Physician Assisted Suicide

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Recommended: How physician assisted suicide affects the patient

Christina Robbins awakens screaming as she clinches the railing of her hospital bed while excruciating pain radiates through her weakened body. Christina’s husband and two teenage daughters sit on the couch in the corner of her dimmed hospital room. In just three months, Christina went from a completely healthy lawyer to lying in her deathbed needing 24 hour care. The cancer has now spread from her lungs throughout her body and within days would reach her brain. The doctors have tried to keep Christina’s pain under control, but with all the medicine the slightest touch feels like razor blades scraping her skin. Being a terminal patient is rather difficult to come to terms with, leaving unpaid bills behind, losing bodily control, and having family watch them die a slow painful death. Incidentally Christiana does not live in one of the four states that offer Physician Assisted Suicide. Physician Assisted Suicide should be legalized in all states because it is a freedom of choice, ceases one’s pain and suffering and decreases traditional suicide rates.
Physician Assisted Suicide is a freedom of choice. According to ecologist John Barlow “Exercising choice over the time and place of one’s death, once death is a certainty and there is no hope, is the ultimate personal dignity” (McCuen153). Considering Physician Assisted Suicide offers people a choice when end of life care fails to provide adequate relief of suffering. Having that freedom can be a peaceful and freeing experience. Dr. Charles McKhann believed “The decision to die, with or without the help, is exceedingly difficult, with many questions to examine and conflicts to resolve” (McKhann 234). This decision is ultimately made by the patient after a deliberation with doctors abou...

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...ly it should be up to the patient whether or not that is an option they want to consider.
Physician Assisted Suicide is a freedom of choice that will cease a patients pain and suffering by giving them a safe and reliable way to end their life. As of right now only four states in the United States give patients the option of Physician Assisted Suicide and legalizing this will only give patients the freedom they should have over their own life. Dying from an incurable illness can be so severely painful that no amount of medicine can sufficiently help a patients pain. Physician Assisted Suicide is a way to help those patients who are often left defenseless and let them choose to end their lives before their pain gets to severe. I urge everyone to consider helping pass Physician Assisted Suicide as an option for anyone who feels that is the path they would like to take.

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