Assisted Suicide Research Paper

SAMPLE ARGUMENTATION ESSAY
Research Question: Should assisted suicide be legal?

Assisted Suicide: Rights and Responsibilities
A woman suffering from cancer became the first person known to die under the law on physician-assisted suicide in the state of Oregon when she took a lethal dose of drugs in
March, 1998. The Oregon Death with Dignity Act passed a referendum in November, 1997, and it has been the United States ' only law legalizing assisted suicide since then. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, more than 4,000 doctors have approved of the assisted suicide law (cited in "The Anguish of Doctors,” 1996). The law allows terminally ill patients who have been given six months or less to live and wish to hasten their deaths to
The issue of doctor-assisted suicide has been the subject of the heated dispute in recent years. Many people worry that legalizing doctor assisted suicide is irrational and violates the life-saving tradition of medicine.
However, physician-assisted suicide should be legalized because it offers terminally ill people an opportunity for a peaceful death and recognized the inadequacy of current medical practice to deal with death.
It has been argued that the reason why some terminally ill patients wish to commit suicide is nothing more than melancholia. Patients suffering terminal illness might tend to be negative, hopeless, and depressed. In "When Patients Request Assistance with Suicide,"
Maskin, an associate professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New York, argues that in many cases, dying patients ' thinking is simply occupied by negative reactions to their critical condition (1999). In other words, most of the reasons why
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terminally ill patients request doctors to assist them in committing suicide might be caused
It may be true that all such requests, in which dying patients ask doctors to help them to kill themselves, come from depression as some psychologists have claimed and that some patients will change their minds if they participate in psychotherapy. However, all of those terminally ill patients who after psychotherapy finally choose to hasten their deaths are very determined. In "Opposing Views on Assisted Suicide," Girsh points out that many dying patients want to know about how to get help from a doctor to achieve a peaceful death even if ultimately they do not choose suicide (1999). In fact, the terminally ill patients in Oregon who voluntarily chose to ask doctors to help them commit suicide were those who decided carefully to take advantage of the doctor-assisted suicide law. First of all, patients who consider assisted suicide are aware of their exact medical condition through a mutual exchange of information with their doctor. Second, these patients understand their medical treatment along with risk, benefits and other options. Third, they must talk with a psychologist to determine if they are psychologically able to make such a decision. Therefore,