Euthanasia, According to Metropolitan Luke of Zaporozhye

The attitude to euthanasia is not a medical issue, but a worldview. From the atheist's point of view, euthanasia is the right decision to end the senseless suffering of a person who will die without the help of a doctor, but it will be longer and more painful. From this point of view, euthanasia looks quite humane and its introduction is justified. The key phrase in this case is "meaningless suffering."

From a Christian standpoint, this phrase is absurd, because our faith gives a person the opportunity to meaningfully approach everything that happens in his life. And suffering, according to the Word of God, has a very important meaning. Sacred Tradition repeatedly confirms the truth of God's Revelation regarding the need for the fire of purifying suffering for our salvation.

But the last personal Golgotha ​​is very difficult even for deeply religious people. In the biographies of some of the saints we find examples of how, in painful pre-mortal trials, they asked their clergy to pray to God for their speedy transition to eternal life. If this cross was so difficult for believing people, what about those who have neither strong faith nor experience of prayer.

The crucible of the last sufferings gives a real chance to a person to enter the Kingdom of God, about which there is a lot of evidence from the Lives, including the modern Fathers of the Church. Some of them taught that this suffering saves a person even from the passage of air torments and immediately introduces him to the mountain heavenly abodes.

But if people have the opportunity to so-called "Easy death", then many in cowardice, fear and disbelief will prefer to take this opportunity. The spiritual consequences of such a choice will be catastrophic: they will deprive themselves of eternal life; will make useless and meaningless the sufferings they have already suffered; deprive themselves, as suicides, of the right to Christian funeral and burial. Euthanasia, in essence, is a direct path to hell that leads a person from temporary suffering to eternal torment, and this is its main danger.

Problems of euthanasia

When I studied at the Medical University, then passed the internship, I was taught to love people. A doctor is a fighter for the patient's life, and a person who commits euthanasia becomes a murderer is an abnormal phenomenon in medicine. Killing patients will lead to professional deformation of the doctor, change of his psyche. Therefore, with the introduction of euthanasia, it will be necessary to introduce a new profession into the qualifier of professions - a specialist in killing, who would deal with both euthanasia and abortion (I would not be surprised if he is popularly called an executioner), as not every doctor can do it.

If we follow the logic of such an attitude to human life, then there is no point in treating the elderly and the disabled, because they are completely useless for society. And in order to solve the problems of ecology, overpopulation of the planet, lack of resources, it is logical to set a threshold of life, for example, up to 50 years, then euthanasia. Live your life, you want happiness for your children - make room for them on the planet. You do not want to know what is a chronic disease that is accompanied by pain - euthanasia. In fact, this sinister ideology is already being cultivated in a consumer society. A number of films have been made based on these ideas.

On the other hand, euthanasia will open a bottomless pit for corruption, moral and professional crimes. This applies to issues of trafficking in human organs, incitement to suicide of a sick person by both medical staff and relatives of the dying person. Legalization of suicide will also lead to the fact that doctors will lose the incentive to seek new drugs and treatments. All this suggests that euthanasia will only exacerbate the problems, which are already so many in our society.

Christ teaches us love, mercy, respect for the gift of each person's life. If our authorities were guided by Christian morality, instead of legalizing euthanasia, they would be concerned with the development of palliative medicine, the development of programs to maintain the quality of life of incurable patients, which will help them live to eternity without suffering.