The Right to Assisted Suicide

You’re visiting the hospice for the twenty-third day in a row; the soft squeaking of the linoleum and the gentle buzz of the fluorescents in the waiting room greet you as you walk in. You’re visiting your Grandmother, whose lung cancer has entered metastasis, and has been slowly spreading throughout her body; she has already lost movement in her arms. She is a hollow shell of the woman she once was; her once bright eyes have been fading steadily every day, and her bubbly demeanor has become crushed and gravelly, and every day before you leave, she will only say, “Kill me.” What would you do in this situation? Would you break the law in order to respect your elder’s wishes? It is a cruel reality we live in when ability to choose the time of our demise, especially for terminal patients, is not seen as a personal right to be acted upon, but to be shunned as a taboo. This is why assisted-suicide, the contraction of a third-party to provide the materials necessary to commit suicide, should be legalized; it would allow both terminal and permanently disabled patients an escape from the mental, emotional, & physical pain of useless treatments, and impaired quality of life, in their final months.

The mental anguish felt by patients is a great burden for them to bear, and the more disfigured or closer to death these patients are, the heavier it becomes. "He is a painful, insistent reminder to others of their frailty, an acknowledgement that, in the routine of everyday life, is ordinarily suppressed. Others cannot avoid wishing that he, and his unwanted lesson, would go away. He cannot avoid knowing this of others and wishing it for himself” (Robert Burt, as quoted by Asch 2). These patients each become attached to their own personal...

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...then goes on to state that the right to die is a personal matter, and that while it is legal to commit suicide in Britain, it is illegal to assist in a suicide. He concludes by saying that Parliament should be allowed to legalize assisted suicide.

Stevens, Kenneth. "Oregon's Death with Dignity Act Is Being Abused" The Right To

Die. Jennifer Dorman, Ed. At Issue Series. Greenhaven Press, 2010.

Kenneth Stevens starts his article with description of the Oregon landscape that is immediately followed by the mentioning of the Death with Dignity Act. He goes on to talk about the number of deaths from assisted suicide from 1998-2006, and the fear of dependency that causes patients to choose assisted-suicide. He discusses the lack of incentive to care for a patient that has chosen suicide, and concludes by stating the concerns that society has about assisted-suicide.