Doctor-Assisted Suicide

Physicians-assisted suicide gives mentally competent adults with the prognosis of six or fewer months to live, due to a terminal illness, the ability to voluntarily acquire a medication that will hasten their dying process; this allows them to forgo the pain and suffering that would otherwise diminish their quality of life. Death with Dignity is a movement that has swept over the United States in recent years, and being as it goes against certain religious ideologies, it has been met with great controversy. The discord surrounding suicide is a fairly recent one, based in religious morals and shouldn’t be applicable in today’s government. It is a matter of human dignity that no one should be denied the right of ending their life own terms. Terminally
In November of 1994, Oregon passed the Death with Dignity Act, three years later on October 27, 1997, it was enacted. Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act became the foundation on which more recent PAS Acts have been based, this act has strict criteria and is tightly regulated- as any life and death matter should be. Although the topic of PAS has only begun to make headlines in the last 20 years, assisted suicide for the considerably ill is not a new practice. Recordings of rational suicide date back to Ancient Rome in 500 BC where a deadly hemlock poison was commonly made available to those who sought a “good death”. This continued for many centuries until influences from the Christian church condemned the practice during the Middle Ages (Fontana). In the United States of America, medical care is independent of any political, religious affiliations. Many dispute this practice by falsely referring to the Hippocratic Oath "first, do no harm" however, this phrase is not in the original oath nor the modern version of the oath (“Bioethics”). Around 14 percent of modern adaptations of this oath still prohibit euthanasia (Tyson). Hippocrates himself was one of the first physicians to secularize medicine, he acknowledged medicine as a branch of science that is unconnected to
To look at the right to die one must first question if it is compassionate to keep a person in a consistent state of suffering until they succumb to their illness? Suffering, disease, pain are all synonymous with deterioration, in this case, it’s deterioration of life itself. Euthanasia of a beloved pet is the ‘humane’ way to say goodbye in many cases due to our humanitarian obligation to preclude pain, this humanity should be extended to humans. Our society under the preconceived notion that death is a punishment that is only inflicted to those who have committed the greatest of crimes, or equally as dangerous, that death is a sort of tragedy. To protect the sanctity of life in a person whose quality of life is limited, they should be allowed to request to hasten their own death. Physician-assisted suicide does not denigrate life, it enhances