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Essay On Death With Dignity Act

1681 Words7 Pages

Can you imagine going through long battle with a disease only to be told that you have only 6 more months to live. All of these thoughts and questions start running through your head and you feel like you’re dreaming or having some sort of out of body experience. Being diagnosed with a terminal illness is unimaginable, emotional and physically trying. Cancer is the number one leading cause of terminal death in the United States, to put that into a better perspective one out of every four deaths is cancer related. That’s about 564,000 deaths annually and 1,500 deaths per day. With that shocking statistic comes the thought of losing to this terrible disease that you’ve let define you for so long. That’s what Brittany Maynard thought until she came across the Death …show more content…

After Maynard went through with this act, the recognition for Death with Dignity began to soar but even then only five states allow this act to be done legally which needs to change. The Death with Dignity Act is an extremely beneficial policy that many people don’t know much about but when correctly educated on the matter many people will realize how truly helpful the act really is.
The Death with Dignity policy has been around for over 20 years and has dated back and argued about since the early 1990s. It was officially made a law in Oregon in 1994 with 51% in favor and officially went into effect in 1997 (Oregon 's Public Health System). Although this implementation was delayed by a legal injunction. On October 27, 1997, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals lifted the injunction. In November 1997, a quantity asking Oregon voters to annul the Death with Dignity Act was placed on the general election ballot (Oregon 's Public Health System). The people of Washington approved their policy in 2008 and it was executed in 2009 after no

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Public opinion polls showed increased support for physician assisted suicide. This was due in part to technological advances in medicine as well as a greater recognition of patient’s rights.” Twenty-nine-year-old Brittany Maynard, utilized Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act, took her own life in November 2014 following a diagnosis of terminal brain cancer. “A Pew poll conducted after Ms. Maynard’s death, revealed that people viewed this as a heroic act. Also, revealed, the majority of Americans, most likely including physicians, now favor legalizing physician-assisted suicide for painful and incurable conditions: 68 percent in favor, 28 percent opposed.

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The Death with Dignity Act, also known as the Right-to-Die Bill, allows terminally-ill adults grant their wishes to hasten their death in some states where it is legalized. These patients that are mentally capable of making their own decisions have the right to voluntarily request and receive a prescription medication to end their suffering sooner. Oregon, Washington, Vermont, and California are the only states that practice the Death with Dignity Act. Oregon voters approved Death with Dignity Act in 1994 and went into effect in 1997. Washington implemented the same act in 2008 followed by Vermont in 2013 which is the first state to pass through legislative process.

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"And I want to die on my own terms." Because California had not yet legalized medical aid in dying, Maynard and her husband, Dan Diaz, moved to Oregon to utilize the state 's Death With Dignity law. Oregon was the first state to enact such a law, in 1997. In the 18 years after, 1,545 prescriptions have been written for a lethal dose of medication, of which 991 patients used that prescription to hasten their death, according to a study released this week. Most of those patients, like Maynard, had cancer.

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II. Need Step Individuals across America are suffering each and every day with terminal illnesses and at this

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“Be smart, be strong, live honorably and with dignity, and just hold on” (Fray). Physician assisted suicide or better known as Death with Dignity isn’t your everyday topic or thought, but for the terminally ill it’s a constant want. The Death with Dignity isn’t something that all people or religions are in favor of and nor is the act passed in all states in the United States. Only three states in the U.S. today, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington offer their residents the option to have aid in dying as long as all the requirements are met. Death with Dignity doesn’t effect just the terminally ill person, but as well as family and friends around them creating many conflicting thoughts when opinion if Death with Dignity is truly moral and a choice

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Physician-assisted death is the practice in which a physician provides a mentally competent patient with the means to take his/her own life, usually in the form of prescribing death-dealing medications. It first became legal in the United States in Oregon in 1998. It is now legal in four other states: Washington, California, Montana, and Vermont. In order for one to exercise their right to die this way, the law states that the patient must be at least 18 years old, be mentally competent, be diagnosed with a terminal illness that will lead to death within six months, and must wait at least fifteen days before filling the death-dealing prescriptions. This controversial practice has raised the question of whether or not it is ethical for a physician

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Death is a natural process that will be experienced by everyone at some point, desirably at the end of a long, well lived life. The reality is that no one knows when that time will come or how it will happen. Unfortunately, for the terminally ill, death is in the near future and it is a sobering reality. Therefore, when that time comes, people need to know that they will have options, and the assurance that death does not have to be an agonizing end. They can choose to endure the annihilating pain that comes with the disease and allow it to take its natural course or choose to put an end to it, surrounded by those who love them.

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According to the official report on deaths under “Death with Dignity Act”. It states that,”The number of prescriptions written has increased each year since the Oregon Act went into effect. The “Death with Dignity Act” is an act which allows people with extreme illnesses in Oregon able to be prescribed by their doctors with medication that will kill them without suffer or pain. In Oregon the law has circumstances that you have to meet to be able to ask for assisted suicide. Those are, patients must be 18 years of age, suffering from a terminal illness with a life expectancy of six months or less, the patientś must make two oral requests for assistance in dying, the patient must make one written request for assistance, two physicians must be convinced that the patient is sincere, not acting on a whim, and that the decision is voluntary, the patient must not be influenced by depression, they must be informed of :feasible alternatives¨ such as hospice care and pain control and they must wait 15 days between the verbal

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In a close victory, fifty-one percent of the voters voted yes and forty-nine percent opposed the Death with Dignity Act. However, the law was delayed for several years due to an injunction by District Judge Hogan who had ruled that the Oregon Death with Dignity Act violated the U.S. Constitution’s Equal Protection clause (Legal). The ruling was immediately appealed to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and in 1996 the ban was ruled unconstitutional by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. In two related cases at that time, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that assisted suicide was not a Constitutional right, but also that the issue would be best addressed in the “laboratory of the states” which are free to prohibit or legalize physician assisted dying. In 1997, the Oregon Legislative Assembly put Measure 51 on the ballot in an effort to repeal the Death with Dignity Act.

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The Death with Dignity Act in 1994 was approved in the state of Oregon. The second state to legalize doctor-assisted suicide was Washington State. (Nordqvist, September 2014)

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There are real case incidents in which a 14 year old girl suffering from terminal cystic fibrosis is asking her country’s president for permission to end her life. She had self shot a video in which she says “I am tired of living this disease and she can authorize an injection through which I can sleep forever”. The girl's video has sparked a broader conversation about whether euthanasia should be legalized in the largely Catholic nation. According to me we should let euthanasia be legal as there is no significance in keeping them alive against their wish as we don’t know how much they are suffering. Another incident is where the woman moved to Oregon where euthanasia is legal to take advantage of Oregon’s death with Dignity Law.

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680 Words | 3 Pages

(Maynard, 20) There are many people that disagree with Brittany Maynard choice. In the medical field there are many restrictions on how a person should live or die like in the case of Brittany. These standards are set by state allowing another unknown person to decide how another should die. However, there are many opinions about this issue and the strongest being that euthanasia is a personal issue, and no one especially the state should restrict a patient's right to

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1321 Words | 6 Pages

Brittany Maynard has been fed up with the government making medical decisions for her and patients in the same situation as her. This is what was on her mind “How dare the government make decisions for terminally ill people like me. Unfortunately, California law prevented me from getting the end of life option I deserved. No one should have to leave their home and community for a gentle death.” She has set things right for terminally ill patients in California.

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Imagine being unable to walk, unable to speak, unable to move and unable to breathe. Imagine being in a state of complete paralysis where the only thing that keeps on functioning is your brain, and you live chained to a machine doctors call life support. Imagine being told that you have an incurable disease that will inevitably kill you. Maybe next month. Maybe next year.

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When you hear the word death or you hear that someone has died today in the news or on the television I know a lot of people think “Man, I feel sorry for the family that they have to go through that.” or they thank god that it was not them or their family members.” Sadly though people try to push away death and push away the fact that everyone dies at one point in time. This is even truer when they witness their own family member in the hospital with a critical condition that the doctors cannot fix even with modern medicines on the doctor’s side. Another such time would be when a person’s family member is diagnosed with an incurable sickness that is fatal.

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