Free Euthanasia Essays: Assisted Suicide :: Free Euthanasia Essay

Assisted Suicide To sanction the taking of innocent human lifespan is to contradict a uncreated purpose of law in an ordered society. A law or court decision allowing assisted suicide would demean the lives of vulnerable patients and expose them to victimization by those who feel they are better off dead. Such a policy would corrupt the medical profession, whose ethical code calls on physicians to serve life and never to kill. The voiceless(prenominal) or marginalized in our society -- the poor, the frail elderly, racial minorities, millions of pot who lack health insurance -- would be the first to feel insistence to die. What about competent, terminally ill people who say they really want assisted suicide? Suicidal lackes among the terminally ill are no less due to treatable depression than the same wishes among the able-bodied. When their pain, depression and other problems are addressed, there is generally no more talk of suicide. If we respond to a death wish in one group of people with counseling and suicide prevention, and respond to the same wish in another group by offering them deadly drugs, we have made our own tragic choice as a society that some peoples lives are objectively not worth protecting. How does cost set down into this issue? In an era of cost control and managed care, patients with lingering illnesses may be branded an economic liability, and decisions to encourage death can be compulsive by cost. As Acting U.S. Solicitor General Walter Dellinger warned in urging the Supreme Court to uphold laws against assisted suicide The least costly treatment for any illness is lethal medication. Why are people with disabilities worried about assisted suicide? Many people with disabilities have long flummox with prejudicial attitudes on the part of able-bodied people, including physicians, who say they would rather be dead than disabled. Such prejudices could easily lead families, physicians and society to encourage death for people who a re depressed and emotionally vulnerable as they adjust to life with a serious illness or disability. To speak here of a slack choice for suicide is a dangerously misguided abstraction. What is the view of the medical profession? The American Medical Association holds that physician-assisted suicide is fundamentally incompatible with the physicians occasion as healer. The AMA, along with the American Nurses Association, American Psychiatric Association and dozens of other medical groups, has urged the Supreme Court to uphold laws against assisted suicide, arguing that the index to assist in taking patients lives is a power that most health care professionals do not want and could not control.