Physician Assisted Suicide

Physician Assisted Suicide

There are only two things guaranteed in this world, death and taxes. No matter how hard people try to avoid either of those things, eventually, they happen anyway. Most people do not get to choose when they die, except for those who commit suicide, and those people also do not choose how it happens. The best thing to hope for is to die of old age, having experienced what life has to offer, but as is well known, it doesn't always happen that way. Some people have accidents, some get murdered, and some get life threatening diseases. Finding out that you have a life threatening disease is an emotional experience and most go through the stages of grief as they decide how they are going to fight for survival. It's only natural to want to survive, and some do, but some people do not get better. They get worse and end up spending what little they have of their life in pain or unable to take care of themselves. There are people who believe that everyone should have the right to choose when and how they want to die. Those people also believe that the terminally ill should be able to choose if they want to stop fighting the disease and just end their life, and they use ethical theories such as deontology and emotivism to explain their reason and prove their actions as ethical. Some of these people are doctors who choose to use their access to materials which can easily end someone's life, to help the terminally ill end theirs early. This is called physician assisted suicide or physician assisted death, and is illegal in all the states, except for Oregon. Over the last eighteen years, over 50 bills have been introduced in an attempt to legalize physician assisted death, but all have failed. Headlining this fight was Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a pathologist in Michigan State (Gorsuch, 2006).

Dr. Jack Kevorkian, also known as "Dr. Death", kept the fight to legalize physician assisted suicide in the newspapers. He first entered the view of public eyes after he assisted in the suicide of Janet Adkins after which he reveled that he did not take a medical history or an exam of any kind. Since then, Dr. Kevorkian also admitted that he assisted in over 130 deaths (Gorsuch, 2006). Not all of Dr. Kevorkian's "patients" were terminally ill and he believed that the law should not distinguish between the terminally ill and the chronically ill. In his opinion, all "patients" deserve the right for a cure and when one is not available, they should be able to avoid further suffering with the help of a physician who can assist them in ending their own life. Dr. Kevorkian believed that he was meant to play a unique roll and to assist those that choose to end their suffering. After a judge dismissed a murder charge against Dr. Kevorkian for his first "patient", Kevorkian assisted in over a dozen deaths. Michigan State decided that there is a flaw in their law that needed to be fixed. In early 1993, assistance to suicide became a crime with which Dr. Kevorkian could be charged. Even with the new law, Kevorkian was not convicted of a crime until he allowed a show to video tape him injecting a patient with drugs which lead to his death (Palmer, 2000). While Dr. Kevorkian is probably the most known to the public, he is far from the only advocate for physician assisted suicide.

Timothy Quill was a professor at University of Rochester who in 1991, started a debate on the subject when he published an article describing and defending his decision to prescribe a lethal dose of drugs to a cancer patient. He wrote that his patient admitted that she might use the drugs to commit suicide some time later. No criminal charges were filed and Dr. Quill did not face any charges from the medical board. Their reasoning was that he prescribed a legitimate drug for his patient and that he had no intention to cause death. A year after Dr. Quill published his article, a gynecology student submitted an article describing how he injected a cancer patient with a lethal dose of drugs after her plea to end her life early (Gorsuch, 2006). What the student did is an act of euthanasia, not assisted death or suicide, and after the article was published there were numerous philosophers in multiple fields who began to publish books on legalizing assisted suicide and euthanasia, "including Ronald Dworkin in 1993, Seventh Circuit Judge Richard Posner in 1995, and Richard Epstein in 1999" (Gorsuch, 2006, p. 2). Even with a larger group of supporters, voters had little to show for their fight to legalize physician assisted suicide, in fact some states moved to make even stricter laws banning it (Gorsuch, 2006).

As Michigan, Maryland, Iowa, New York, Virginia, and Oklahoma, strengthened their laws against assisted suicide, supporters of assisted suicide turned to the New York and Washington Courts to declare that banning assisted suicide was unconstitutional. What resulted was a melting pot of rulings. One ruling found that the right for assisted suicide was constitutional and another disagreed. After going through appellate courts the decision was left to the Supreme Court which upheld the ban on assisted suicide. Their decision, however, did not included cases in which the patient was terminally ill, and that decision was left for another day (Gorsuch, 2006). This left the question of assisted suicide unanswered and allowed the supporters of assisted suicide to fight another day.

Unlike many other states, Oregon allows physician assisted suicide, which allows supporters in other states to continue to attempt to legalize it in their own state. While Oregon allows physician assisted suicide under their Death with Dignity Act, it provides a very strict set of rules which determines who is eligible for assistance with death. These guidelines include, being examined by two physicians who have to determine whether the disease is terminal and whether the patient is in a lucid mind frame and is able to make the decision to end their own life. If these conditions are met, the patient can submit a written request, which must be witnessed by two people who can verify that the patient is lucid and is not being coerced, for medication to aid in their death (Gorsuch, 2006). While Oregon's Death with Dignity Act gives ammunition to physician assisted suicide supporters, it also helps those who do not support it to point out all the flaws. Oregon's law is not clear on many things including the definition of terminally ill and if it excludes cases in which if the disease was treated in some way the patient might survive. It also is not clear on the timetable. The Act states that the patient must be given six or fewer months to live but sometimes it is difficult to determine the timeline of someone's last months of life. There are cases in which patients waited over 400 days to

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