America's Right To Die Essay

America's Right To Die
A person who is diagnosed as terminally ill and expected to die within six months should not be expected to live out the rest of their life in excruciating pain because twenty- eight percent of the American population believes assisted suicide is morally wrong. In America, only five states have passed laws to legalize assisted suicide (California, Montana, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington). People who wish to die with dignity and little suffering don't have much freedom to do so in a free country.
Terminally ill patients should have the choice to have a physician administer lethal drugs to them so that they can prevent or end their suffering. People who oppose assisted suicide argue that these drugs should be unavailable because a patient who gets a diagnosis might rush into killing themselves when they could otherwise have survived. This argument is ignorant and imperceptive. There are other ways that patients can end their lives if they choose, such as refusing a ventilator, removing feeding tubes, refusing dialysis, etc., that are much slower and painful ways to die. These methods are considered passive-and legal-ways for patients to end their lives. There is no difference between a patient killing themselves by refusing necessary care and the patient killing themselves using lethal drugs prescribed by a doctor, save for being helped by a qualified physician to die a painless death. Either way, the patient is still ending their own life. If one form of suicide is legal, so should the other be.
Drugs to end a patient's life should be easier to get for those who need it. While the opposing view's argument that the drugs need to be better monitored does make sense, the current process to get these drugs makes it harder for those who truly need them to get the drugs. The established telephone line to get these drugs does make it too easy for anyone to get the drugs, but that is easily fixed. Challengers of this law note that there is no further supervision of the drugs once they are in the home. If we modified the law to set up a group of physicians whose specific job was prescription and administration of lethal drugs, we wouldn't have to worry about possible abuse of the drugs to commit homicide or suicide if someone is not terminally ill. However, the law makes it nearly impossible for patients of Atkins disease, or other such illnesses that eventually kill the patient, to choose to end their suffering and maintain their dignity. The law classifies these patients as not sound-of-mind enough to make their own decisions, but it does not allow them to make a request for the drugs before they reach that point. So how are they supposed to die peacefully? The law should allow different choices for people who are mentally ill. Perhaps their family members can make the decision for them at a certain point, or maybe we could allow them to write an advance decision.