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The Pros And Cons Of Assisted Suicide

1700 Words7 Pages

A mother of five children, continually exhausted and bed-bound at home with a gaping, foul smelling, open wound in her abdomen, can no longer eat and no longer wants to fight ovarian cancer. Should she be able to have the right to end her life? This is the question many doctors and patients are facing today. The right to assisted suicide can have a large impact in society. It affects the patient, their family, the doctor, and the nurses who have been taking care of the patient. Granting terminally ill persons the right to assisted suicide will change how people spend their last few days of their lives. Based on different research and studies, terminally ill persons should be assisted with ending their lives in order to improve their end of …show more content…

Although family, doctors, relatives, and the government may have a say in whether or not assisted suicide should be legal, the patient themselves is the one who is dealing with the decision to end their own life or not. Assisted suicide should be allowed for the terminally ill in order to preserve their dignity. The book Euthanasia, Assisted Suicide, and the Philosophical Anthropology of Karol Wojtyla by AK Fernandes states, “If a person chooses, they ought to be allowed to have assisted suicide or euthanasia. Such a free choice will preserve dignity by allowing a person to maintain control over the timing and manner of their death.” Loss of dignity is closely associated with certain types of distress often seen among the terminally ill. Preservation of dignity should be an overall aim of treatment and care in patients who are nearing death. One study discusses an empirical model on the effect of illnesses and dignity. The outcome concept in this model is dignity. Both burdensome illness-related concerns and a taxing social dignity inventory are shown as having a deleterious effect on dignity. (Dignity in the terminally ill: a developing empirical model). Being a burden and having a terminal illness makes patients feel less dignified because they are not able to take care of themselves. And for many patients, particularly those in hospital and those with more debility, life without dignity was described as a life no longer worthy of living. (Dignity in the terminally ill: a developing empirical model). Patients suffering from terminal illness do not care to prolong their life, they care to preserve their dignity and pass away in a manner they want. Giving terminally ill patients the ability to preserve their dignity and choose the way they want to pass gives them the power to feel that they are dying as the person who their loved ones remembered them

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