In a report by CNN a decade ago, it was noted that in 1998, a year after the physicianassisted suicide was legalized in Oregon, a breast cancer patient asked her doctor to prescribe her medicine that would end her life. She was the first person go use the physicianassisted suicide method to end her life in order to end her pain by ingesting the prescribed medicine. Many other states then started to review the law and even attempted to legalize it.
There are very obvious arguments both for and against the legalizing of physicianassisted suicide.
The arguments for include:
1. People should have rights to control their own lives and to make decisions for themselves
2. Death is a better option than enduring unbearable pain
3. If having the right to refuse treatment (and causing death) is an option, then it is the same as asking for medicine to end one's life
4. Bringing assisted suicides out into the open may raise awareness of the issue as they happen anyway regardless of whether they are legal
The arguments against include:
1. Taking any life is an immoral act that neglects human rights
2. The process may be abused with people without family support or without the means to survive (who will be forced to choose death as an alternative)
3. Doctors may be wrong in estimating how much time an individual has left to live
4. The public losing confidence in the medical profession as they could solve all problems by killing off patients
5. The doctors would be breaking their Hippocratic Oath (which makes them swear not to give or suggest high dosages of deadly drugs to anyone)
Some areas of knowledge included here are ethics and human rights. When it comes down to making decisions, knowledge issues ultimately include an individual's ability to use reason and logic in conjunction with their emotions to make "good" decisions for themselves. When it really comes down to it, laws have no control over how much an individual values his/her life or how he/she will make decisions. The issue also comes down to how words such as "human rights" are defined, which has a root in language. The nature of language hinders any absolute meaning as there is always connotation and denotation that can be debated about every single word.
As of now, human rights is defined as "rights fundamentally belonging to all persons" according to the Merriam Webster dictionary. In order to fully comprehend the meaning, the word fundamental also has to be defined. The word is defined as "serving as a basis supporting existence". According to these definitions, human rights is a notion that should be taken seriously and adhered to under all circumstances.
Ironically, due to the origin of human rights being after the Nuremberg trials, there is no legal status for human rights. It was merely a pledge made by members of the United Nations. Some of these arguments are based on human rights, which were arbitrarily defined by humans. Over time, human rights have also changed and are sometimes even defined differently for certain minority groups. So even if the human rights were adhered to from beginning to end, there could still be fluidity in what is being adhered to as the definition of human rights changes. This also portrays the failure of words to communicate rigid ideas as words are just representations of what is being communicated. Therefore, the side arguing for legalization of physisianassisted suicide's first point and third point become invalid. The side arguing against legalization's first point is also invalid.
Looking at this issue through human rights, the argument against physicianassisted suicide is more valid. Although argument five against the issue has the same issue with words and definition mentioned above, arguments two, three, and four are not based on language but based on logic and reasoning. It is only logical that patients without great means of survival will choose death as an alternative as that is their easy way out. It is also a fact that doctors may be wrong in estimating how much time someone has left to live as they even admit it themselves. Following, it is only logical that the public would lose some confidence in the medical profession as all they see is people being put to death by their doctors as an easy solution to their sicknesses.
A similar issue would be Catalonia stopping their bull-fighting tradition in order to highlight their independence from Spain. Catalonia is a part of Spain that does not wish to be a part of the country, but is a part of it due to borders defined by humans. They stopped bullfighting last month as a gesture to differentiate themselves from the rest of Spain, although they are still defined as part of the country. They even have their own dialect, Catalonian Spanish, instead of speaking conventional Spanish. The issue here is similar to the one with human rights as both of these pertain to lack of clarity in definitions.
Another way to understand this issue at hand is to consider different people's responsibility to a person's life. Does the physician, the patient, or the patient's family make the final call on a decision that could potentially impact the patient's life? Making a sound judgement, especially when it is a life or death matter, is difficult because it's hard to know what the best interest of the patient is. In this specific issue, the patient committed physician-assisted suicide. Is the physician responsible for the patient's death or is the physician justified for doing what the patient wished? Personally, I feel that individual wishes should be respected regardless of whether I disagree with them or not, so if I were the physician, I would also have assisted the patient (only after convincing and all else fails)and carry the burden of assisting a suicide.
ReplyDeleteI think that a key argument 'for' physician assisted suicide is number 3: that taking medicine to end one's life and refusing treatment are the same. This is a highly controversial but interesting point and may be the core issue of this debate. I think it should be addressed more explicitly. Refusing treatment is a decision in the negative-- refusing an option that is already available. On the other hand, asking for prescription drugs that will bring about death is a decision in the affirmative-- it requires an extra step, asking a physician to provide materials to induce death, rather than inducing death through the lack of treatment. I think there may be some overemphasis on the meaning of 'human rights' -- while this presents an interesting point, I think that the debate should focus more on the implications of human rights. As Remmy said, the most important question is whether the physician, the patient, or the patient's family has the right to decide what will happen to the patient. In this case, the means by which the physician, the patient, or the patient's family is able to decide the patient's fate is also an important and controversial issue: as mentioned, requesting medication to end one's life is different from refusing treatment.
ReplyDeleteAnother underlying knowledge issue in the case of physicianassisted suicide is that, if a patient is unconscious, is it right for his/her family to request a physicianassisted death?
ReplyDeleteThis is an ethical issue that relates to a very famous Taiwanese case in which a 17-year-old was hit by a car on her way to school and survived but ended up in a deep coma for over thirty years. During those thirty years, her parents begged the doctor many times to end their daughter’s life through physicianassisted death since whether she was alive or not no longer made any difference; she was an irresponsive burden. Of course there is no perfect law that can be applied to every case. When I put myself into the position of the family of a patient, who is undergoing permanent and unbearable pain, I would choose to let the patient suffering by letting him/her go because, first, the patient cannot be cured and, second, the patient becomes a physical and financial burden in a long run.
If physicianassisted suicide is legalized, I would suggest it to be done only if a person signs a form at the age of 20 or so, agreeing to physicianassisted suicide when he/she becomes permanently unconscious or gets a permanently incurable disease. This will fulfill the human right that “people should have rights to control their own lives and to make decisions for themselves” and will prevent the patient’s family to make any decision regarding to death.
This reminds me of Jack Kevorikian, a physician who is known to the public as "Dr. Death" because he is pro-euthanasia and has assisted many patients in ending their lives by euthanasia. At the beginning of 1999, he was charged second-degree murder because he assisted at least 130 patients to die "peacefully".
ReplyDeleteWhile I believe that we don't have the rights to end anyone's lives. If someone is not satisfied with his quality of life, then I think he has the rights to do whatever he wants to do with his life, even if that means to end his life through physicianassisted death.
More over I don't think it is necessarily the physician's fault for assisting a patient to die through euthanasia if it was the patient's request. While Jack Kevorkian did help hundreds of people die, I don't think it was necessarily his fault for allowing them to die peacefully.
I believe that if it was a patients' will, not physician's suggestion, to end his life, he has the basic rights to do so. If I were the physician I would help the patient if the patient's basic quality of life is not, well, up to the patient's expectations.