Name: Seema Baswana
Country: India

Year: 2026
Volume: Vol-16, Issue-2, Year-2026 (July-December)
Page Number: 15-21
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21413060

ABSTRACT
Euthanasia remains one of the most difficult questions in modern jurisprudence because it forces law to confront suffering, dignity, autonomy, dependency, and the limits of medical power at the same time. In India, the debate has moved from abstract moral disagreement to a more precise constitutional and procedural framework through Aruna Ramachandra Shanbaug v. Union of India, Common Cause v. Union of India, and, most recently, the Harish Rana litigation. Yet legal doctrine alone cannot fully capture what is at stake in decisions at the end of life. Literature supplies a necessary corrective. It reveals that the crisis of dying is not merely biological. It is narrative, relational, and institutional. Texts such as Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich and the ethical reflections around Brian Clark’s Whose Life Is It Anyway? illuminate how suffering is intensified when the patient is reduced to an object of management rather than treated as a person whose life retains meanin