SHOULD ASSISTED SUICIDE BE LEGALIZED?

Should assisted suicide be legalized?



Should assisted suicide be legalized?

Mary Ann was diagnosed with leukemia in 1997. She spent the next five years wasting away. At first she declared war on the cancer, attacking her own body with radiation and bone marrow transplants until she was a shell of her former self. Still, the leukemia would not retreat but continued to grow inside her.

She watched as her body began failing. There were dreadful waves of pain, violent coughing, constipation, abdominal cramps, convulsions, and humiliation. The sickness was overpowering her will to survive.

Assisted suicide should be to legal to permit individuals with incurable, hopeless illnesses who want to die to arrange an easy and comfortable death.

Assisted Suicide Should Be Legal

Assisted suicide is a practical position for many terminally ill patients in the UK. Doctor Peter Rogatz believes "Many arguments are put forward for maintaining the prohibition against physician-assisted suicide, but I believe they are outweighed by two fundamental principles that support ending the prohibition: patient autonomy---the right to control one's own body---and the physician's duty to relieve suffering. Society recognizes the competent patient's right to autonomy---to decide what will or won't be done to his or her body.”

There is almost universal agreement that a capable adult has the right to self-determination, including the right to accept or decline life-sustaining treatment. Suicide is not illegal; yet assisting a person to take her or his own life is prohibited. Marcia Angell, former executive editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, has put it this way: `The highest ethical imperative of doctors should be to provide care in whatever way best serves patients' interests, in accord with each patient's wishes, not with a theoretical commitment to preserve life no matter what the cost in suffering. ... The greatest harm we can do is to consign a desperate patient to unbearable suffering---or force the patient to seek out a stranger like Dr. Kevorkian.'"

States are now getting involved in the assisted suicide issue, passing laws that would make it legal to participate in assisted suicide. Writer Lawrence Rudden observed that "In 1997, Oregon passed the Death with Dignity Act, making it the only state to permit physician-assisted suicide. Since then, the act has survived an attempt by Congress to overturn it, court hearings on its constitutional validity, and two voter initiatives, in which Oregon residents approved the measure first by a slim margin in 1994, then overwhelmingly in 1997. To qualify for assistance, patients must make two oral requests and one written request at least two weeks apart, is terminally ill with less than six months to live, and be judged mentally competent to make the decision by two separate physicians. Patients are also required to administer the medication themselves."

Many argue that a decision to kill oneself is a private choice about which society has no right to be concerned. This position assumes that suicide results from competent people making autonomous, rational decisions to die, and then claims that society has ...