For the utilitarianism, „abandoning the sanctity of life”1 is an important principle. In order to maximize the happiness (John Stuart Mill) and the pleasure (Jeremy Bentham) and in order to minimize the suffering and the misery, the utilitarian doctrine is ready to treat the abortion and the euthanasia like every other human action: such actions could be bad in some circumstances, good in others, according to the consequences. Abortion and euthanasia are methods through which people sacrifice a potential life for a real one, methods through which people put an end to someone’s life because this person will be more miserable than happy in the future and, also, because the relatives’ and friends’ life will be easier. Nowadays, the human cloning, the therapeutic cloning2, the Eugenia, the euthanasia and the abortion raise substantial ethical and jurisprudential questions. All these concepts - and, in the same time, procedures - became possible thanks to the evolution of the biological theory and of the genetics. Along with the scientific evolution within the biology the philosophy and the social-political theory, the social Darwinism, the scientific racism and the sociobiology received new dimensions. Also, the division between humanism and evolutionism became very fragile; the scientific humanism resulted from their encounter. Nowadays, in the case where the physician establishes through a diagnostic that the baby who is to be born will suffer of a serious affection, people’ tendency is to confer a quite unanimous consent and full justification to the demand for VIP. Generally speaking, people agree to avoid suffering and they reject the insufficiencies of the human body for survival. Practically, this is the argument for increasing the capacities of the human body through „light Eugenia”? Another important question for the private law and the bioethics is: why the suffering patients, without chances for survival, should not enjoy the right to euthanasia? There are countries which consider that the assisted suicide (passive euthanasia) should be legalized with the provision of the patient’s conscious agreement, after the failure of any healing treatment. Their logic was that even a moribund patient could find the joy of living, deploying certain activities, sharing his last moments with the family and his friends. The law on euthanasia should always take into consideration extreme cases, too; it should give to all of us the opportunity to dispose of our capacity of reasoning in deciding the solutions for our lives, as long as these decisions do not constitute a threat for the other individuals’ rights. The majority of the European States consider the practice of euthanasia as a crime, despite the large presence of this topic within the public debates. Only Belgium and Holland did already exempt the euthanasia from penalty under certain conditions. France and Great Britain condemn the active euthanasia and assimilate it to a murder, as well as the passive one, which is assimilated to a crime (medical non-assistance to a person in danger). In Germany, the subject remains taboo since the Nazi regime. Starting with 2001, Holland is the first State in the world that adopted a legislation liberalizing euthanasia, obviously under strict conditions. From 2002, Belgium established the following conditions: The patient should suffer because of an incurable disease for which the medicine has no solution, he should 1 Hursthouse, Beginning, 131. 2 The practice of therapeutic cloning, which uses embryos for the fabrication of medicines, is rejected in France and many other European countries. The destruction of unused embryos still remains an unsolved juridical problem because of the confusion existing at the level of the juridical statute of the embryos. In spite of this situation, a good number of scientists choose an utilitarian position: „L’utilisation d’embryons surnuméraires n’implique pas, à la différence du clonage thérapeutique, le risque de favoriser un trafic d’ovules, ni de faciliter le passage au clonage reproductif, la naissance d’un enfant cloné”. V., Axel KAHN, „Clonage, eugénisme, avortement, euthanasie: où allons-nous?”, Res Publica, Hors série, No. 1, Vol. Bioéthique et éthique médicale (Octobre 2002): 22. Sfera Politicii 146
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