A Composition of Ethics in Physician Assisted Suicide: Comparative Elucidation

If the government grants assistance in birth, what makes it any different to have a helping hand in death? In physician assisted suicide a terminally ill patient confers with a doctor that they want to demolish their suffering with dignity. Assisted Suicide is a profoundly controversial topic, roughly 65% of people in the US are against it while 35% are for it. This topic is very familiar with Americans because of the sheer number of doctors who have taken part.

A number of doctors have been accused of helping the terminally ill end their suffering, but one doctor in particular made a stand point. Dr. Jack Kevorkian is responsible for over one hundred and thirty assisted suicides. The doctor’s fascination with death began while he worked at the University of Michigan hospital, where he would photograph terminally ill patients to try to determine the exact time of death in their eyes. He also did this to distinguish the difference between a patient fainting, being in a coma, or actually being deceased in order to learn when resuscitation was useless. Not one to avoid distasteful ideas Kevorkian again caused pandemonium with colleagues by proposing that death-row inmates be used as subjects of medical experiments while they were still alive. In a method he called “terminal human experimentation,” he argued that condemned convicts could provide a service to humanity before their execution by volunteering for “painless” medical experiments that would begin while they were conscious, but would end in fatality. For his unorthodox experiments and strange proposals, Jack Kevorkian’s peers gave him the nickname “Dr. Death”. Dr. Kevorkian believed in every terminal patient’s right to assisted suicide. The doctor even invented ...

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...e medication or because of problems with the completion of physician-assisted suicide. The authors of the study also came to the conclusion that "...if physician-assisted suicide is legalized, but euthanasia is not, some competent patients may not be able to end their own lives for purely physical reasons, as in the case of patients with neurologic illnesses who have problems with swallowing or using their hands and patients who are physically too weak to take all the oral medication themselves."The Royal Dutch Medical Association recommends that a doctor be present when euthanasia is attempted. Two studies conducted in Oregon, where physician-assisted suicide became legal on Oct. 27, 1997 did not mention complications arising from the attempts. But critics suspect the results of the Dutch study were typical, and similar problems in Oregon had not been reported.