Physician Assisted Suicide Persuasive Essay

Physician assisted suicide is a current controversial issue that has been debated over since the colonial days of the United States. The Oxford dictionary defines assisted suicide as, “the act of killing himself/herself with help of somebody such as a doctor, especially because he/she is suffering from a disease that has no cure.” Although the definition seems like a doctor can put easily put a suffering patient out of their pain and misery by euthanizing the patient, the concept is much more complex than that. Euthanizing and medically assisting a patient to commit suicide are two completely different things. According to The World Federation of Right to Die Societies, “euthanasia usually means that the physician would act directly, for instance by giving a lethal injection, to end a patient’s life.” While physician assisted suicide is described by The American Medical Association as, “a physician facilitates a patient’s death

It can be argued that every individual has a “right to die” because the due proper clause implies that an ill patient has the right to refuse medical treatment and the government should not deny one of this right. The Due Process Clause, under the fourteen amendment, states that no one can be deprived of their, “life, liberty, or property.” For example, a patient who has little chance of survival may choose to have a physician assisted death arguing that he or she is protected by this specific law. But a Supreme Court ruling, which took place in 1997, elaborated on the definition and distinguished a bold line between physicians assisted suicide and refusal of medical treatment. In the Washington vs. Glucksberg trial, four physicians and three ill patients went to court to challenge the state of Washington’s law against physician assisted