ASSISTED-SUICIDE

Should A Terminally Ill Patient Be Allowed To Commit Physician-Assisted Suicide?



Should A Terminally Ill Patient Be Allowed To Commit Physician-Assisted Suicide?

Introduction

Assisted suicide is the practice of painlessly causing the death of those who suffer from painful or incurable diseases or disorders. It is sometimes referred to as mercy killing. In the closely related practice of assisted suicide, however, the suffering individual takes his or her own life, aided by one or more assistants. Although anyone can assist with suicide, physicians are often asked to do so because of their medical expertise and access to controlled medications. Physician-assisted suicide, however, is highly controversial, as it highlights the fundamental tension between the physician's goal of relieving misery and the doctor's traditional role as a healer. Assisted suicide is the forms of voluntary homicide, but it differs with other varieties of voluntary homicide (such as murder or manslaughter) in as much as their principal objective is not to inflict pain, but to alleviate it (by ending a life of suffering) (Kaplan and Schwartz, 2000). This incongruous coupling of deliberate homicide and a benevolent motive creates thorny legal and ethical puzzles.

In the United States two states, Oregon and Washington have legalized assisted suicide under certain circumstances. Several other countries have legalized assisted suicide. But while medical societies in other countries have approved assisted suicide for physicians, the American Medical Association (AMA) has concluded that physicians must not participate in assisted suicide. Instead, the AMA believes that if physicians diligently attend to matters of respect for patient autonomy, good communication, support, and adequate pain control, public demand for assisted suicide may decrease dramatically.

Assisted suicide has been matters of debate for centuries, but became particularly controversial topics during the late 20th century. Increased interest in health-related matters such as living wills, do-not-resuscitate orders, and access to abortion services fueled already-heated public debates over the definitions of life and death, and who has authority to make decisions in these areas. As advances in medical science continue to increase human life expectancies and permit more individuals with serious chronic, degenerative, and terminal diseases to survive for longer periods of time, these controversies can be expected to escalate (Ganzini et al. 2000). Medicine and life-support equipment can maintain biological functioning of individuals in persistent vegetative states, but leave unanswered many normative questions, such as when life is—or is not—worth saving, what kinds of autonomy individuals should have over their bodies, and the appropriate role of the state in regulating end-of-life decisions. These questions have broad implications in the areas of ethics, religion, public policy, and the law.

Discussion and Analysis

Those who study assisted suicide often distinguish between different categories of life-ending behavior. These distinctions can be of great importance in ethical and legal analyses. For analytic purposes, for example, it may be useful to differentiate euthanasia from physician-assisted suicide by focusing upon who engages in the final act to cause the death of a suffering patient. If, for example, it is the physician who injects a lethal dose of ...