Pros And Cons Of Physician Assisted Suicide

Chase Stuart

Mrs. Berni

English 11

09 February 2023

Euthanasia Legal or Illegal Euthanasia as described by the Oxford’s English Dictionary is the painless killing of a patient suffering from an incurable and painful disease or in an irreversible coma. Of course this idea is controversial and in most countries is illegal. It was first proposed in 1870, by Samuel Williams to use anesthetics and morphine to intentionally end a patient's life. In course with these ideas it brought about decades of debates about ethicality and legality. Eventually most countries decided that if in fact euthanasia was not ethical and in turn needs to be illegal. Euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide should be illegal because it is against the hippocratic oath,

Most people know the hippocratic oath from medical dramas such as “Grey’s Anatomy” where the only line they hear is ‘do no ham’. In reality the hippocratic oath is much longer and is a moral guideline for doctors to follow. Most doctors take this oath after they graduate from medical school. With only the line ‘do no harm’ it makes sense that the reasonable conclusion would be that killing someone would be doing harm. This is not the only line that comes to this conclusion. “The ethics of euthanasia have been a contentious issue since the beginning of medicine. The Hippocratic Oath takes a strong stand against euthanasia, requiring doctors to pledge never to “give a deadly drug to anybody if asked for it, nor…make a suggestion to this effect” (Emanuel and Joffe). The oath directly states no to give a patient or to suggest giving them the deadly drug. From this statement it shows that even during the conception of the oath that euthanasia was a frowned upon practice. This is a vital part towards euthanasia’s legality along with its ethicality. The legality of euthanasia is complicated, but this shows that the very oath that doctors take is against the very

They are wrong; the argument that since the removal of life support is legal that means euthanasia should be legal is a weak argument to begin with. They forget that there are laws and rules for the removal of life support. These laws are all based on consent of the patient or surrogate in charge of their care. “In the United States, the withholding and withdrawal of life support is legally justified primarily by the principles of informed consent and informed refusal, both of which have strong roots in the common law” (Luce and Alpers). This means for doctors to withdraw life support there is one main requirement, consent. This being the consent of the patient or in most cases the caretakers consent. Doctors are not just able to take people off of life support whenever they want. Another thing is that if a patient does not have caretakers or surrogates to give consent the physicians then have to appeal to courts, which then the decision is left in the judges and juries hands. This is related to physician-Assisted Suicide because of the death involved after the removal of life support. “The court also decided that terminally ill patients did not have a liberty interest in committing suicide or in receiving a phaysician’s assistance in commiting suicide, because of both the long tradition of prohibiting suicide in the United States and the state’s legitimate reasons for continuing to make assisted suicide illegal. In Vacco, the Court drew further distinctions