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Physician Assisted Suicide Argumentative Essay

1290 Words6 Pages

Physician assisted suicide is one of the most complex and critical health care policy issues that doctors and nurses must face and either advocate for or against. What makes it difficult is determining whether or not the patient’s condition is poor enough to be considered eligible for this type of treatment. In 1990, Dr. Jack Kevorkian started a movement of taking this practice forward himself and helping multiple people do what they wanted with their life. Physician assisted suicide (PAS) can be a respectful way for people to be let free of their misery if done at the request of the patient.
PAS can be seen as a negative act that doctors and nurses have the power to over use. For example, Dr. Jack Kevorkian had taken it into his own hands …show more content…

That legally includes the right to exercise control over your own body, as evidenced by legal sex change operations and even by a woman’s right to have an abortion. A person’s right to die is simply an extension of those already established rights. A well known author, Paul Menzel, said that, “This “exception,” is not really an exception, but part of the very nature of the right to refuse” (Menzel 368). A patient has the right to refuse treatment for his or her illness if deemed terminal or if they have a small chance of making it through treacherous medical attention. For example patients in modern day hospices are officially given morphine dosages to help with any of the pain they have, but unofficially they do not stop the dosage until the heart stops in the patient. Patients do not last long in the hospice because of this continuous dosage of morphine but it helps the patient have a painless death. So even though they are not officially euthanized they are still slowly shut down by the drugs they are given. Seeing this happen in modern day hospices is not uncommon and it shows that there is no difference than just given a lethal dosage of a drug. If people are slowly and peacefully being put down in hospices unofficially than people should have the right to die before they go to the hospice and have a quicker and less painful way to go

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