Term Paper on "Assisted Suicide California"

Term Paper 3 pages (1017 words) Sources: 3 Style: APA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Assisted Suicide

California once again has written a bill to legalize assisted suicides. The last two died, but the legislators keep on trying. The proposed law is modeled after the one that passed in Oregon, which in 2006 resulted in 46 residents, most of them suffering from cancer, killing themselves after their physician gave them a prescription for a lethal amount of drugs. Should such a law become national? Should everyone in the country be allowed to have assisted suicides? Given the Supreme Court's recent ruling and some of the studies that have been conducted, I believe that this is a right people should have, but it is necessary for the patient to talk with more than one doctor when making the decision.

The issue of assisted suicide became newsworthy in 1990 when Dr. Jack Kevorkian helped Janet Adkins, a 54-year-old Alzheimer's patient, take her life. He met Adkins in a Volkswagen van he had outfitted with a "suicide machine" consisting of three chemical solutions fed into an intravenous line needle. Dr. Kevorkian is not the only one who supports doctor assisted suicide. The Hemlock Society is a group committed to promoting the legalization of euthanasia. In 1994, Oregon passed the "Death with Dignity" act, which allows the terminally-ill to end their lives through the voluntary self-administration of lethal medications, expressly prescribed by a physician.

In 1997 the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that people have no constitutional right to die, upholding state bans on physician-assisted suicide. That opinion, by then-Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, said individual states could decide to allow the practice. Thus, it is now left to the states to decide.

Although much of the controversy revolves around whether or not the assisted suicide should take place, given the Supreme Court ruling, perhaps it is better to go the next step and determine when a person has this right. For example, Oregon states that, in order to participate, a patient must be: 1) 18 years of age or older, 2) a resident of Oregon 3) capable of making and communicating health care decisions for him/herself, and 4) diagnosed with a terminal illness that will lead to death within six months. It is up to the attending physician to determine whether these criteria have been met (Moskowitz, 2003, p. 46).

Is this enough? Some say that it is important to give more attention to the patient's reasoning before making a decision. Muskin argues that not discussing a patient's motivation for assisted suicide is the real violation of his or her rights. Varghese and Kelly agree, saying that legal and ethical debates about suicide focus on "rational" decision making, the patient's psychiatric condition, and determination of "competency" to make decisions. However, they believe "These issues are less important at the clinical level than understanding the nature and degree of suffering for patients with terminal illness and the ways in which psychological and social factors influence decision making in this setting."

It is normally thought that patients who have been diagnosed with severe illnesses such as cancer… READ MORE

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