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End of Life Medical Issues

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End of Life Medical Issues
Euthanasia: When should be the End?
Christina Nichols
PHI208 Ethics and Moral Reasoning
Craig Thompson
June 6, 2014

End of life medical issues are a very sensitive subject for doctors, patients, and family members. Some support the patients’ right to terminate their own life. Euthanasia loosely called physician assisted suicide is when one takes deliberate action to end life when faced with persistent suffering and certain death (Medical News Today, 2012).Many feel that patients should not have to suffer unjustly when faced with serious pain and debilitating illness. Often times it is just as difficult for family members to stand by and watch loved ones suffer. As someone that has witnessed both my grandmothers die on hospice care in the last six months, I know that watching someone die can be more painful than losing them all together. With as much compassion as I have for people in pain, I do not believe people have the right to end their lives whenever they chose. I oppose euthanasia and physician assisted suicide (PAS) because I believe that it is a doctor’s duty to keep patients alive, it may create financial and ethical issues when it comes to patients and insurance companies, and God should be the only one who decides when ones journey has been completed.
First, I oppose euthanasia because I believe that it is a doctor’s duty to keep patients alive. If doctors were allowed to preform euthanasia I believe that it would put a lot of physicians in the difficult place of deciding weather to treat a patient to the best of their ability or to end the patient’s life. I believe that it is a physician’s duty to offer patients the highest level of care. Physicians would also be put in a position where their own personal beliefs and moral bias would play in to their treatment plans. A non-religious objection to PAS would be that its legalization could inspire a lack of respect for human life (Mosser, 2012).
Next, I oppose euthanasia because it may create


References: ForaTv. (2009, Sep. 24). End-of-life care dilemma: Who gets booted from the ICU? [Video file]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XpAYPgjMYg Mosser, K. (2013). Understanding Philosophy San Diego, Ca: Bridgepoint Education, Inc. What is Euthanasia (assisted suicide)? March 19, 2010. www.medicalnewstoday.com/artices Retrieved June 5, 2014.
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