Essay On Euthanasia

1149 Words3 Pages

Life is a blessing; therefore, people should cherish and preserve it as much as possible. Patients in critical situations such as dealing with a terminal illness should be able to decide whether they want to end their lives or to have a physician do it for them. An arguable debate is whether euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide should be legal in many parts of the world. The question has grown and raised concerns: should physician and medical experts end the life of a patient who wills it? Euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide should become legal in the United States and other areas of the world because patients should not have to live life with an unbearable pain and suffer the whole time through it. Although the terms euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide are so much alike, there is a slight difference between the two terms as well as the action. In the general viewpoint, physician-assisted suicide involves the physician providing the medication to the patient at their request, and then the patient administering the medication themselves (“Washington” 40). On the other hand, Nele DeBal and colleagues define euthanasia as the physician giving the medication, for example a lethal drug, to deliberately end the patient to end the patient’s life. The process of euthanasia does not require the involvement of the patients giving themselves the drug (110). Though euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide are similar in the sense that it ends the patient’s life, they are unlike in the sense that the process is different. Dr. Arshad Taqi states how the debate about legalizing euthanasia has been around since modern times, and since then it has developed a variety of different definitions, making it a more difficult de... ... middle of paper ... ...low and painful death, deprived of a quick and painless death. Physicians have the power to help put people out of their misery, but instead they just watch them suffer. Len Doyal argues how euthanasia can be legal because physicians choose not to help their patients, but they can take their lives and experiment with it (65). When their decisions to try to benefit the patient’s life in the future go wrong, they only made them hurt more instead of helping them hurt less. Some say it is a crime, others say they are doing right. Doctors have a duty to help patients out as much as they can. People have the right to die and if they make the final decision that they do want to die, doctors should understand the patients decision and assist the needs and wants, concluding that euthanasia and physician assisted suicide should become legal in various areas of the world.

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