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Assisted suicide, a hard pill to swallow for most people. Who wants their family members to resort to this option? No one does, it causes pain among family members and is just looked at as ethically incorrect. Many states do not allow this to be an option, and it is hard to get a doctor to sign off for this type of treatment. There are plenty of logical reasons to consider this, but there are equally as many opposing reasons to why we should not allow this form of death.
The non profit company Dying with Dignity, their mission is to stand up and to support those who choose assisted suicide as their form of death. They show many reasons to why this is an option for civilians and help them choose their end of life plan. People with terminal illnesses should not have to suffer if they do not want too; it should be their right to decide their fate.
We might think that people try and resort to this option but only a few states have legalized this as an option for their civilians. These states include California, Colorado, Montana, District of Columbia, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington. These states have specific and strict laws for this suicide. For example, in In Oregon, and Vermont your doctor must be either an M.D. or a D.O. which is a medical doctor or a doctor of Osteopathy. The law is the same for doctors in Washington but these doctors also have the right to turn away a qualified patient to this treatment. In Colorado, the law allows eligible candidates with an estimated six months or less to live request this type of treatment. In the District of Columbia, you must request this treatment orally twice and they must be separated by fifteen days in between these fifteen days you must write a request for this treatment and sign and date it and send it to your doctor forty-eight hours prior to your second request.
Assisted suicide is thought about to help end another person’s misery. While it is a good thing that these people have this as an option for themselves it is also a bad thing. People whose family members are cancer patients are worried that their family members might resort to this. One woman who lost her husband to cancer was very thankful that he did not choose assisted suicide. A woman named Kristen Hanson was worried about her husband J.J. who was suffering from terminal brain cancer. “He sometimes felt such despair that he may have taken a lethal prescription had it been legal in New York, where we lived, and if he had it in his nightstand during his darkest days. He was tempted to believe that ending his life would relieve the burden on his caretakers and allow him to bypass the experience of illness-induced disability that the disease would otherwise cause”(Hanson). At this same time as J.J. went through this misery, a girl named Brittany Maynard had the same cancer. Instead of trying to wait it out Maynard decided to take her own life in Oregon where this first became legal.
Keeping this form of death open as an option and having it be so controversial means people are bound to come up with false claims. One claim that people probably think about the most is if assisted suicide is an open option then they think people will resort to this frequently. This claim is incorrect because this option is only available for those with a severe illness and that are projected to live another six months or less. Another false claim that people come up with is that “Poor, uneducated and minority patients will be pressured to ask for medical aid in dying (Death With Dignity).” once again this is faulty because the statistics do not favor this at all. This claim feeds into the third claim of people without insurance are going to resort to this option. A very small portion of the people chose this reason it is why they chose to end their own life.
In another case a woman named Jeanette Hall voted in favor of assisted suicide in Oregon. She did not want anyone to suffer. When voting for this she never thought that this would have to be a decision that she would make. Jeanette contracted colon cancer six years after voting for this. Doctors gave her two options after telling her that she only has six months to a year to live. “Doctors gave Hall, who was 55 at the time, two options: She could get radiation and chemotherapy and attempt to fight cancer, or barbiturates could take a lethal dose of barbiturates to end her life”(Bolar). Hall then came to the decision that she was not going to get any chemo to fight cancer and that she was only going to refuse the treatment. With her refusal of treatment, she made herself terminal. “I didn’t want to live,” Hall said. “I was just going to say, ‘Give me the barbiturates and call it good” (Bolar). A while after she said this, her doctor had tried to change her mind and he refused to give her these barbiturates. Eventually, her doctor called her son who had no idea that his mom had cancer let alone she was trying to end her own life. Stevens, in a last-ditch effort to convince Hall against death, asked her: “Wouldn’t you like to see him graduate? Wouldn’t you like to see him get married” (Bolar). Those questions changed her mind entirely and fifteen years later she is still living and today Hall tells her story to try and get others to stop trying to end their own lives.
When I had first started research for this I did not see that assisted suicide should be an option, when I later continued to search it and learn more I found that maybe it should be an option for reasons of we do not know what these people are going through. We can not feel their pain and if they do not want to be in it anymore then that is their own option, not ours. No one who considers this as an option to end their life or even chooses this as their way to pass will just choose this randomly. The people who have thought about it and want it have put a lot of thought into it. They have most likely contemplated it over a period of time and found it to be their best option. Many people see this as giving up your life. Where you might think that, but you also have to think about everything that these people have been through. They did not want to suffer anymore, no one likes to see someone else suffer. They are calling the shots in their life and it is their own decision so they should be allowed to make it up themselves. No one wants to lose someone they love but sometimes it is not up to us to choose their life for them because we also do not feel their pain. They know and they understand everything that they are giving up but they do not feel like they can handle it anymore. That is why we should keep this as an option, it is death with dignity.
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