preview

In The Article, “Euthanasia And Physician-Assisted Suicide

Decent Essays
Open Document

In the article, “Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide Should Be Legal”, Lawrence Rudden responds on why he feels Euthanasia should be legal all around. The article begins with a story about a woman who was diagnosed with breast cancer. She spent the next few years slowly dying and the cancer grew inside of her. She was forced to watch her own body begin to fail. She was eventually told she had less than six months to live. One of her final requests was to die with dignity by asking the nurse to end her life, and she did. She wrote a letter two days earlier saying she feels thankful she could escape the cancer before it got worse. In 1997, Oregon was the first state to pass the Death With Dignity Act. To qualify for assisted suicide, …show more content…

That may be true for now but one can imagine how it could change throughout the years if it became legal everywhere. Practices of killing people with clinical depression or even those with disabilities could come into play in hopes to take people out of their distress. For physicians, participating in euthanasia is against the Hippocratic Oath. This is the oath for anyone in the medical practice that states the conducts and moral practices of physicians. Physicians must respect and value all human lives. Not only will this practice violate the oath, but it also will break the respect and trust between the patient and the physician. There are actually two versions of the oath. The first is the original version. The second is the modern version. Both have the same meaning but different wording. One difference between the two is the content of euthanasia and abortion. The modernized version says “If it is given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to take a life..”. Although this new version of the oath allows euthanasia, there is still the original version which does not allow physicians to assist any patient in death. Within the original Hippocratic Oath it states: 'I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody if asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect... '. This

Get Access