Persuasive Essay On Assisted Suicide

The end of life decisions is difficult for most people to manage on their own. Nurses are there to support the patient and to ensure that the patient is informed and educated on all options when it comes to their care. When you have a terminal illness it is challenging for individuals to cope with, let alone adding the option for assisted suicide. To be clear assisted suicide is defined as someone deliberately helping another person end their life upon their request (Radbruch, Leget, Bahr, Müller-Busch, Ellershaw, De Conno, & Vanden Berghe, 2016). Some states have passed legislation allowing the process to die by assisted suicide when facing a terminal illness (Evans, 2015 p.629). In today’s world, people are living longer and able to prolong life, even with a terminal illness, due to advances in medicine and pharmacology (Evans, 2015 p.629). When an individual gets to a certain point in their illness where no amount of medication or pharmacology is working and the patient quality of life has diminished, the patient should be able to make the decision to end

The rules and regulation for each of these states are slightly different. “The Oregon law allows terminally ill residents to end their lives through the voluntary self-administration of lethal medications, expressly prescribed by a physician for that purpose” (Trossman, 2015). The individual has to have a terminal illness with less than six months to live and be a competent adult (Procon.org, 2015). This is important to note because this doesn’t allow a physician to just order medication for any person who wants to end their life. It allows the patient to die on their own terms when facing a terminal illness that will cause the patient to die in a way that the patient doesn’t want