**Author details**

*Bioethics in Medicine and Society*

nally ill. A lived hope may prove determining [22].

Palliative care should be the answer to the question why euthanasia should not be resorted to, because this care implies bioethics, psychology, theology, etc. There is research which show that a significant percentage of those requesting euthanasia give it up once they sign up for a palliative care program. Certainly, the family plays the most important role [21] but together with the other actors of the palliative care, hope can be reached, a chance given for the patient's life to change, even if termi-

The first International Conference for Palliative Medicine Research (May, 1998, Bethesda, Maryland) organised by Dr. Russell Portenoy, the President of the "Pain Medicine and Palliative Care" Department within the Medical Centre Beth Israel in New York and by Dr. Eduardo Bruera, Director of the palliative care program within the "Grey Nuns" communitarian hospital (with the participation of 268 experts in palliative medicine from 22 countries) constituted the event that defined palliative care as a real an efficient alternative to euthanasia. In Romania, at Brasov, there is an organisation – The Medical Foundation Hospice "House of Hope" and a Centre for Palliative Care Medicine. These have organised Courses of Palliative Care in collaboration with the National Association of Palliative Care, which took the form of plenary presentations and workshops. Due to this activity, 43 institutions or sec-

tions of palliative medicine (public and private) were set up in the country.

vidual still has to suffer to have access to the heavenly skies.

In a holistic approach, the quality of life means the relationship between the body and the soul, which only together can determine an individual's existence. According to this approach, separating and ignoring the value of the soul means to mutilate the individual, to wrong them, since joy and pain belong both to the body and to the soul. When the body is in excruciating pain, the soul is the one that

The Christian orthodox church is against the legalisation of euthanasia. Still, the Christian orthodox church has a special prayer for those on the deathbed, which looks like a theological "euthanasia": "*the prayer of the hard separation from the soul*". The priest is called to the moribund patient's bed and, through his Godgiven grace expressed in this prayer, unties the soul from the moribund body to make it to eternity. *The prayer of the hard separation from the soul* (a prayer for the dying) is a prayer dates at least from the second half of the 4th century [23] and is given when an orthodox believer torments on the sufferance bed, unable to die peacefully. This is the solution of the Church for the prolonged sufferance issue: we ask God to put an end to sufferance by death, for Him to peacefully sever the soul of His servant from their body and rest them with the eternal and the saints. The effect of the prayer is beneficial for the moribund patient, namely that their soul leaving the body will have rested in heavens, beside God's saints. The priest prays for the moribund patient's soul: "*So Lord, God Almighty, hear me, Your sinning and unworthy servant at this hour and free Your servant from this unbearable pain and bitter powerlessness that has a hold on him and rest him with the souls of the righteous*…" [23]. Therefore, the purpose of this sermon that the priest performs by the moribund patient's deathbed is to free them from the body but, at the same time, to protect them from the powers of the demons, since "the demons cannot lead these souls to heavens" [24], but to hell. If, in case of euthanasia and medically assisted suicide, the action of ending the earthly life is carried out by a human being (the doctor, nurse, with or without the patient's approval, in this case of spiritual "euthanasia" the action is performed by God, following the priest's prayer. Only God decides the exit of humans from earth towards eternity. Only Him knows how much an indi-

**12**

**5. Conclusions**

Ungureanu Mihail Adeodatus and Vasile Astărăstoae\* University "Grigore T. Popa", Iași, Romania

\*Address all correspondence to: astarastoae@gmail.com

© 2020 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
