As of July 21, a women from Great Britain made the decision to end her life with the help of a health clinic, despite having no serious health problems because, as she said, she didn't want to grow old. Assisted suicide is a growing controversy in the United States. It is the process of one person acquiring a lethal amount of medication from a physician. That lethal dose is then taken all at once in the place of one person's choosing. In the United States it is legal to obtain this medication in Oregon, Montana, Vermont, and California if one is terminally ill and over the age of 18. PAS or physician assisted suicide can affect anyone, it can affect a person directly, it can also affect a person if a loved one makes the decision to end their …show more content…
Supporters of the physician assisted suicide movement contend that doctors should want to help those who ask for care. One major reason that doctors should not accept physician-assisted suicide as a legal process because of the Hippocratic oath: “The Hippocratic Oath proclaims: ‘I will keep [the sick] from harm and injustice. I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect.’ [1] This is an essential precept for a flourishing civil society. No one, especially a doctor, should be permitted to kill intentionally, or assist in killing intentionally, an innocent neighbor” (Anderson). It is clearly stated in this oath that doctors will not give a deadly drug to a person who asks for it. It also states that doctors will keep the sick from harm, but is intentionally giving someone a lethal amount of drugs not harming them? A right minded person would say yes. Also, an oath is an oath and a doctor of all people should want to stick to it. On the note of doctors, what about the doctors that do follow the oath and don’t want to help a person kill oneself: “Doctors and nurses might find themselves ‘pressured’ to cooperate in a patient's suicide. In order to satisfy the desires of a patient wanting to die, it's unjust to demand that others go against their own deeply held convictions” (Andre). Doctors are a major group, often represented in today's society. They work together to achieve miracles and no doctor should want or feel obligated to put a fellow doctor in a position to do something they disapprove of. No matter the particular doctor's reasoning for not wanting to do the procedure they should most definitely not be pressured into performing such an unfair