Reasons For Physician Assisted Suicide

“Free Will” and Economic Reasons for Physician Assisted Suicide
Throughout time the origins of human rights have progressed to embody a world that preserves humanity, freedom and tolerance. Hugo Grotius, a European Renaissance thinker, began the origin of human rights by believing natural rights were independent of religion and obtained solely by being human. The American Revolution prompted Thomas Jefferson to declare that rights were “self-evident” in the Declaration of Independence. Furthermore, during the French Revolution, Marquis de Lafayette helped mold the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which assigned sovereignty to the nation, not the king. All three of these instances that made human rights more prominent follow the theme of “free …show more content…
Assisted suicide can be broken down into two different categories and types. The first type of assisted suicide is physician assisted suicide. This type of assisted suicide gives the physician the opportunity to allow for a patient to obtain lethal medication. However, a patient must go through physiological testing and be approved by two separate doctors before being allowed to receive the medication. Physician assisted suicide fully embodies the idea of “free will” because once the medication is obtained by the patient, it is the patient’s decision where or not to take it. This type of assisted suicide also allows the physician to feel less guilt due to the fact that they don’t actually kill the patient, just give the patient the opportunity to take medication. The second type of assisted suicide is euthanasia. Euthanasia is very criticized not just in the United States but throughout the world. At this moment, euthanasia is illegal throughout the United States. This type of assisted suicide permits the physician to physically inject a lethal substance into a patient ("Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide," n.d). This type of assisted suicide is heavily regarded as extreme and would not be present in the 28th Amendment that will be …show more content…
This oath is a precedent taken by all medical students and states that doctors will “do no harm” to their patients. While one may believe that “do no harm” means keeping a patient alive at all costs to preserve their life, others who agree with physician assisted suicide see “do no harm” in a different way. “Do no harm” can ironically also mean not allowing a patient to feel extreme suffering and pain. There is no incentive of a patient receiving pain because if they are terminally ill they will most likely pass within the next few months (Braddock, 2013). What does more harm, allowing the patient to decide to take their life at their own free will, or allowing them to endure suffering until their inevitable death? This is an ethical value which each individual must ask themselves. Patients should be able to have the “free will” to determine how their life ends. Being in a hospital bed in extreme pain with seeing loved ones watch one in their worst moments, as their final moments, may not be the way one would want to end their life. Although medical attention and medicine can help reduce the amount of shear pain one has, it cannot stop all the internal and external