Assisted Suicide: Should You Have the Right to Die or Not? Severe body wasting, immobility, unmanageable vomiting, bowel and urinary incontinence, total dependence, and severe uncontrollable pain (Rogatz), this is what terminally ill people go through day to day without a quick end in sight. Terminally ill, suffering people are being denied the right to end their unspeakable agnoy and are forced to live each of their remaining days in misery and pain. All these people ask and want is to end their suffering before it gets too much to handle. The question here is this; should assisted suicide be made legal for the terminally ill? This is a topic that has become a topic of great controversy with the prevalence of the HIV virus as well as the increase of debilitating diseases like Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease. I believe that terminally ill people, suffering tremendous pain and discomfort, should be allowed to make the choice of ending their suffering by assisted suicide.
Church of Euthanasia. About Death and Dying. About...
English: Dr. Jack Kevorkian, best known for his ad...
English: "An Evening with Dr. Jack Kevorkian" host...By the end of this paper it should be evident why assisted suicide should be legal.
In order to make sure that we are using the same definitions for these terms, let me take a moment to define the way I used the terms in this paper. Euthanasia originated from Greek roots: eu meaning "good" and thanatos meaning "death" (Newfield). Voluntary (or active) euthanasia is when a competent person makes a voluntary request, without changing their mind, to be helped to die. An example of this is when Dr. Jack Kevorkian assisted the killing of a patient in 1998 with ALS (Euthanasia and Physician Assisted Suicide: All). Passive euthanasia is the terminating of life support, or not taking drastic measures to revive a patient. Physician assisted suicide is when "a physician supplies information and/or the...