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The Pros And Cons Of Assisted Suicide

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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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Today’s medical staff faces ethical dilemmas that are more perplexing, challenging, and controversial than ever before. As medical technology develops and we create more ways and machines that serve to prolong life, we face the legal and ethical debates over quality of life, patient autonomy, professional integrity, beneficence, social consequences, nonmaleficence, and the definition of death itself. Raising more ethical, moral, and practical issues than any other issue is physician assisted suicide. Physician assisted suicide is the provision of the means of ending his or her own line with the assistance of a medical professional. Arguments in defense of and in opposition to assisted death have traditionally been centered on the same bioethical

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The right to assisted suicide is a heavily controversial and debated over topic that concerns people all around the United States. The arguments go back and forth about whether a dying patient has the right to end their life with the assistance of a doctor or physician. Some people are against it because of moral and religious reasons. Others are for it because of their compassions and respect for unhappy patients waiting to die naturally. Assisted suicide is prohibited by common law or criminal statute in all 50 U.S. states; medical aid in dying is specifically authorized in 5 states: Oregon, Washington, Vermont, Montana, and California.

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Physician-assisted suicide is a widely controversial issue that is discussed in today society. There are debates over whether it is ethically correct or whether assisted suicide should be legalized for the terminally ill. Each side of the arguments have different viewpoints concerning individual aspects of physician-assisted suicide. Such as certain guidelines that should exist if legalized. Advocates of physician-assisted suicide argue that it should be legal under circumstances such as great suffering through terminals illness.

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Notably, the courts recognize the rights of patients to “die with dignity” however, others see these states encouraging patients to request the lethal injection to not become a burden on others instead of not suffering in pain or even fear of future pain. In this essay, I will focus on the six states law on physician-assisted suicide on the patients terminal condition or disease and whether patients with non-standard reasons such as non-terminal conditions (i.e. pain, disability, depression, free choice, etc.) have the right to end their own lives with physician-assisted suicide by the law.

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The concept associated with Physician Assisted Suicide holds a critical position within the contemporary generation as a number of different perspectives exist based on slippery slope arguments surrounding ethical understanding. Based on my current knowledge, my conceptual ideas, support the pro aspect behind physician assisted suicide for various reasons. For instance, free will and autonomy (Wong, dartmouth.edu) when it comes to life and death, terminal illness that has no possible cure and lastly, being able to provide the assistance in order to end the suffering being experienced by the patient as well as the family if the patient chooses to carry out the euthanasia. Further, individuals within society are permitted to practice natural human rights and should be given the

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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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In the defense of Physician Assisted Suicide, a wide publicly talked about topic, it should be a choice every terminally ill patient receives. Physician Assisted suicide is when a patient is terminally ill and has no chances of recovering. The patient themselves can make the decision, with the help from their physician, to get lethally injected and end their life reducing and ending the pain. In America each state has a little over 3,000 patients that are terminally ill contact an advocacy group known as the Compassion and Choices to try to reduce end-of- life suffering and perhaps hasten their death. Physician Assisted Suicide shouldn’t be looked at as suicide, but as ending the pain and suffering from an individual whose life is going to be taken away anyway.

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734 Words | 3 Pages

Doctor-assisted suicide is a controversial topic but what people fail to realize is the real facts of it. Physician-assisted suicide, also known as euthanasia, is quite self-explanatory; it is when a terminally ill person has the physician's help to die. It is not legal in all fifty states, and it should be. It is a hard decision to make and can prevent not the suffering of the sick lives, but the family's life, too. Doctor-assisted suicide should be legal, so terminally ill people can end their suffering, to help end their family’s suffering, and a doctor's job is to take care of their patients.

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1550 Words | 7 Pages

Physician-assisted suicide is a very controversial topic in today’s society. Physician-assisted suicide is defined as an action performed by the physician at the request of the patient to end the patient’s life with certain medical procedures. The legalization of physician-assisted suicide should not be passed in the United States because it is not morally acceptable in the society, leads to misunderstanding of a physician’s duty and increases mental suffering of both patient’s family and doctor. Physician-assisted suicide should not be legalized since the action itself is not justified morally. It is never morally acceptable for the society to give up on its people’s lives.

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But there continues to be adverse reactions concentrated towards the practice. After reading and comprehending the controversies of the topic, I have come to a firm belief that terminal patients should have the right to control their death through the use of assisted suicide when faced with

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Some say that the patient will suffer even if they decide not to choose assisted suicide, but assisted suicide helps end the terminal illness before it gets to the “end” which is when suffering becomes the most

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Anyone who has witnessed a person fights a life-threatening illness with no hope of recovery can sympathize with the patient's anguish and loss of will to live if it means more pain and less ability. Should a terminally ill person be able to choose when to lose their life? Some people oppose it for moral and religious reasons, while others support Physician-Assisted Suicide（PAS）, which is the voluntary termination of one’s life through administering a lethal substance with a physician's assistance. Unlike euthanasia, where the physician performs the intervention, PAS involves the physician providing the necessary means and the patient performing the act. Even to this day, when PAS is already legal in a growing number of states of the USA and

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1781 Words | 8 Pages

Assisted suicide has caused many divisions in the medical field on whether assisted suicide should be legalized. In September 1996 issue of the BMA news review, the results of a survey of over 750 GPS and hospital doctors showed that 46 percent of the doctors supported a change in the law to allow them to carry out the request or a terminally ill patient for voluntary euthanasia, 44 percent were against euthanasia and supported the present law and 37 percent said they would be willing to actively help end the life of a terminally ill patient who had asked for euthanasia and so assisted suicide, if the law allowed it.” (www.idebate.org/debatebase/debates/assisted-suicide/house-belives-assisted-suicide-should-be-legalized) What we should all know is that we have a God given right to choose how we want to live our lives within the limits of the law. We choose how we want to live and where, we also choose our career paths our significant others as well as

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1510 Words | 7 Pages

Assisted dying is becoming more and more of a common talk around everyone in the world. Whether a person is for it or against it, it is still something to controverse about. In this article I am going to talk about the pros and the cons of assisted dying, as well as my views of this delicate topic. “Assisted suicide is providing another person with the knowledge or means to intentionally end his or her own life; an example would be a doctor prescribing barbiturates to someone with a terminal illness who then takes the medication and dies.” (Thompson 2014).

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887 Words | 4 Pages

“Dignity is concerned with how people feel, think and behave in relation to the worth or value of themselves and others. To treat someone with dignity is to treat them as being of worth, in a way that is respectful of them as valued individuals” (The RCN Definition of Dignity, 2015). Throughout my clinical experiences, I have observed and accomplished providing dignity in all my patients including individuals during their final months of terminal cancer. I realized that preserving dignity is especially important during the final stages of life and throughout various chronic diseases as many patients view themselves as being worthless as they believe that their disease or condition is taking over their life.

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