Pros And Cons Of Assisted Suicide

1037 Words3 Pages

Assisted suicide by definition is the suicide of a patient suffering from an incurable disease, carried out by the taking of lethal drugs provided by a doctor for this purpose. Recently, it has been debated whether or not the decision to let someone die by the hands of a doctor because of prolonged evidence of pain is ethical or not. Part of this is because the patient might not be making the decision to die if they are being treated in a corrupted hospital or hospice center, where the doctor decides to execute the patient without their consent. It is also unknown how the doctor will choose to carry out the bringing of death and if he or she will be treating the patient humanely while doing so. On the other side however, it is considered …show more content…

People with diseases like terminal brain cancer and ALS who have limited time to live, should be able to decide when they want to die, as opposed to dying slowly and painfully. In hospice centers when a person is about extremely near death, they are cut off from food and water and made to wait for death from starvation and dehydration. Sometimes the person lives longer than expected and has to experience the pain of hunger and thirst for an extended period of time. This makes me question how it is ethical to let someone be deprived of resources and slowly deteriorate, when they could go peacefully with the antibiotics administered through euthanasia. The sad upside to this is that hospice centers would be able to get new patients in sooner and spend less money per patient. The money saved from the shorter hospice stays would most likely feed into the funds for the assisted suicide process so in a way it would even out. I like to call this procedure the ‘lesser of two evils’ because on the one hand you would be letting someone suffer, and on the other you would be killing them to end their suffering. I believe more that a person should cease the pain instead of continuing to let it happen. While it may be a hard thing to think of considering if the person dying is related to you, you must consider how they are feeling. If it comes to the point where they are begging for the pain to stop or to die, it may be time to put the process into

Open Document