Physician Assisted Suicide Is Wrong

They say assisted suicide is euthanasia, or something that will lead to it. Something that will create a culture that promotes reckless and rash behavior when it comes to life and death decisions. This, however, is not the case. Physician assisted suicide is the solution to something that many fear, not death itself, but the byproduct of death - pain. It gives people freedom of choice over their most valuable asset, their own right to life. Carefully regulated assisted suicide is not something to be feared in the slightest, as long as patients are in the right mind when they are making the difficult decision. Assisted suicide is a merciful and dignified treatment under these specific circumstances. In America, and much of the western world, there is a multifaceted and complex, tabu about death, dying, and
In Crisis Magazine, Alexander Schimpf agrees with this, but in a drastically different way, “A suicide undertaken with the ‘assistance’ of a physician destroys the hiddenness of suicide - not in order to bring it to light to prevent it, but to make other active accomplices in the evil action” (Schimpf). Is ending suffering evil? Is saving someone with minute chances of living from days, weeks, or even months of suffering immoral? Simply, physician assisted suicide is not the suicide people should fear today, instead it is a dignified way for someone with little to no chance of recovery to grasp onto what small sliver of control they have left of their own lives. In a debate on intelligencesquaredus.org, Peter Singer and Andrew Solomon argue for assisted suicide, while Baroness Ilora Finlay and Dr. Daniel Sulmasy argue against it. Singer and Solomon make many points throughout the debate, all of which seem to have more logical and practical standing when compared with the cons position. One of their main arguments was the importance of control, personal choice, and freedom (Singer and Solomon). Peter Singer