Summary: Governor Jerry Brown has recently signed a bill which legalizes physician assisted suicide in the state of California. By doing so, California is following Oregon, Washington, Vermont, and Montana in becoming the fifth state in the US to legalize such medicine (ProCon, n.p., n.d.). Drugs like this will only be offered to terminally ill patients, and will require the patient to reaffirm that they want the drug several times with waiting periods between each in order to be sure that this is something that he or she wants to do. It is also expected that many hospitals will refuse to offer this drug to patients because it could bring bad publicity and have a negative effect on patient relationships (Lovett & Perez-Pena, 2015). There are a lot of arguments against this bill, for example, people claim that terminally ill patients might be talked into accepting …show more content…
The legislation has received harsh criticism and opposition from religion opponents who state that ending the life of any human being is a sin, regardless of the reason.
Moral/Ethical Issue: The moral issue here is whether or not one human should have the power to help end another person’s life. With every controversial issue, there are two very different viewpoints. A large portion of the country that believes that this kind of medicine is murder. The bill was passed with the intention of helping terminally ill patients avoid the pain and suffering that goes along with treatment, and instead gives the patient an option to opt for a death with dignity on his or her own terms. In my opinion, there are a lot of diseases out there that cause far too much suffering, to the point where I could understand someone wanting to end their life, on the premise that nothing is going to get better. This was a very hot topic while I was in high school, and to learn more about it we were