Physican-Assisted Sucide Should be Legal Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Physican-Assisted Sucide Should be Legal - Essay Example Persons who are for the legalization of assisted suicide believes personal autonomy, individual freedoms, which are expected during life should not abruptly and unnecessarily stop near the end of life. Another perspective is that since everyone agrees that terminally sick or severely injured animals are allowed a humane way to die peacefully. This rationale should be applied to humans too. A person’s sovereignty, their power to make decisions regarding their personal well-being, is stripped away by forbidding them the right to end their own life on their own terms. Self-determination, a right deemed indispensable during a person’s life, abruptly ends at the end of life, just at the time people needs it more than ever. What may be worse is the added indignation of forcible life-saving measures imposed on a dying person. People are kept technically alive while their bodies and minds are wasting away as their families watch and suffer along with the patient. Assisted suici de should be legal. It should not even be a topic that is debated anymore. American citizens are, according to the Declaration of Independence, â€Å"endowed with inalienable rights† but apparently the right to die with dignity is excluded somehow. The U.S. Constitution does not prohibit assisted suicide. It’s illegal mainly due to religious zealots who raise objections for ideological reasons. They think the practice is society â€Å"playing God† with end of life situations. However, they have no problem with society â€Å"playing God† by using extraordinary high-tech procedures to extend peoples life. Assisted suicide is also known by the term â€Å"mercy killing.† It is defined as a form of Euthanasia which means â€Å"good death.† All of these terms describe a circumstance when a terminally ill patient is administered a lethal dose of medicine or is allowed to die without anyone else actively involved in the process such as not resuscita ting the patient or the patient being removed from a life support system. A doctors’ involvement could be to use intravenous means to administer the lethal dose. The terminally ill patient then activates a switch, lever, etc. which dispenses the drug or the doctor could administer the drug(s) themselves. (Kure, 2011). Physicians, lawyers and philosophers have argued the idea of assisted suicide since the beginnings of civilization but the general public discussion pertaining to legalization is but a few decades old. The questions regarding assisted suicide have moved beyond the realm of who is allowed to speak for the unconscious patient and into that of the rights of the patient. According to common law found in the majority of, if not all, legal jurisdictions, incurably ill persons who exhibit mental competency are able to request that life-savings methods be withheld even when this choice will certainly result in their death. This right found in common law is based on the importance society places on self-determination. All agree that people should to be protected from unwanted, offensive and non-consensual touching by anyone else. These local common laws have their foundations in the U.S. Constitution at both the federal and state level. On the federal level personal rights stem from liberty provision within the Due Process Clause located in the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. At the state level, New Hampshire’s state Constitution, as an example, individual rights