ABSTRACT
The "death with dignity" movement attempts to specify contractually those conditions under which a patient may be allowed to die without compromising the obligation of the community to care. The right to die must be protected from abuse but its placement within the larger context of the right to equal access to life and health care. A somewhat less conventional way of approaching the distinction between allowing dying and mercy killing is to focus on the obligations not of the community but of the dying. Although the progressive impoverishment of the patient in dying is not in and of itself humiliating, the impoverishment "becomes humiliating if it is gratuitously prolonged by the zeal of others. The basic thrust of the euthanasia movement is to engineer death rather than to face dying. The emotional impulse behind the movement is understandable in an age when dying is made such an inhumanly endless business.
