Euthanasia as a legal question is an exercise in futility. A government of the people cannot sanction the right to choose death.

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问题     Euthanasia as a legal question is an exercise in futility. A government of the people cannot sanction the right to choose death. Nor can the government prevent it.
    Legislators can create laws that prohibit or allow euthanasia or assisted suicide. The laws can be supported by social mores, collective conscience, individual rights.
    The judicial system can incarcerate those who assist the terminally ill in suicide, but it cannot imprison those who have been released from their pain, their suffering.
    To the terminally ill, to those whose pain has become unbearable, to those whose bodies arc withered and decayed beyond repair, any law is irrelevant.
    To those who care for the terminally ill the pain and suffering are not a legal matter. To watch someone die, someone you love, is a form of death itself. To hear them beg for relief, for release, and to be unable to provide it is psychically debilitating. You are forever changed.
    And to you, watching your loved one endure sufferings beyond human capacity, laws become irrelevant as well.
    The question of euthanasia as a moral or legal matter will not be resolved through debate and legislation. No religious dogma or social commentary can encompass the broad spectrum of external and internal events included in the experience and witnessing of physical and mental deterioration.
    Each person experiences pain and suffering in a different way. No law can ever define unbearable pain. No law can ever define the parameters of quality of living. The quality of life is no longer the question; life as the victim knows it is long gone.
    For those whose lives are irrevocably changed, and certain to cease, quality is now a matter of what lies beyond this realm. To determine the quality of one’s death is not a question for lawmakers, for social pundits, for clergy. It is a question for the individual. No one person can determine for another if the quality of his existence is now beyond the confines of this world.
    There is always the fear of the slippery slope in the question of euthanasia. Just when can you give that loved one the overdose of morphine? At what point, after the diagnosis of certain death, do you say to yourself, "I do not want to go any further; I cannot face the inevitable pain of physical ruin"?
    This slippery slope is just another reason why no law can ever suffice, because the answers to the questions above will never be the same from one event to the next.
By saying "the slippery slope in the question of euthanasia", the author most probably refers to ______.

选项 A、a tricky situation that leads gradually to disaster
B、a dangerous course leading easily to catastrophe
C、attempting to end a patient’s life without his assent
D、climbing a slick hillside in constant danger of falling

答案C

解析 根据第十段中的“Just when can you give that loved one the overdose of morphine?At whatpoint...do you say to yourself,‘I do not want to go any further…’?”可知,“the slippery slope inthe question of euthanasia”指有可能未经病人本人同意就实施安乐死。所以,C应为答案。
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