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The Giver: Euthanasia and Euphemisim

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The Giver: Euthanasia and Euphemisim
The Giver
Euthanasia

Euthanasia refers to the practice of s deliberated intervention undertaken to produce the termination of a very sick person’s life in order to relieve them from their suffering. Euthanasia can be categorized in voluntary euthanasia, non-voluntary euthanasia, involuntary euthanasia, active or passive euthanasia. The voluntary euthanasia takes place when a person wants die and says so and asks for the help of somebody or something else to die. Non-voluntary euthanasia refers to when the person can’t make a decision or cannot make their wishes known. For example, the person is in coma, is too young, is mentally retarded and other similar cases. Involuntary euthanasia happens when a person wants to live but is killed anyways. This is usually murder but not always. For example, let’s say a person is seen in an 8th floor window of a burning building and their clothes are on fire and the fire brigade hasn’t arrived yet. The person starts screaming for help and a passerby has a gun and shoots the screaming person because he/she knows that within seconds the person whose clothes are on fire is going to start to suffer and agonize from the burns until its death. Active euthanasia occurs when the medical professionals, or another person, deliberately do something that causes the patient to die. Passive euthanasia occurs when the patient dies because the medical professionals either don't do something necessary to keep the patient alive, or when they stop doing something that is keeping the patient alive (switch off life-support machines, disconnect a feeding tube, among others).

In The Giver the concept of euthanasia is present but with other name instead. What we call euthanasia in our society was known as “release” in Jonas’s society. In the story we can see two of the different types of euthanasia described earlier: voluntary and non-voluntary euthanasia. The voluntary euthanasia was shown when Rosemary, The Giver’s daughter

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