Linda Fleming, Essay Example

Regarding the case of Linda Fleming, it appears on the surface to be a textbook validation of Physician Assisted Suicide (PAS). Suffering great pain from pancreatic cancer and expressing a deep spiritual core, she seems to have made her decision to end her life in a completely rationale manner, and with a degree of dignity acceptable to her. Moreover, she chose to have family and her doctor by her side as she elected to be undergo euthanasia while conscious, by means of lethal drugs.

In these circumstances, the attending physician was clearly merely an instrument employed by the patient. Her mind was made up and she needed him only to abide by the legal components of the action, and of course to secure the actual means to her death. It would seem that, ethically as well as legally, this doctor committed no breach.

The troubling element of Ms Fleming’s case, however, is the speed with which the decision and her subsequent PAS were done, given other factors of her situation. For one thing, at sixty-six, she was hardly an especially elderly person. Then, intense physical suffering notwithstanding, she had been diagnosed with cancer only a month before. The rapidity of the PAS is, then, somewhat startling, and I am not wholly comfortable with the ethics of the physician involved.

While I certainly don’t believe the doctor was ethically bound to let her suffer until no other recourse was available, surely a month is simply too short a time in which to investigate all options regarding both treatment and pain relief. I feel, in fact, that Ms Fleming’s urgency in reaching her decision should have served to give the doctor pause; pain alone cannot be the sole criterion for determining a PAS, unless there is absolutely no means of substantially easing it, which seems unlikely.

Ultimately, this case as outlined appears too pat. The timing of the PAS is highly suspect and gives the impression of the physician as being an accessible service, rather than as a judiciously influential and helpful part of a process. It may be that the circumstances did dictate an ethical rightness in assisting Ms Fleming, but the greater ethical consideration lies in what was not attempted in that very brief period between diagnosis and PAS.