Euthanasia Outline

Assisted suicide is also known as physician-assisted suicide because the physician assists the patient. Assisted suicide is suicide committed by a patient who is suffering from a disease, by taking the lethal drugs provided by a doctor for the purpose of committing suicide. When assisted suicide takes place it is the patient who ends his/her life not the physician. Before assisted suicide a physician provides an individual with information, guidance and means to take his or her own life with the intention that they be used for this purpose. Assisted suicide and euthanasia are different due do a big factor of what happens during them.

Euthanasia is a deliberate intentional act of an individual to end the life of another individual in order to relieve them from intractable suffering (QUT,2017). This term is often perceived in different ways. Most common three includes - a)Voluntary euthanasia: performed to end one's life with their consent, here the person is competent.For example; physician injects the suffering patient with lethal substance after being requested (QUT,2017) b) Non-Voluntary Euthanasia: performed when the person is not competent. For example; physician injecting the patient with lethal substance under the unresponsive state in post-coma (QUT,2017) c)Involuntary Euthanasia: performed when a patient is competent but has not requested their death wish. For example; performed when patiently is at

Euthanasia is the practice of ending the life of an individual for the purposes of relieving pain and suffering. Over the years, there has been a big debate about its merits and demerits, and the debate is not about to end anytime soon. However, no matter what side of the debate one supports, it is important to consider a few facts. One, the prolonged stay in hospital is bound to raise medical costs. Two, some medical complications bring suffering and pain to the patient without any possibility of getting back to one 's normal activities of daily living. However, ending the life of a person intentionally may be treated as a serious crime in some jurisdictions. Given these facts, it is evident that making a decision about euthanasia is bound to be a challenging task. Although not everyone might agree, euthanasia is a necessary procedure that relieves the pain and suffering of the patient and rids the family and the government of expensive medical costs that would not necessary improve the life of the patient.

What is physician-assisted suicide? “Suicide is the act of taking one's own life. In assisted suicide, the means to end a patient’s life is provided to the patient (i.e. medication or a weapon) with knowledge of the patient's intention” (American Nurses Association). Physician-assisted suicide is known by many names such as death with dignity, right to die, and of course, euthanasia. Euthanasia is a much more in-depth term concerning the patient and the type of suicide.

Assisted suicide is the suicide of a patient suffering from an incurable disease, by the taking of lethal drugs provided by a doctor. When referring to assisted suicide the patient with the illness administers the lethal drugs to themselves that the doctor has prescribed. The two lethal drugs that are used for this process are called Seconal and Nembutal. Seconal, which comes in the form of 100 individual caplets, must be broken apart to produce a fine powder. Nembutal, comes in a liquid form, and costs more than 1,000 dollars for a dose. Insurance almost never covers lethal drugs. (Physician-Assisted Suicide Fast Facts 1)

Euthanasia, formally known as mercy killing, is the act of intentionally causing the painless death of a sick person, rather than allowing that person to die naturally. In terms of a physician's actions, it can be passive in that a physician plays no direct role in the death of the person or it can be active in that the physician does something directly to cause the death (Yount, 2002). Euthanasia may also be formed into three types of act, which are voluntary, involuntary, and nonvoluntary. Voluntary involves killing the patient at his or her request. Involuntary occurs when the patient does not give consent, or refuses. Nonvoluntary is where the patient is not able to make the decision about their medical treatment so it is up to a third

Euthanasia is the practice of ending one’s life who is in a position of having an incurable illness in order to stop their suffering and die peacefully at their request. When a patient who fits the

Euthanasia is the act or practice of killing, helping, or permitting the death of hopelessly sick or injured individuals in a relatively painless way for reasons of mercy. Assisted suicide is the suicide

Assisted suicide, is defined as providing a person with the knowledge required to commit suicide, including counselling about lethal doses of drugs, prescribing such lethal doses or supplying the drugs (Euthanasia and assisted suicide).

Assisted suicide has been an issue for many decades. There are views of it being considered murder and against God’s will but there are also views of it being a sympathetic release from life. The debating of this topic has not come to any concrete resolution about the legality of the practice. Assisted suicide should be legal even though the act of killing is involved. It provides the escape from life that the person wants and does not harm anyone else in the process. The views on this issue when debating have been outdated for far too long.

This is where some of these big cases come into play. The three big cases that we will look at are Baxter v. Montana, Lee v. state of Oregon, and Washington v. Glucksberg. These cases are the reason that the five states have legalized assisted suicide and the reason for it. In Baxter v. Montana a 75 year old retired truck driver had a terminal form of leukemia. He was getting chemotherapy for it, but that will only get you so far. He began to get fatigue, nausea, and his glands started to swell. After the infections started the pain became unbearable for him. So he wanted the option of assisted suicide, but at this point in time it was illegal in the state of Montana. So the plaintiff of the case sued the state of Montana and said that the homicide statute was unconstitutional. The Montana supreme court looked into this case and previous assisted suicide cases. And the issue they found was “whether the consent of the patient to the physician’s aid in dying could constitute a statutory defense to a homicide charge.” But in Montana there is an exception to the consent defense, where the public can not cause harm to anyone even with their consent. So the supreme court looked even deeper into another Montana case that was just for public

When considering assisted suicide there are several different definitions that may fall into this general term. Often times “assisted suicide” is confused with “euthanasia”. Tamayo-Velazquez, Simon-Lorda, & Cruz-Piqueras (2012) claim: “’Euthansia’ refers to the direct administration of a lethal agent to a patient by another party (a doctor) with a merciful intent after patients’ explicit informed request. ‘Physician assisted suicide’ refers to a patient’s willful and intentional ending of his or her own life with the assistance of a physician” (p. 678). In recent years, there has been a lot of news coverage concerning the assisted suicide of Brittany Maynard. Brittany was a 29 year old woman diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. She became actively involved in trying to develop an aid-in-dying law in her home state of California. Alternately, euthanasia involves a physician or other medical

“Nonvoluntary euthanasia” sounds like it would mean the same thing as involuntary euthanasia, but it does not. Like involuntary euthanasia, nonvoluntary euthanasia is requested by someone other than the patient, such as family members or a physician, and is performed without the patient’s consent (Pojman). However, the difference is that nonvoluntary euthanasia occurs when the patient’s wishes are unknown instead of acting deliberately against their wishes. In my opinion, it would be difficult to argue favorably for the morality of nonvoluntary active euthanasia. If the patient’s wishes are unknown, how can we as a society accept that they should be intentionally killed by nonvoluntary active euthanasia? How

Voluntary euthanasia may be looked down upon within active medical practices, although in some cases, the view of passive euthanasia is morally acceptable. For instance, within common life-threating illnesses, a patient will take extreme measures into

There are 3 different types of euthanasia. Volantary - which means that the doctor, or whoever performed the assisted death got full permission from the patient to kill them. Nonvolantary - without full consent of the patient or if the patient did give them their full consent, they weren’t fully decisionally-competent. And Involantary - this is when the person is killed against their will, they refuse to die but they are still killed. This Is murder!