Persuasive Essay On Assisted Suicide

The issue of ending oneselves or a loved one’s life is a difficult action to process if a person is not directly affected by a situation involving a decision as such. Parents around the world who have children in vegetative states are pushed with the difficult decision, if available where they live, to permit a medical professional to end their child’s life whether with assisted suicide or simply pulling the life support. Assisted Suicide is a practice where the termination of one’s life using lethal injections because of suffrage from an incurable disease. Pulling life support means that the patient not longer receives vital nutrients needed to survive because they are unable to tend to themselves. Parents should not be burdened by people, who have never gone through such a difficult ordeal, telling them that it is not okay to take their own child’s life. Parents want the best for their child and if their child is in a vegetative state they may decide that their child has no quality of life.
Parents who have children in a vegetative state should have the liberty to exercise their right to end the life of their child. This issue of ending a child’s life bring many ethical decisions to question. Many opposing a parent’s right to end their child’s life may say so because this is murder, regardless of their child’s state-of-being. There a difference between murder and assisted death, a child who is simply surviving with assistance has no quality of life, they cannot feel emotion, they have no sense of what is happening to them. They are simply bodies being moved by other people from bed to bed, getting changed, being bathed; they cannot do anything themselves. Parents sit and watch their child wasteaway, year-by-year, with likely no improvement in their child’s state. The parents suffer watching their child like this, when maybe before this state-of-being the child was living a normal, happy life. This is a serious question to if parents even get post-traumatic stress disorder from watching their child go from happy and healthy, to a full vegetative state. Many people believe that a child may still have a sense of being in this state, understanding what is going on but unable to show reaction or speak.
People opposed to ending a child’s life may say that there is some evidence that people in vegetative states still have reactions to incident that occur around them; for example, when they see their parent maybe the part of their brain that associates love and affection lights up, showing that they still recognize them. There is not enough profound evidence to support the idea that vegetative people can still understand and feel emotion, and even if they could is there still a quality of living. Their ability to feel emotion can support parent’s ability to end their child’s life because children are most definitely suffering even more if they are able to feel emotion, but unable to express themselves, speak, move on their own; the quality of life is so terrible they would be trapped inside their own heads, how is this
living. The people opposed to parent’s having the right to end their own child’s life view this action as murder, they believe that the parents are killing their child regardless of their state of being and murderers can, and should be convicted in a court of law. This may be true and valid in a broad sense, but I do not think if one of those people who were opposed of this action would agree with it if their own child were to be in a vegetative state. This is a personal and family manner, it’s not up to other people to decide what is right for a family, if they are unaffected by the decision. The line between living and surviving needs to be more clear, children in vegetative states are not living, they are simply surviving with the access to a feeding tube and vital IVs. These parents have to suffer large burdens watching their children waste away in this state. If we do something about it, many children who are in vegetative states may be killed, or their parents may choose to keep them alive, either way parents should have the right over their child’s life if their state of being is vegetative.