Contemporary World Issues: Euthanasia, Essay Example

Suicide has from time immemorial been treated as a criminal offence all over the world. Civilization has always decreed that human life is sacrosanct and should be respected. Even in Greek, the seat of civilization, the individual who committed suicide was denied burial honors. Several American states have been following in this tradition of treating suicide as a criminal matter. The fact that some States, and government officials are pushing for the legislation of physician assisted suicide, is a shame (Durkheim 327).

It is extremely saddening to see people trying to  defend physician assisted suicide(PAS).This is because  it is a bigger threat than terrorism.PAS claims more lives per year than all the lives lost in terrorist acts all over the world. This is because every year PAS claim 25,500 lives. The September 11 attacks only claimed 2976 people, yet we all rose up in arms against the said attacks. We should put an end to our double standards.

Suicide is the deliberate taking of life. Physician-assisted suicide is the act of doctors to end the lives of their patients who are terminally ill. These are the patients who seem to have no hope of recovery. Killing patients in the name of euthanasia is a criminal offense that the nation should not even be talking about (Whiting 42).

First and foremost, a physician’s first duty is to take care of the lives of his or her patients. A doctor spends so many years just learning how to preserve the lives of his or her patients. The time a doctor spends in premed school is close to four years, and then there is the times spent in medical school. All this time, the knowledge being impacted on the doctor is enable him or her to be able to preserve the life of the patient. To cap it, the physician is bound by the Hippocratic Oath to protect the life of the patient (Durkheim 327). To do otherwise, is to go contrary to medical ethics. America is a country that is built on ethics. America rewards those that adhere to ethics .We should not turn a blind eye on ethics in the medical field.

To legalize euthanasia is to do irreparable damage to honest doctors who do not want to perform this legalized murder. This is because these assisted suicides bring recurring guilt on the doctors who perform euthanasia. It can even destroy their health (Whiting 42).

There is the contention that doctors are out to cut costs and take advantage of others in the process. Doctors should understand that their role is to treat patients and not to mind about costs. We have healthcare and insurance to think of the bills.Also, doctors are bound by professional ethics and should not think of deviating from them. This is because, when individuals stray from ethics calamities always follows. Watergate is an example.

Some proponents of mercy killing post that life expectancy is hard to predict. They argue that terminally ill patients should be assisted to die. This is wrong because life expectancy in the US is remarkably high. The average life expectancy is 71 years for men and 73 years for women. This is because science has done wonders and a lot of diseases that have troubled past generations have their cures here with us. To kill patients because life expectancy is hard to predict is to mock science and the achievements of science (McDougall, Jennifer and Martha Gorman 45).

Assisted suicide should not be allowed because medical science has found solutions to most diseases. Today, the life of a patient can be prolonged indefinitely because of improvements in medical technology. Research is been done day and night to improve life expectancy. Science and technology are doing wonders to prolong human life. Even terminally ill patients need not fear the agony of pain. Science has taken care of that. To legalize euthanasia is to rubbish the efforts made by science and technology towards the preservation of life (McDougall, Jennifer and Martha Gorman 45).

Euthanasia is amoral and should not be legalized. To legalize it is to go against the spirit of the US constitution that upholds the sanctity of life. The proponents of physician assisted suicide should reexamine their stand

Works Cited

Durkheim, Émile. Suicide. New York: The Free Press, 1997.

McDougall, Jennifer and Martha Gorman. Contemporary World Issues: Euthanasia. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 2008.

Whiting, Raymond. A Natural Right to Die: Twenty-Three Centuries of Debate. Westport, Connecticut: Green Wood Press, 2002.