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Physician Assisted Suicide: Good or Bad Essay Example

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Physician Assisted Suicide: Good or Bad Essay Example
Physician Assisted Suicide-The Debate Physicians and patients debate over whether or not physician assisted suicide is okay to do in any circumstances, because there are pros and cons to every side. One might say that if a physician assists in the suicide it may help someone not suffer through a slow painful death. Another person might argue that if a physician does assist even by just prescribing the medicine is morally wrong and against the oath the physician takes at the beginning of his or her career. Understanding some people are terminally ill and want to just die versus putting up the fight is a hard situation to understand, but some physicians do “understand”. Even though they understand does not mean that they will agree to assist in taking the pain away from someone. On the other hand a patient may want to live as long as possible and prosper every bit of their life even if it means being in a vegetative state.
According to the article “Assisted “Suicide is the Euthanasia of Hope” this patient “was dying from ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.(cited in Smith, 2011 para 3). “He had been suicidal for 2 ½ years after the solar plexus blow of his diagnosis” (cited in Smith, 2011 para 4). This shows that a terminal illness can effect a person’s will to live as well as their thinking on how things can work out if you just hang tough and wait out the storm, so to speak. Our text states that, “The argument is straightforward: A person is 99% certain to die within a certain time, but before that death naturally occurs, the patient is kept alive only to suffer” (Mosser, 2010, section 2.3, para 34), but this is only one option. On the other hand “life is a gift from God and precious. To end it prematurely is to reject that gift.” (Cited in Mosser, 2010, section 2.3, para 35). In ending your life prematurely a person must face their religious beliefs consequences. Each belief comes with incentives and consequences, but those might be a thing that can be changed or

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