Does Euthanasia Have a Specific Age?

He had been ill from birth with a terrible bowel disease and had been in and out of hospital all his life. As his body grew, so did the pain. By the end it was agonizing. It was when Danny Bond was 13 that he started talking about wanting to die. His parents tried to distract him from the idea but nothing worked. "All he wanted was the privilege to be given an injection that would kill him instantly in seconds, and I had to watch him die in days," his mom said. But it was the only way Danny could become the author of his own terrible destiny... (Vallely, P., 2014, February 16). Euthanasia, also known as doctor-assisted dying (suicide), and also termed mercy killing, basically means to take a deliberate action with the express intention of ending a life to relieve persistent unstoppable suffering. Euthanasia can be voluntary that is when the person requests to be killed, or involuntary in which the person will be killed by the decision of someone else and not his own request. Responding to cases like Danny Bond’s case, many countries like Belgium legalized the killing of a suffering child at any age if he requested it. But should children have the right to ask for their own deaths? Euthanasia is against the law in most of the countries all over the world. It is rarely legal in some countries and in this case it would be allowed for adults only. However, some countries, like Belgium, changed the case. Belgium is now on the cusp of becoming the first country ever to remove an age limit for the procedure thus allowing terminally ill children to choose to end their lives. Yet there were those in Belgium who argued against the decision. The first person was, as Reuters news agency reported, a man in the public gallery of Belgium's parliament who shouted "murderers" in French when the vote for the new law was passed. Moreover,