Physician-assisted death is an option for patients with a prognosis of a mere six months to live or less to willingly end their suffering instead of having to live it out knowing that they will not be alive much longer. This term should not be confused by euthanasia, which is the act of deliberately causing the death of another person who may be suffering from an incurable disease or condition, usually done via lethal injection. Physician-assisted death occurs when the patient has been prescribed medicine, usually in the form of pills, that hastens death and then consciously takes the medication at their own will. On one end of the spectrum, people have conceived physician-assisted death as a horrible idea; it goes against both religious and
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In March of 2014, I watched my grandfather, who had stage four non-small cell lung cancer, lay in a hospital bed for a duration of fourteen days. During those fourteen days he was hooked up to a variety of machines, including a feeding tube and a ventilator. He was very much drugged up on morphine and was essentially a vegetable lying in the bed. Now, my grandfather was a noble man; he had his dignity and was a stubborn person who showed no weakness. Lying there on that hospital bed he was not like himself and he was very much helpless. If he had the option to choose to end his life before he got to a state so embarrassing to him I know he would have chosen that path; however, physician-assisted death is not an option in the state of West Virginia and in many other states in America. In Oregon, Vermont, California, and Washington physician-assisted death is available by state law, and mandated by court ruling in Montana. People may assume that I am being heartless by suggesting that my grandfather have the option to leave this world earlier than nature prescribed, but in reality I am in favor of decisions he could have made himself while he was still competent. Instead, he died not even an hour after they were forced to remove the ventilator that supplied his breathing and kept him alive. The fact that he was hooked up to a machine to stay alive itself is going against nature’s course, and therefore conflicts with negative opinions of assisted dying; that it is an unnatural course of
In March of 2014, I watched my grandfather, who had stage four non-small cell lung cancer, lay in a hospital bed for a duration of fourteen days. During those fourteen days he was hooked up to a variety of machines, including a feeding tube and a ventilator. He was very much drugged up on morphine and was essentially a vegetable lying in the bed. Now, my grandfather was a noble man; he had his dignity and was a stubborn person who showed no weakness. Lying there on that hospital bed he was not like himself and he was very much helpless. If he had the option to choose to end his life before he got to a state so embarrassing to him I know he would have chosen that path; however, physician-assisted death is not an option in the state of West Virginia and in many other states in America. In Oregon, Vermont, California, and Washington physician-assisted death is available by state law, and mandated by court ruling in Montana. People may assume that I am being heartless by suggesting that my grandfather have the option to leave this world earlier than nature prescribed, but in reality I am in favor of decisions he could have made himself while he was still competent. Instead, he died not even an hour after they were forced to remove the ventilator that supplied his breathing and kept him alive. The fact that he was hooked up to a machine to stay alive itself is going against nature’s course, and therefore conflicts with negative opinions of assisted dying; that it is an unnatural course of