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| Rosa Osteicoechea Punto Fijo, Venezuela |
Physician assisted suicide is a practice that is becoming more common every day and according to Gonchar “public support for assisted suicide has grown in the last century and now is legal in five states in the United States” (2014). However, there are many people who have never heard of it. People usually think that euthanasia and assisted suicide are one in the same but they have different legal meanings.
On one hand, physician assisted suicide is a practice in which the patient request to the doctor the prescription for a lethal substance to help accelerate death but the doctors do not take any part in the physical act. The action is performed by the patient itself as the last will. On the other hand euthanasia which is known in the United States as mercy killing is committed when someone other than the person who dies performs the last act and in many countries is considered homicide. As in any controversial issue there are people who support assisted suicide and the people who do not.
On the con side people claim this practice interferes with the fundamental role of the doctors who are supposed to heal people instead of killing them. On the pro side, people who agree with the assisted suicide, claim that every person has the right to decide when to die. So, definitely, this topic has different causes that are worth to explain and details that are necessary to describe.
One of the reasons many people opt for suicide is that patients who are suffering from an illness with no cure want to terminate their pain as soon as possible. Some diseases cause extremely painful symptoms which unfortunately cannot be controlled with medicines and on top of that some of those illnesses have no known cure. Furthermore sick people feel hopeless to continue living a life that will not have even a glimmer of happiness in the future.
All this burden of emotions clouds the minds of patients leading them to think that their only option is to terminate their existence. When the decision has been made by the patients they have to inform their doctors and their families, the doctors provide the prescription for the medicine to stop life and the families are supposed to provide unconditional support to their relative. It is the sick person’s task to perform the act. Living in pain is unhuman, the body is not able to perform well, the mind stops working as it should and no one wants to keep living like this. Pain itself is a good enough reason to consider assisted suicide.
A second cause for sick people to choose assisted suicide is the lack of help some patients have to face. Family is the main support of a sick person, but sometimes family is not around to help and when this happens the injured person is on his or her own. This situation sometimes makes the person feel even worse about the condition of the illness which leads to a series of emotional changes as depression and anger. Not counting with any help from a relative, to support the person in the hardest days, when all motor skills have been lost and they cannot even get into bed by their own devices makes things harder to overcome.
A person in pain needs help to do activities that a healthy person can do easily such as cooking a meal, feeding themselves, and taking a bath. All these activities are difficult for a person in pain if they have support from the family this is easier to get through. But when no one is there to help, thoughts start to torment you about how life is too hard to continue without a companion to support you during the hard times. When the patient feels alone and helpless this can lead to depression.
The Oregon law expresses that “mentally ill patients can receive assisted suicide if they do not have impaired judgment” (Marker, 2006, p. 64).So according to this law as long as the person is still rational and able to think correctly regardless the mental condition the person presents they are eligible to request assisted suicide.
A third cause that leads people to commit assisted suicide is the amount of bills a sick person has to pay. Health care in the United States is really expensive even if the person has insurance. A common affection like a cold can take a person to visit the doctor and the bill can equal the salary of one week. Now imagine how much a treatment or a medicine for a terminal disease or a disease with no cure can cost. In some cases the health insurance company does not covert many of these treatments and if the person is not wealthy the debts would accumulate.
Moreover if the sick person has no money neither good insurance probably that person will not have access to the medicines needed to alleviate the pain. Marker states that “while assisted suicide may be a choice for the comfortably well off, it could become the only medical treatment that the poor can afford” (2006, p. 67). This means that people with no medical insurance who do not have money to take care of their sickness probably will end up having no other option but requesting assisted suicide because of the financial burden.
Official reports from Oregon, where the assisted suicide is legal, show that patients who died from assisted suicide had financial concerns. Even though, Oregon State provides Medicaid to poor people, this kind of insurance does not cover interventions the patients need and want which is again why they choose to request assisted suicide.
Now that the causes have been described is time to deepen in the most controversial part of this topic, the question that has brought a heated discussion among the medicine field. Should physician assisted suicide be legal or not. According to Gholipour (2013), doctors in the United States are still divided regarding this issue. Also, the New England Medical Journal conducted a poll where the results show that 65% percent of the American readers are against the idea of physician assisted suicide.
However 5 states in the U. S. have legalized physician assisted suicide, with the votes of their settlers. Oregon was the first state to legalize it, and then Washington, Vermont, Montana and New Mexico did the same. The pattern shows this is a continuous process and the debate will continue to be strong among the medical field and the ethicists, but the efforts to legalize assisted suicide will not stop.
I believe the government should legalize assisted suicide because is a way of avoiding suffering to sick people and maintaining their dignity, but the regulations of the law need to be strict to stave off questionable outcomes. In my opinion no one that is healthy should have the right to request for assisted suicide because they are completely empowered to have a normal life. In addition any person who has mental impairment should be considered apt to request assisted suicide. Also minors should have a guardian with power to make decisions about their conditions.
Even though people have different perspectives about this subject history shows that it will continue to be legalized in every state as it has been in the past until it becomes legal in the whole country. The life is a fragile asset and humans are not supposed to live forever, in addition sickness are around constantly. Despite the medicine field has achieved significant progress treating diseases and finding their causes, sadly it cannot cure all the diseases that currently exist.
When the efforts to stop the pain are in vain sometimes the only option left is to stop life. Assisted suicide should be seen as a way to stop the suffering and releasing the person from all the pain that cannot be finished by using traditional medicine. People should not be kept in pain, if ending life is the only solution and people have chosen it, their will deserves to be respected.
References
1) Gholipour, B. (2013, September 11). Physician-assisted suicide: Poll shows divide among experts. Retrieved from HuffPost Healthy living website:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/12/physician-assisted-suicide-legal_n_3913400.html
2) Gonchar, M. (2014, February 20). Should terminally ill patients be allowed to die on their own terms? Retrieved from Teaching and learning with the New York Times website: http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/20/should-terminally-ill-patients-be-allowed-to-die-on-their-own-terms/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=
3) Marker, R. (2006). Euthanasia and assisted suicide today. Society, 43(4), 59.
