Assisted Suicide Vs Passive Euthanasia

Assisted Suicide

Doctors around the world use euthanasia to end a patient's life when a doctor feels it's time to end a severely sick patient’s life. Euthanasia is the painless killing of a person suffering from pain physically or mentally, this practice is illegal in most countries. Doctor’s usually turn to assisted suicide when the patient’s body is refusing to get better and not taking any of the treatments in. Euthanasia, also known as assisted suicide should be legal in our country because if people want to die peacefully and calmly in the right way, they should. If a person is thinking about ending their life, assisted suicide is the more better option because the patient gets assistance from a doctor and it's in a more calm matter
instead of harming the body. Patients and their families want an ill family member or loved one to die in the most calm and peaceful way they can, and with assisted suicide that patient can/will get that effect.

Assisted Suicide can also be referred to as “Euthanasia.” This present day definition differs from that of the classical Greeks, who considered euthanasia as simply “one mode of dying.” There are two main classifications of euthanasia, passive euthanasia and active euthanasia.
Passive euthanasia is when the life-sustaining treatments are withheld. Active euthanasia is a lethal substances or forces are used to end the patient’s life. According to the article Suicide, Euthanasia, and Physician - Assisted Suicide, active or passive Euthanasia involves forgoing medical treatment, knowing that such a decision will result in death. Euthanasia was a rational act by people who deemed their life no longer useful. Some doctors use assisted suicide to end a patient’s life because their body doesn’t want to get better or the patient doesn’t want to deal with the pain they have to deal with. In the article Suicide, Euthanasia, and Physician - Assisted Suicide the terminally ill patient has the right to physician-assisted suicide, in which a physician provides the means (such as lethal drugs) for the patient to self-administer and commit
suicide.

There are a wide variety of arguments on assisted suicide whether or not assisted suicide should be legal in our country. Assisted suicide was first legalized in England in 1938 with the founding of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society. Voluntary Euthanasia is when the patient is killed has requested to be killed. There are only five states in our country that allows medically assisted suicide and they are Oregon, Vermont, Washington, Montana and New Mexico. In the rest of country if doctors use euthanasia it is considered a huge crime. A 57 year old woman named Barbara Mancini was prosecuted for giving her severely sick dad a lethal dose of Morphine. Her dad was a home hospice patient in failing health and repeatedly expressed to family members his wish to die. With that wish being granted, after Barbara gave her father Morphine she was charged with a felony after an autopsy on her father’s corpse, showed that her father died from the Morphine she gave him. After that Barbara lost her job and paid more than $100,000 in legal fees.

A highly famous man named Jack Kevorkian became a pathologist in 1928 who assisted suffering from drastic medical conditions in ending their lives. In the 1950s he became intrigued by death and the act of dying. He made visits with terminally ill patients and took photographs of their eyes in attempt to try and pinpoint the exact moment of their death. Jack believed that doctors could use the information to distinguish death from fainting, shock or coma in order to learn when resuscitation was useless. In a method he called “terminal human experimentation” he argued that convicts could provide service for humanity before their execution by volunteering for painless medical experiments that would take place while the patient was unconscious, but would end in death. In 1986 Jack discovered a new way to expand his death row proposal when he learned that doctors in the Netherlands were injecting their patients die by injecting them with lethal. His new fight for assisted suicide became a campaign for medical experiments on dying. Jack Kevorkian first became famous when he assisted in the suicide of Janet Adkins, a 54 year old Alzheimer's patient. She heard about Jack’s newest invention called the “suicide machine” and contacted Jack about using it on her. Jack ended up getting arrested for his experiments with death and assisting people with dying. After more than 8 years of prison, Jack died on June 3, 2011 at Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan.

There are only a 5 but now 6 states that allow assisted suicide in their state. Oregon, Vermont, Washington, and Montana but just recently added to the list is California. Oregon was the first state to legalize assisted suicide for terminally ill and mentally competent adults in 1994. After Oregon legalized assisted suicide, Washington legalized assisted suicide in 2008 and Vermont then legalized it in 2013. Two years later California legalized assisted suicide in 2015 and then Colorado legalized it a year later. In all six of the states each patient has to be 18 years or older to take part in the act of euthanasia. Also, the patient has to be a resident within that state or else they can’t get the lethal dose. If the doctor is not licensed to assist a patient in suicide they will get in trouble. Euthanasia remains a heated topic in debate within the states on whether or not it should be legal in their state.
Euthanasia (assisted suicide) is not legal in Illinois and is a criminal offense. As stated in the Chicago Tribune News Article on Assisted Suicide, Illinois shuns the words/phrases like “suicide” or “euthanasia” or “aid in dying” or “physician assisted-suicide.” According to Illinois law, withholding or withdrawal of death delaying procedures from a qualified patient or following with terms of this Act or a health care agency shall not constitute suicide or homicide or murder. States are permitted to enact certain laws protecting a patient's right to die, though few states have done so. In those states, doctors are allowed to give patients lethal doses of certain drugs to end the patient's life. The patients who are going to be injected with the lethal can control the amount of lethal they are injected with. In the Chicago Tribune news article, individuals must go through a series of steps, including having two doctors agree that the patient has less than six months to live and is making this important decision of his or her own free will.

According to the article Personal Stories (Assisted Suicide) a patient named Kate Cheney, 85 had terminal cancer and informed her doctor that she wanted assisted suicide.
Her doctor was concerned that she didn’t meet the “required criteria” for mental competeness because of dementia. Her psychiatrist found that Kate had a loss of short-term memory. After that, her psychiatrist noticed that Kate’s daughter wanted her mother’s suicide more than her mother did. The psychologist also worried about familial pressure, writing that Kate's decision to die "may be influenced by her family's wishes." The psychologist determined that Kate was capable to choose death. Months later, Kate went into a nursing home for a week so that her family can get a break from the care giving. After she returned home, she declared her desire to take the pills herself and approved the writing of the lethal
prescription.

Euthanasia, also known as assisted suicide should be legal in our country because if people want to die peacefully and calmly in the right way, they should. If a doctor or the patient think it's time to give up on the patient who doesn’t want to get better then assisted suicide is a good option because if you don’t it's just a waste of time and medicine that could’ve been used for other sick and dying patients.