Physician Assisted Suicide: An Ethical Dilemma

Imagine the following scenario: You have just been diagnosed with a severe illness. Your doctor tells you that without treatment, you will die soon. Then he tells you about a certain treatment that might delay the spread of the disease, giving you longer to live. The catch is that the treatment is expensive. You don’t want to die, so you contact your insurance provider to see if they will cover the cost of the treatment. They don’t. Instead they offer you a cheaper ‘treatment’ as an alternative. The name of the treatment? Physician assisted suicide (PAS). In a perfect world, the above scenario would be entirely fictional. Unfortunately, situations like the one described above have already occured in America. Barbara Wagner, an Oregon woman, …show more content…
For the sake of time, I will consider PAS and euthanasia as essentially the same practice. Thus these terms will be used interchangeably, except in citations, which will always use the term stated by the source. I will also avoid the moral or religious arguments against these practices, not because they are invalid, but because the inclusion of such arguments would lengthen this speech beyond the imposed limits. Instead I will argue that legalizing euthanasia, even if initially for a good purpose, leads to severe ethical consequences. These consequences can be summarized as the danger to doctors, the danger to patients, and the danger to …show more content…
They argue that patients with terminal conditions should have the right to end their lives quickly instead of slowly wasting away, often in great pain. This argument obscures another right that is given when PAS is legalized. As Dr. Peter Saunders, General Secretary of CMF UK, writes, legalizing euthanasia gives “doctors a legal right to kill”. This right is a direct contradiction to the mission of doctors. The profession of doctors is to cure the diseases of their patients, not to end their lives. In fact the first oath taken by doctors, the Hippocratic Oath from Ancient Greece, states that “I [the doctor] will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked, nor suggest such counsel...” (Saunders). This oath, or a version of it, is sworn by the majority of doctors in the US before they are given their licences. In addition, the World Medical Association stated in 2013 that “Euthanasia, that is the act of deliberately ending the life of a patient, even at the patient’s own request or at the request of close relatives, is unethical”. When doctors act in such a contradictory manner, problems