...term "physician assisted suicide" meant the provision by a physician of the means of which a suffering, terminally ill patient could initiate his or her death. The "euthanasia" means the killing of a terminally ill person to end his or her suffering. Now, by practice, the term "physician assisted suicide" has been expanded in meaning to include the administration of a lethal substance by a physician to a suffering patient-a form of euthanasia. Thus, physician assisted suicide can now be defined as any action taken by a physician to provide death to a patient. Many people argue that the decision to kill oneself is a private choice which society has no right to be concerned about. This position assumes that suicide results from competent people making autonomous, rational decision to die, and then claims that society has no business "interfering" with a freely chosen life or death decision that harms no one other the suicidal individual. However, according to experts, who have studied several cases on suicide, the basic assumption is wrong. It is very unlikely that someone with serious disability commits suicide. Rather, as society view seriously disabled and terminally ill individuals as burdens with unacceptable quality of life, these persons may feel an obligation to commit suicide. A careful 1974 British study, which involved extensive interviews and examination of medical records, found that 93% of those studied who committed suicide were mentally ill at the...
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...Case Background: “Dr. Death” was the nickname given to a pathologist named Jack Kevorkian who had a controversial practice of assisting those who wanted to commit suicide (McLellan, 2011). In the 1990s, Kevorkian helped to create the dilemma for whether terminally ill people should have the right to kill themselves. “Kevorkian said he assisted in the suicides of more than 130 people from 1990 to 1998.” (McLellan, 2011, para. 9). Those who support the right to die say it is our freedom to choose the way we die and Kevorkian wanted to push professional medicine towards assisting that freedom (McLellan, 2011). Kevorkian was able to avoid conviction a few times due to un-clear laws on assisting suicide, but in 1998 he was convicted of second-degree murder after he had administered the drugs to a patient who could not do it himself. He was paroled after eight years during a ten to twenty-five year sentence due to good behavior and promising never to assist a suicide again (Bhanoo, 2011). With Kevorkian practicing something controversial,...
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...Assisted Suicide and euthanasia 1 Assisted suicide is a very controversial subject. Everyone has an opinion on the matter and it is likely that everyone will not agree on the matter. I have always been of the opinion that god gave us life and is the only that should take it away. However, I have never been in a terminally ill state and do not know the feeling of living everyday in unbearable pain. I can only imagine what a person is going through in this matter and can understand why they would wish to be dead. My opinion of assisted suicide being wrong is based on my moral belief and that fact that I do not think I could ever been able to commit such an act. Because of how I feel, it seems morally wrong for anybody else to commit such an act as well. Since taking my class on ethical behavior, I have come to realize that what one believes to be morally correct is not necessarily how another person may feel. This belief is called moral relativism. “Moral relativism is whatever anyone claims to be morally acceptable is morally acceptable, at least for that person” (Ruggiero, 2008). “For years, doctors have been prohibited from assisting patients in taking their own lives. Dr. Jack Kevorkian gained world attention by assisting in several suicides to dying patients; he was sentenced to over 60 years for his efforts, despite the gratitude of the patients and their families....
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...Assisted Suicide Shanette Anfield PHI200: Mind and Machine Troy Epps July 31, 2012 Assisted Suicide Assisted suicide is an ethical issue that not only has an effect on the individual, but it also reflects on the society where the individual lives. Euthanasia is an act of someone else ending someone’s life. Assisted suicide is the act of the individual having help in ending their own life. “Physician-assisted suicide (PAS), is slightly different than euthanasia; in using PAS, the patient is provided the means for terminating his or her life, but the patient, not the doctor, ends the life in question” (Mosser, 2010, Chp. 2.3, para. 31). However, not all assisted suicides may involve a doctor. In the United States, Oregon was the first state to pass an assisted-suicide law. Washington is a state that has as recently as 2008 adopted an act that allows residents that have less than six months to live to request a legal dose of medication. Eleven states, including Alabama, Idaho and North Carolina ‘have no enactments which criminalize aiding, abetting, assisting, or counseling suicide” (“Assisted Suicide,” 2010, para. 1-7). Several other states such as Alaska, California and Florida “criminalize aiding, abetting, and/or assisting suicide” (“Assisted Suicide,” 2010, para. 8). I am a Georgian and our law states that any involvement in an assisted suicide is a felony. The main conflict of assisted suicide is grounded...
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...|Assisted Suicide: | |A Right or a Wrong? | |By Claire Andre and Manuel Velasquez | |Matthew Donnelly loved life. But Matthew Donnelly wanted to die. For the past thirty years, Matthew had conducted research on the use of | |X-rays. Now, skin cancer riddled his tortured body. He had lost his nose, his left hand, two fingers on his right hand, and part of his | |jaw. He was left blind and was slowly deteriorating. The pain was unrelenting. Doctors estimated that he had a year to live. Lying in bed | |with teeth clenched from the excruciating pain, he pleaded to be put out of his misery. Matthew wanted to die now. His pleas went | |unanswered. Then, one day, Matthew's brother Harold, unable to ignore Matthew's repeated cry, removed a .30 caliber pistol from his dresser| |drawer, walked to the hospital, and shot and killed his brother. Harold was tried for murder. | |Rapid and dramatic developments in medicine and technology have given us the power to save more lives than was ever possible in the past. | |Medicine has put at our disposal the means to cure or to reduce the suffering of...
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...What are your views on assisted suicide? According to our text, Active euthanasia refers to positive steps taken to bring about someone else’s death, by administering a lethal injection or by some other means. Active euthanasia is morally wrong and I strongly object to it. For Christians, life is viewed to be sacred and the bible teaches, “Thou shall not kill.” Assisting someone else commit suicide is an act of killing the person, either by administering a lethal injection or by some other means. The bible teaches that killing another person is sin. With this basic understanding, Active euthanasia remains morally wrong in my opinion. Many argue that if a person so chooses to end his or her life or have someone else assist them in doing so, then it is morally permissible as long as no harm is done to others. Advocates of this argument fail to see the emotional stress people undergo in deciding to assist others commit suicide. This argument aims at elevating the individual right of the hopeless person rather than focusing on the damage Active euthanasia can cause the individuals assisting others. The family of the person requesting assisted suicide feels the grief of suicide more. As required by the laws of many states, family members are required to give consent to such request. Losing a love one through natural death is painful, losing a love one through assisted suicide compounds that pain as family members are left with the emotional turmoil from the trauma. The...
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...THE LAW ON ASSISTED SUICIDE On July 26, 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld decisions in New York and Washington state that criminalized assisted suicide. These decisions overturned rulings in the 2nd and 9th Circuit Courts of Appeal which struck down state statutes banning physician-assisted suicide. Those courts had found that the statutes, which prohibited doctors from prescribing lethal medication to competent, terminally ill adults, violated the 14th Amendment. In striking the appellate decisions, the U.S. Supreme Court found that there was no constitutional "right to die," but left it to individual states to enact legislation permitting or prohibiting physician-assisted suicide. (The full text of these decisions, plus reports and commentary, can be found at the Washinton Post web site.) As of April 1999, physician-assisted suicide is illegal in all but a handful of states. Over thirty states have enacted statutes prohibiting assisted suicide, and of those that do not have statutes, a number of them arguably prohibit it through common law. In Michigan, Jack Kevorkian was initially charged with violating the state statute, in addition to first-degree murder and delivering a controlled substance without a license. The assisted suicide charge was dropped, however, and he was eventually convicted of second degree murder and delivering a controlled substance without a license. Only one state, Oregon, has legalized assisted suicide. The Oregon statute...
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...of the Detroit medical pathologist Dr. Jack Kevorkian. Doctor Kevorkian, known as Dr. Death, claimed to have helped 130 people commit suicide when terminally ill, died in Detroit. He was 83. Born in Pontiac, Michigan, to Armenian immigrants, Jacob...
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...some agree with Physician-assisted suicide? PHI 208 Ethics and Moral Reasoning May 23, 2016 Physicians have been assisting people in committing suicide for many years by using methods of lethal injections. Assisted suicide is a step method in assisting someone to end their existence and is legal in Oregon, Vermont, and Washington State. James Rachel; 1941-2003 has argued for euthanasia (from the Greek for “good death” or the right to die and euthanasia is a practice of intentionally ending someone life to help relieve suffering and pain. Euthanasia has rising troubling questions in ethics due to it being out of the norm such as eating and doing ordinary activities. When a person is almost certain to die in any given amount of time and is suffering from a life threating painful disease such as a brain tumor, cancer at stage five should be allowed to use Physician assisted suicide. The cost of the medication and treatments are very costly to someone with limited health insurance and having their family members watching them suffer. This argument would support physician-assisted suicide (PAS) and is a little different from euthanasia. (PAS), physician assisted suicide, a doctor will provide a patient with a lethal amount of medication which will cause death to the patient. Certain countries such as the Netherlands and Belgium have made this process legal. In the United States Oregon legalized (PAS) physician assisted suicide in 1997 and the Supreme Court upheld...
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...At some point in everybody’s life death will inevitably be knocking at the door, and often times many people end up struggling with the best way to cope with it. Dying usually happens because your murdered, you commit suicide, or naturally. We all should know that murder is a person taking another person’s life, suicide is the taking of your own life, and naturally is death by natural causes. Composing a paper as to why a 110 year old person dies would be really challenging for me, mainly because at 110 you are considered to be really old. However, recently there has been another form of death that has a lot of controversy surrounding it. Doctor assisted death also known as Euthanasia. Euthanasia currently does not fall into any of the three before mentioned categories; we put it somewhere in the middle between murder and suicide. Like many other words in our English language euthanasia is Greek rooted eu, it means good and then thanasia means death, combined they mean “good death”. Take a moment and consider you have an illness and the doctors have just informed you it is terminal and you have only four weeks to live. They then tell you that during those four weeks you are going to be in continual excruciating pain and unbearable agony, and that no matter what pain medication they gave you there was nothing that would give you even a moment of relief. What would you do? If you decided to take action would it be in the form of an injection, a handful of pills...
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...Even though people have the right to live and die at their own rate. Is it okay to kill Someone because they are ill or sick? People should live out their final days without The help of killing them. It gives people the option to kill people without merit or Notion. It is considered murder by most if a person help kills someone with their Permission. Helping the terminally ill At what point does a person with cancer or HIV have the right to end their lives with The assistance of euthanasia from a doctor or nurse. It is often the someone have the The right to tell someone to kill them. The pain and suffering will be great on both Ends of the spectrum with any family member. It can be so much suffering on the Person wanting to end their life to prevent anymore pain. The pain from the actually Act of killing someone can be a great issue for all involved. The quality of life in the End stages of cancer and other diseases can be awfully bad. When you are dying from An illness such as cancer, end stage kidney disease, end stage heart failure, and so on, Ending your life in a painless manner with professional assistance is a very dignified Way to die. Is there a way for someone to past away peacefully in their sleep without Someone helping to go to the other side? Everyone should have the right to die in a Fashionably way with complete respect. Respect and dignity should be a honorable Reflection of a person’s wishes...
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...Assisted Suicide PHI 200: Mind and Machine Physician Assisted Suicide Physician assisted suicide is the common term whereby a physician, at the request of a terminally ill patient, assists the patient in voluntarily ending their own life. Assistance can mean providing one with the means (drugs or equipment) to end their own lives, but may extend to other actions. There are currently three states in the US which allow physician assisted suicide as well as a handful of countries. Global public debate has been ongoing for decades, centering on legal, religious, and moral conceptions of suicide and a personal right to death. “In some religious contexts, while a suicide is considered to be an offense made out of unknowing, confusion, or despair, assisted suicides are ostensibly actions made in faith, with no expectation of incurred sin or such that would bar transcendence to an afterlife”. In certain religious denominations, particularly the Roman Catholic Church, suicides are considered a serious sin. So, many Catholics oppose the practice of assisted suicide. For years, doctors have been prohibited from assisting patients to end their own lives. There are many arguments for and against assisting terminally ill patients to remain in control of their own destiny. Should a terminally ill patient be able to commit suicide? Proponents of patients’ rights argue that patients have the right to die...
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...Assisted Suicide Pamela Zipfel Herzing University Assisted Suicide Whose life is it anyways? Is the right to die our own decision or does ones fate lie in the hands of someone else? Should a person with a terminally ill disease be forced to suffer in pain? Physician assisted suicide should be a legal option for terminally ill patients; therefore the government, religious groups, and family members should not intervene. In the United States there are only two that support the Death with Dignity Law. These states are Washington and Oregon. These two states allow a physician to prescribe a patient with a terminally ill disease a lethal dose of medication to end their life. If you assist someone to die in any other state you will be prosecuted for homicide. The laws are very strict on this matter, a patient can only have up to 6 months to live and they have to be of sound mind. These laws are being fought strongly by religious groups. The fifth commandment “Thou shalt not kill,” is what we are taught growing up, by our churches and family. Physicians struggle with something that goes against their beliefs and moral ethics when deciding to participate in assisting a patient with suicide. Even though Washington is a death with dignity state it is hard to find a physician to prescribe the medication to assist with death. The Catholics believe that suffering is a critical piece of life. If someone takes their own life they bypass the chance to experience redemption. However...
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...For example, in Director of Public Prosecutions v Nestorowycz [2008] VSC 385 a wife stabbed her husband who was terminally ill and she received a suspended sentence. (End of Life Law in Australia, 2018). 2. Perspectives on the issue Different groups in society have diverse perspectives on the issue of voluntary euthanasia due to factors such as their religious beliefs, occupation, own health, moral values and life experiences. According to an Australian on-line poll carried out by isidewith.com (2018), 88% of people believe that terminally ill patients should be allowed to end their lives via assisted suicide. Groups against changes to the law to allow voluntary euthanasia and reasons for this perspective: - Some doctors believe that they have a moral obligation to keep patients alive in line with their Hippocratic Oath. They are also concerned that it may weaken the role and spending on palliative care. - Christian groups such as the Australian Catholic Church oppose legalising euthanasia as they believe in the sanctity of human...
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...Legalization of Euthanasia in the United States Euthanasia is a method that produces rapid unconsciousness and subsequent death without evidence of pain or distress. “It is only legal in Oregon, Washington, Montana making it illegal in forty seven states” (Marker 26-29). It is a controversial topic that is discussed among many Americans. It has many people of different genders, races, and religions in uproar, due to the wide range of opinions one may hold towards the topic. Some feel that it is their own right to choose to die or survive, and others feel that the practice of euthanasia is a type of suicide and also murder. With the legalization of euthanasia, it would significantly cut the cost of economic burdens on the families and society; secondly it brings closure to unnecessary increasing suffering; and it’s the patients right if face with life threatening injuries and terminal illness. Euthanasia would significantly cut the cost of health care. America has serious health care problems and end of life care is incredibly expensive due to the frequency of hospitalizations, the increased need for specialists’ attention, etc. Those with terminal illnesses have even more expensive health care needs. Obviously, those in the final stages of a terminal illness are no longer in any position to contribute economically to society. From a family standpoint the lives’ of the patient may be meaningful, however from an economic standpoint they are all cost and no benefit. Along...
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