Euthanasia Persuasive Essay

Euthanasia “places the heart of medicine on trial.” Physicians’ absolute repugnance to killing people is necessary if society’s trust in them it to be maintained. This is very true because physicians have opportunities to kill not open to other people, as shown by the horrific story of Dr. Harold Shipman, a British physician serial-killer. Shipman had killed upwards of 218 patients. After noticing a high death rate of patients under his care, an investigation was begun. The police then investigated other deaths Shipman had certified. They found a pattern that he was administering lethal overdoses of diamorphine, then proceed to sign patients' death certificates, and even forging medical records to indicate that they were in ill health, and even forged many wills (Harold Shipman: a chronology, 2005). Another infamous doctor was the Jack Kevorkian AKA "Dr. Death", he was presumed to helped over 130 people to commit suicide since the 1990s and was convicted to served about 20 years in prison
And the public needs to be absolute certainty –and to be able to trust- that this is the case. Anything that would blur the line, the fact that we have damaged that trust, makes physicians less believed this day, and their confidence in the community need to be reintegrated as their primary obligations are to protect the people's life. I think that legalizing euthanasia would create all those things (Arras, 1997). Euthanasia is a simplistic, wrong, and critical response to the complex reality of human death. Physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia involve taking people who are at their weakest and most vulnerable, who fear the loss of control or isolation and abandonment –who are in a state of intense “premortem loneliness”- and placing them in a situation where they believe their only alternative is to be killed or kill themselves (Miller,