Free Euthanasia Essays: Assisted Suicide :: Free Euthanasia Essay

Assisted Suicide To mandate the taking of innocent human life is to contradict a primitive purpose of law in an ordered party. A law or court decision allowing assisted suicide would demean the lives of vulnerable patients and pick up them to exploitation by those who feel they atomic number 18 better off dead. such(prenominal) a policy would corrupt the medical profession, whose ethical code calls on physicians to serve life and never to kill. The voiceless or marginalized in our conjunction -- the poor, the frail elderly, racial minorities, millions of populate who lack wellness insurance -- would be the first to feel pressure to die. What about competent, terminally ill sight who say they really want assisted suicide? Suicidal longinges among the terminally ill are no less due to treatable depression than the aforesaid(prenominal) wishes among the fit. When their pain, depression and some other problems are addressed, there is generally no more than talk of suicide. If we respond to a death wish in matchless group of people with counseling and suicide prevention, and respond to the same wish in another group by offering them lethal drugs, we hit made our own tragic choice as a society that some peoples lives are objectively not worth protecting. How does cost don into this issue? In an era of cost control and managed care, patients with lingering distemperes may be branded an economic liability, and decisions to encourage death can be driven by cost. As Acting U.S. Solicitor General Walter Dellinger warned in urging the Supreme Court to uphold laws against assisted suicide The least(prenominal) costly treatment for any illness is lethal medication. Why are people with disabilities worried about assisted suicide? Many people with disabilities have long experience 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 widen familie s, physicians and society to encourage death for people who are depressed and emotionally vulnerable as they adjust to life with a serious illness or disability. To speak here of a free 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 role 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 situation to assist in taking patients lives is a power that most health care professionals do not want and could not control.