Mercy Killing: Ethics Or Economics
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Very little mercy remains in the modern approach to euthanasia; it has become a contradiction in terms. While the concept may sound ethical to outsiders, for the immediate family it often boils down to sheer economics, moving far beyond a simple legal subject. Even when legal systems allow mercy killing after lengthy deliberations, it is restricted to the passive type—forcing both the patient and their relatives to endure silent pain for an extended period. In desperation, the final lines of this piece are written one foot longer to mirror that agonizing, drawn-out struggle.
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Silent my heart goes to souls long in strife---
To those in ailing beds, to drooping chins,
In hope who treat as god the mute machines
Linked to lifeless wires, breathing borrowed life.
The life in coma may no longer feel,
But those who tend them pick an humble pie,
And suffer worse in watching loved ones die,
The sick may fade, the wardens feel great ill.
Poor patients live a life of virtual corn,
In beds of death to nameless numbers turn
In health-care shops whose ways and means we mourn,
Whilst loved ones watch blind to the goings-on.
These wealth-care shops, not health, have one-way lanes
Called ICUs, hidden black-holes so mean,
Each life policed by a callous machine,
While near and dears peep through the window panes.
Nurses come and go taking copious notes,
While monitors keep up robotic beat,
Pump blood, but scarce the life as human treat,
The doctors deign, but where are rescue boats?
Intensive care goes too extensive now,
Expensive too as measured by the bills,
While pockets pinch, the wounded, weary wills,
What price is life? The dying shows us how.
The fate must rest on medical mercy,
On chance, not choice, the game will end one day,
When switches flip, poor life is left to pray,
The patient, impatient, pleads: end my agony.
Yet, mercy killing, barred from the halls of ethics,
Is left to wail elegies on economics!
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Musings | 02.04.2011, revised Sept 2026| care, compassion, death, life, Elegiac lyric
Note: One may read also two more pieces on the subject: In search of dignity (04,03.2011), and Gentle unto death (02.10.2008).
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