Physician Assisted Suicide | Academic Papers Help

  Topic: Physician Assisted Suicide

 Introduction

Physician assisted suicide is a controversial issue in today’s society and has been so for many years. As technology in medicine advances, the issue becomes more and more pressing. By definition, physician assisted suicide is the practice of allowing a physician to end a patient’s life with his or her consent using a lethal dose of medication or poison (Battin, Rhodes, & Silvers, 1998).  There are two sides to this debate. On one side, we have those people who are pro physician assisted suicide and they have their good reasons for supporting their argument. The other side comprises those people that are opposed to the idea and are ready to defend their stand with a zeal only rivaled by religious zeal (Battin, Rhodes, & Silvers, 1998). The aim of this paper is therefore to look at the both sides of the debate and articulate them through a critical argument.

First off, human beings should not be allowed to take other people’s life even with their consent. Medical professionals should not be given the power of taking someone else’s life because it discredits the ethical value of medicine. On the same note, it may sound rather hypocritical and ironical for the profession that is supposed to preserve life to be involved in killing or murder (Drickamer, Lee, & Ganzini, 1997).  But someone may argue that the cost of keeping people who are terminally ill alive on life support machines is high or strenuous on guardians or relatives. Well, this is a good point of argument but a person’s life cannot be assigned any monetary value (Mehlman, 2000).  In some cases, cost may become the determining factor in deciding between life and death, rather than the well being of the patient which shows reversals of priorities and moral decadency of the society in which we are living in nowadays.

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