Few storylines are more devastating and more emotionally charged than those concerning deaths by euthanasia. Scriptwriters for films like the classic “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and the more recent “Million Dollar Baby” are well aware of this fact and know how to utilize the act for maximum emotional and psychological impact.

However, what many viewers of these films may not fully realize is that hidden beneath the pathos and drama of these stories is a real topic: one that is harsh, un-glamorous and extremely controversial. Where films tend to portray the use of euthanasia to end the life of a suffering patient as tragic yet morally sound, the reality of the issue is much less uplifting. Ultimately, the euthanasia depicted in movies is incomparable with the euthanasia of the real world, where intervening factors make it a hazardous, corruptible practice—a delicate moral conundrum too unpredictable for use in dealing with human life.

The legal definition of euthanasia is the act of terminating a person’s life in response to that person’s request. Easily confused with both physician-assisted and individual suicide, euthanasia is differentiable by the fact that in the act of euthanasia, while the patient comes to the decision to end his own life, it is inevitably the physician who carries out the termination of life at the patient’s request.

Euthanasia is thus morally reprehensible in ways that suicide is not—where the act of suicide rests solely on the victim’s shoulders, euthanasia instead involves multiple players, most notably a doctor who, instead of providing the adequate support, usually agrees or even encourages the patient that death is the best or only option. This serious negligence on the doctor’s part is what may influence the patient to make his or her life or death decision while he or she is often too emotionally and physically burdened to rationally do so.

To add to the moral precariousness of the practice, after being reviewed by the patient’s physician, the only approval that a decision must receive is a psychological evaluation of competence by a psychologist. Using methods such as interview and subjective evaluation, this psychologist must decide whether the patient is making a clearly thought out, rational decision, or is being influenced by factors other than their physical health, such as depression or outside coercion.

The dependability of such evaluations is clearly questionable. Coupling the lack of objective data in the study of psychology to the moral ambiguity of the subject itself creates a very unreliable image of a person’s ability to make the ultimate decision to end his own life.

If euthanasia is legalized, the power of surrogates to undermine a patient’s own decision must also be taken into account. In the United States, for example, a surrogate’s decision is often treated legally as the patient’s own. That means that if euthanasia is made legal, a court could allow a surrogate request for death on behalf of a child or an adult who doesn’t have the capacity to make the decision on his own. In the Netherlands, where euthanasia has already been legalized, a 1990 government-sponsored survey found that 0.8 percent of all deaths in the Netherlands were euthanasia deaths that occurred without a request from the patient. A similar 1995 Dutch study found that the lives of a reported 948 patients had been ended without their request.

Though the theoretical motives of euthanasia are compassionate, the fact remains that the practice is too dangerous, corruptible and unreliable for legalized use in reality. Barraged by a multitude of intervening factors, from a patient’s mental health to their medical and psychological counsel, the patient’s decision to live or die no longer belongs solely to him, and as long as it is possible for even a single patient’s life to be lost without his or her consent, euthanasia will remain too perilous a practice to be allowed in the halls of our hospitals.