Assisted Suicide Bad Public Policy

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Assisted Suicide: Bad Public Policy

The struggle to keep assisted suicide from becoming legal has dwindled in the past years up until this year due to the Terri Schiavo case in Florida. There have been many American euthanasia movements in the past but this was a highly televised case evolving assisted suicide. There is only one state within the United States that has legalized assisted suicide and that is Oregon. There is one country that permits euthanasia and that is Holland. As a nation we need to maintain our stand against assisted suicide and not allow legalization of this movement. I do not take this subject lightly due to the fact that colon cancer runs in my family and has killed my grandmother, aunt, and uncle at an early age. Having to watch their last days of their lives in a hospital was very hard. My girlfriend of a year now is a nurse at a local hospital and so is her mom so I hear stories of suffering all the time. The issue of end-of-life care needs to be given more serious consideration by all Americans because we will all be affected by this unforeseen tragedy at one time or another. With new medications that help relieve intolerable suffering to terminal ill patients and with improved hospice care that should be available for all Americans, physician-assisted suicide should not be a given option.
Let me first start off by distinguishing the difference between assisted suicide and euthanasia:
Assisted suicide is distinguished from euthanasia in that it necessarily involves an individual who is capable physically of taking his or her own life and does so with means provided by another person. Euthanasia, on the other hand, refers to the situation where another person not only may provide the means but actually performs the specific act that causes an individual's death (for example, injecting a lethal dose of medication). Euthanasia may be voluntary (the individual has requested that another act to bring about ...