Terminal illness is a sickness which is not curable and eventually, those suffering from such an illness die after some duration of time, mostly six months. People with terminal illness usually are given medication to allow them prolong their life beyond the set duration but they cannot be cured completely due to lack of medication fit to cure these diseases, (Mai,2006). However, people with this kind of diseases can be given a chance to end their life rather than endure the pain caused by the disease. This is known as assisted suicide. It occurs where the sick person is assisted by a health practitioner to end their life through some medication.
Assisted suicide is a common practice in modern world. It is required that people who request to be assisted to commit assisted suicide should be of sound mind and must also be diagnosed with terminal illness. This must be witnessed by a legal doctor among other witnesses (Battin et al, 1998). Failure to meet these requirements results to prosecution of the doctor or the health practitioner involved. Many individuals suffering from terminal illness have requested for assisted suicide instead of waiting for the time that they will die a natural death (Kelly et al, 2003).
However, it has been largely been discouraged by some countries all over the world. This is through an argument that no one has the power of life and thus no one has the right to facilitate in taking of another life. It also used as a measure to prevent doctors from commit murders in the name of assisted suicide.
Assisted suicide first arose in America in the 1990s through Dr. Kevorkian who assisted forty people to commit suicide in Michigan. He first assisted someone in 1990, was prosecuted but due to lack of a law barring the act, the prosecution was not successful. He was later jailed for carrying out an active killing of a patient.
Assisted suicide has been an issue of discussion everywhere in the world currently. Some arguments have been put in place against assisted suicide. Some people argue that legalizing the act would give doctors a license to kill the patients who they think are in critical conditions (Williams, 2001). It considers those doctors who go ahead to give the prescription as murderers. However, this is a Hippocratic argument since when a person on life support machine requests to be unplugged from the machine, and the doctor agrees, it is not considered as killing.
A second argument against assisted suicide is that most people requesting for it are those suffering from depression (Nakaya, 2005). This group of individuals are considered as not have passed through adequate pain that should amount to making the request. They should therefore not be granted such request, which is the opposite of what really happens.
Another argument against assisted death is that it destroys the trust that patients have on their doctors (Williams, 2001). Patients who are critically ill are put in a situation where they are wondering what the doctor is going to do to them, could be he or she might kill them or not. Some patients suffering from terminal illness usually commit suicide without seeking guidance from the health practitioners having in mind that this option is going to taken away from them at a later stage of their illness.
Guidelines have been put forward to facilitate in the act. A person that requests for the act has to be of sound mind such that he or she can make sound decisions, must be suffering from a terminal disease and must have less than six months of life, must be suffering unbearable pain and there must be witnesses to ascertain all the above conditions. From these guidelines, some observations can be made.
One of the observations is that every individual has a right to decide what is to be done with regards to his or her life (Young, 2007). This means that a person can be able to make a decision on whether to continue suffering from the pain or to have his life cut short before the predicted time. This shows that the society has respect for every individual’s decision regarding to his life.
These conditions also identify the obligations of a physician which are to provide cure and also where cure is improbable, to help relieve pain and suffering. This shows that the act is part of a doctor’s professional duties and should not be viewed as immoral as long as the patient has agreed to take the option.
Another observation that is made is that the doctor does not take the act unnecessarily. For a doctor to perform assisted suicide there has to be witnesses to ascertain the patient’s suffering and to prove that the patient was eventually going to die. This denies the doctor’s the chance to take a person’s life out of negligence.
Following the above argument, people suffering from terminal illness should be allowed to take the option of associated suicide. This removes the suffering that they go through. It also reduces the amount of expenses that the family of the patient has to incur for rest of the period that the patient has to live. They therefore retain the right to decide on whether to die or continue enduring the pain.
References
Mai, F. M. (January 01, 2006). Beethoven's terminal illness and death. The Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, 36, 3, 258-63.
Kelly, B., Burnett, P., Pelusi, D., Badger, S., Varghese, F., & Robertson, M. (January 01, 2003). Factors associated with the wish to hasten death: a study of patients with terminal illness. Psychological Medicine, 33, 1, 75-81.
Williams, M. E. (2001). Terminal illness: Opposing viewpoints. San Diego, Calif: Greenhaven Press.
Young, R. (2007). Medically assisted death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nakaya, A. C. (2005). Terminal illness: Opposing viewpoints. Detroit: Greenhaven Press.
Battin, M. P., Rhodes, R., & Silvers, A. (1998). Physician assisted suicide: Expanding the debate. New York: Routledge.
