ABSTRACT
The exacting of death as a punishment for serious crime may be as old as man himself. Murder and suicide are wrong; even carelessness that may hasten the death of another or of oneself is seriously culpable. The agonized death of Christ on a cross led Christians further to see in his sacrifice a form of redemption, a buying-back of fallen man, a restoration to man of the possibilities meant for him. A person's decision about death in the last analysis will be guided by what he, and the others around him, believe the significance of life, and therefore of death, to be. Death has never quite seemed to lie within the bounds of human decision, as other episodes do. The foetus is "potentially" human, in the sense that, given normal environment and nurture, it will become fully human; the comatose patient has been but is no longer fully human.
