New Client. Professor__. English___. 2/28/17. The Implications

In homes across the world, millions of victims are suffering from fatal and terminal illnesses.With death knocking on their door, should these people have to endure pain and misery knowing what is to come? The answers to these questions are very controversial. Furthermore, there is a greater question to be answered—should these people have the right and option to end the relentless pain and agony through physician assisted death? Physician-Assisted Suicide PAS is highly contentious because it induces conflict of several moral and ethical questions such as who is the true director of our lives. Is suicide an individual choice and should the highest priority to humans be alleviating pain or do we suffer for a purpose? Is suicide a purely

However, there is immense criticism on the morality of the process, especially because the process denies a patient the right to natural death. The critics of the assisted suicide procedure argue that such a process devalues human life and tends to promote suicide as an alternative to personal suffering. By claiming that the procedure allows terminally ill patients to initiate dignity at death is flawed because the purpose of medical profession is to ensure a dignified life. According to the physicians’ code of ethics and the Hippocratic Oath, physicians are not allowed to do harm to their patients because their role is to allow a dignified health for members of the community. Consequently, legalization of Physician Assisted suicide that requires physicians to assist the patients to die is against their medical ethics. Quill, Cassel, & Meier (2010) provide that although the patients voluntarily ask the medical practitioners to assist in the process, the practitioners have a role to advise the patients against such a procedure. Besides, such a premise is bound to raise awareness of suicide as an alternative to suffering within the public domain, which may encourage such behavior among healthy members of the community that feel that they enjoy the freedom to make such a decision. On this basis, the negative moral implication of assisted suicide makes its legalization unworthy in the

Thesis Statement: Physician Assisted Suicide should be a matter of free will and not just law.

   The basic dilemma surrounding the subject of assisted suicide is who has the right to choose when someone dies? There are many layers of questions and varying opinions surrounding this right. How can our own self-determination be considered morally wrong when taken in the context of the opinion of others? In a society that stresses individual freedoms why is it that Congress continues to hinder doctor-assisted suicide (Keminer, 2000, p. 8)?

Thesis: When it comes to the topic of physician-assisted suicide (PAS), some experts believe that an individual should have the option of ending their life in the event that they have been given six months to live with a terminal illness or when the quality of their life has been vastly changed. Where this argument usually ends, however, is on the question whether physician-assisted suicide is medically ethical, would be overly abused to the point where doctors might start killing patients without their consent. Whereas some experts are convinced that just improving palliative care would decrease the need for someone to want to end their life before it happened naturally.

In today’s society, suicide, and more controversially, physician assisted suicide, is a hotly debated topic amongst both every day citizens and members of the medical community. The controversial nature of the subject opens up the conversation to scrutinizing the ethics involved. Who can draw the line between morality and immorality on such a delicate subject, between lessening the suffering of a loved one and murder? Is there a moral dissimilarity between letting someone die under your care and killing them? Assuming that PAS suicide is legal under certain circumstances, how stringent need be these circumstances? The patient must be terminally ill to qualify for voluntary physician-assisted suicide, but in the eyes of the non-terminal patients with no physical means to end their life, the ending of their pain through PAS may be worth their death; at what point is the medical staff disregarding a patient’s autonomy? Due to the variability of answers to these questions, the debate over physician-assisted suicide is far from over. However, real life occurrences happen every day outside the realm of debate and rhetoric, and decisions need to be made.

Another aspect of physician assisted suicide is this procedure devalues the lives of those who are disabled. A family may feel that it would ease their financial burden if their loved one committed suicide and desired to aid them in the process. However, if those are not the true wishes of the individual, how can we put a price on a person's life, the only chance we will ever have to partake in this experience? For a medical doctor, there is a sense of obligation to the individual to ease their suffering. The conflicting problem is that the assisted suicides cannot be effectively and properly regulated; the lines are too fuzzy as to where we can draw the limitations.

In one of the articles that I read, it stated that there are four primary arguments for legalizing doctor-assisted suicide. One of the arguments is the Mercy Argument. The Mercy Argument in summary talks about the immense pain and indignity of prolonged suffering, and that cannot be ignored. The next argument is the Patient’s Right to Self-Determination. This argument is trying to say that the patient has the right to choose the

The actual patients’ examples of assist suicide in Woodman’s book, they are strong enough evidences to convince the reader why physician-assisted suicide should be legal in society. Like stories she provides, so many patients and their families are hoping to end their life in dignity and even though they decide to die, so many countries and states banned their last rights because of ethical reasons which actual patients do not care.

Physician assisted suicide should be morally permissible. Patients who are in constant suffering and pain have the right to end their misery at their own discretion. This paper will explore my thesis, open the floor to counter arguments, explain my objections to the counter arguments, and finally end with my conclusion. I agree with Brock when he states that the two ethical values, self-determination and individual well-being, are the focal points for the argument of the ethical permissibility of voluntary active euthanasia (or physician assisted suicide). These two values are what drives the acceptability of physician assisted suicide because it is the patients who choose their treatment options and how they want to be medically treated. Patients are physically and emotionally aware when they are dying and in severe pain, therefore they can make the decision to end the suffering through the option of physician assisted suicide.

It is the twenty-third visit to the hospital. White walls, white floors, and the smell of bleach follows you when you go to visit your dying relative. They do not have much time, you know it, and so do they. And so they plead for you to let them end their suffering, and with the help of assisted suicide, they can do that. One of the most controversial topics that is being debated today, both morally and legally, is assisted suicide, sometimes known as active euthanasia. Assisted suicide is the act of directly intervening in order to end the life of a terminally ill patient. Arguments against assisted suicide say that the patients are not in their best mental state, that it gives the doctor too much power, and that it goes against different

Although a patient’s choice of suicide symbolizes an expression of self-determination, there is a great distinction between denying life-sustaining treatments and demanding life-ending treatments. The right to self-determination is a right to allow or reject offered treatments, not to choose what should be offered. The right to refuse life-sustaining interventions does not correlate with a right to force others to hasten their death. The inability of physicians to inhibit death does not mean that physicians are allowed to help induce death.

Who should be in charge of ending your life? Understanding euthanasia in its entirety can only be met when one knows the various forms it can take. They include passive, active, voluntary, and involuntary. Passive euthanasia refers to the practice of medical practitioners refraining from providing treatment in turn, allowing death. Active euthanasia, on the other hand, involves the deliberate killing of a person, using medical skills and knowledge as an instrument (Sheldon). The primary concern in this paper will be with voluntary euthanasia, euthanasia in which a clearly competent person makes a voluntary and final request to die. There will also be occasions mentioning non-voluntary or involuntary euthanasia, instances where a person is either not competent to or is unable to verbally express a wish to die (Young). Euthanasia, as a whole, is also called mercy killing. This differs from assisted suicide in that with euthanasia the doctor can provide and also administer the drugs that are used to end their patients ' life, where as with assisted suicide the doctor may only supply the lethal dose of drugs, but is not allowed to administer them (ProQuest Staff). Euthanasia has become a controversial topic over the years since death in general, is typically a very touchy topic. The controversy comes in when people begin to take into account all the different factors that play into the decision of ending one 's life. Euthanasia must be an individual 's choice, in which plays a

In “When Life is a Fate Worse than Death,” Haider Javed Warraich argues that the issue of patients’ right to die is complicated by the sometimes conflicting interests of patients and physicians. The most important ethical dilemma in this article is that which of the two, patient’s desire or doctor’s expertise, should carry more weight to the use of life support, which can save life or prolong a painful death. Doctors are trained to do no harm; they seek to heal, not to terminate life. Further complicating matters is the issue of liability. Even if a doctor agrees with the patient’s choice to end his or her life, the doctor may be hesitant for fear of legal repercussions. Those several issues can result in patients, the major stakeholders, stuck on an unwanted life support, technically alive but with little sense of “dignity.” And yet for patients, too, the matter is complicated, for they may feel ambivalent about ending their own lives. In order to avoid such murky uncertainty, each state should establish guidelines that involve structured dialogue between doctors and patients and take both sides into account.

The right to assisted suicide is a concerning issue that has gained major attention and sparked major controversy as of late due to its immoral, yet respectable outcome. Over the past 20 years, attempts to gain legal consent to physician-aided suicide has become successful in several states including Oregon, Washington, Vermont, and California, with Montana slowly approaching a court decision. The idea of physician-assisted suicide exhibits our exercises of free will, along with general compensation for the pain and suffering endured, as well as economic opportunity, supporting those who wish to let go and the physicians that care for them.