavior. The roots of human moral consciousness lay in man’s nonhuman ancestry.
Euthanasia, then, was more than a choice; under the proper circumstances, it separated humans from the rest of the animal kingdom and testified to their evolutionary superiority. 80 Another notable Progressive-era American whose approval of euthanasia was mixed with an admiration of Darwinism, eugenics, and scientific naturalism was the novelist Jack London, author of the bestsellers Call of the Wild (1903) and The Sea-Wolf (1904). 82 Following Haeckel, London was a self-confessed materialist and atheist, rejecting the more moderate agnosticism of other Darwinians.