Persuasive Essay On Assisted Suicide

“Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window […] the variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames.” This was said by American author David Foster Wallace who died by suicide in September of 2008. Most people do not want to die, dying is absolutely terrifying but for some, it becomes a choice between leaping out the window and sailing down to a quick death at your own hands and getting caught in the building and waiting for the

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is one of the guiding moral documents of Canada, which states, “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.” (Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 1982) In the opinion of the Supreme Court, current law infringes upon section 7 and this means that the ban on assisted suicide unjustly and immorally denies the human right to life and liberty and therefore, it is immoral to ban physician-assisted suicide outright. Law and ethics are closely related and often what is legal is ethical and what is illegal is unethical. (American Medical Association, 1994) Denying a mentally competent and terminally ill patient the right to a quick, painless and dignified death would be blatantly disregarding the foundational medical principal of autonomy. This would also make sense from a libertarian standpoint, as the person would be able to live their life the way that they want to with almost no harm to others. Research shows that doctors often agree with physician-assisted suicide and believe it is the moral choice especially in cases where the patient is terminally ill and has no treatment options

Furthermore, people feel that legalizing doctor-assisted suicide will open the floodgates and lead to a slippery slope that will ultimately devalue the worth of human life and lead to doctors pressuring the terminally ill to request assisted suicide. The evidence tells a different story however. One Dutch research article found that those most often requesting suicide were terminal cancer patients (15%) and those who had a terminally progressive neurological disorder (8%) (Onwuteaka-Philipsen et al., 2010). The same article showed that of all the patients these doctors saw, only 7% asked for doctor assisted suicide/euthanasia and around only 2.4% of the patients actually received euthanasia/doctor assisted suicide (Onwuteaka-Philipsen et al., 2010). To be clear, active euthanasia is when a doctor actively does something that will end a patient’s life, like injecting the patient with a lethal dose of poison and passive euthanasia is when the doctor withholds treatment that could potentially save a patient, such as in the case of a do not resuscitate order. Physicians, the study showed are generally very conservative in allowing PAS, as two thirds of those who requested euthanasia/PAS did not receive