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Legalizing Physician Assisted Suicide

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Legalize Physician-Assisted Suicide
Stacy L. Free Top of Form
PHI103: Informal Logic (ACL1248D)

Instructor: Stephen CarterBottom of Form

January 14, 2013

Legalize Physician-Assisted Suicide “To be or not to be ” the infamous question brought about by Shakespeare in his famous play called Hamlet (No Sweat Shakespeare, 2004-2013) begged Hamlet to question whether to exist or not exist. As in the play, there are people who have struggled to answer this question throughout human history. In modern times a debate has sprung regarding the sickly who are terminally ill. Although some believe that physician-assisted suicide should not be legalized because it is a moral issue that they maintain is unnecessary and what it boils down to a lack of physician training that puts undue pressure on patients to opt for suicide, the procedure should be legalized because, when death is imminent, people should not be limited by laws that affect their basic human rights, forcing them to live in agonizing pain due to inadequate medical services, and allow them to die with dignity. If physician-assisted suicide were legalized then terminally ill people would be relieved from having to endure unnecessary pain and suffering when, even with medical intervention, the patient is forced to endure an agonizing demise. Assisting in more than 130 terminally ill patient suicides between 1990 and 1998, Dr. Jack Kevorkian believed that terminally ill patients should be allowed to determine when they were ready to die. He went on to say "I'm trying to knock the medical profession into accepting its responsibilities, and those responsibilities include assisting their patients with death (McLellan, D., 2011).” By definition, physician-assisted suicide is when a physician provides terminally ill patients with a potentially lethal prescription that they could ingest on their own to

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