preview

Legalize Euthanasia Now Essay

Decent Essays

Assisted Suicide – Legalisation or Criminalisation? Discuss.

In the past years, assisted suicide has been an issue of large controversies throughout many countries. However, something that I believe is one of the main problems, is that many people are confused between two different ideas – assisted suicide and euthanasia. Assisted suicide is basically when a patient who suffers an incurable disease, which causes a lot of pain, is given the necessary drugs to commit suicide. However, the patient must make the final act of ingesting the drugs, by his own means and can't be helped by anyone else. Euthanasia, on the other hand, is when another person is the one who actually takes the final move in finishing the patient’s life. As we can …show more content…

For me, the most important advantage of legalising assisted suicide is the basic fact that the patient with the incurable and painful disease stops suffering. As any humans, hospital patients should have the rights to end their lives whenever they should want to because that is part of what living in a democratic country means. People should be able to do whatever they want, as long as they don’t harm anyone else’s health or interests. That is why I believe that just like humans in everyday life commit suicide when they can't cope with life anymore, hospital patients should have the same rights. Even though I understand that taking a life is a very important and irreversible decision, I can imagine that in very extreme cases, the pain is so large, that the patient might have resigned him/herself that the best thing was just to die.
Assisted suicide also disables the family of the hospitalized person to observe their relative or friend suffering. To see your relative suffering, is something horrible, undesirable for anyone and it can even destroy whole families. When members of a family see their relative in pain, it is true that a melancholic mood spreads out to all the indirect victims, like a disease. This makes the people much more prone to have discussions and fights, sometimes leading to parents getting separated and/or divorced. Statistics prove that 12% of all divorces in Britain are caused because of the fact that an ill person in

Get Access