Physician Assisted Suicide Argumentative Essay

Words: 1300
Pages: 6

A young girl named Brittany Maynard moved from California to Oregon, because of her brain cancer. Brittany had two surgeries that were supposed to stop the tumor from growing but later she had found out that the cancer was coming back even more hostile than before. That is when she found out that she would only have six months to live. Once she had done research on different types of treatment, she found out that none of them would save her life. This destroy what little time she had left. That is when she decided that she wanted to move to Oregon where it was legal for physician assisted suicide (Maynard, 2014). Getting a better understanding of what physician assisted suicide is about, could make people realize that it is not always as bad as they think. Many people do not know what physician assisted suicide is or how it works. Physician assisted suicide is defined as “voluntary termination of one’s own life by administration of a lethal substance with the direct or indirect assistance of a physician” (Physicain-assisted suicide, 2015). The process for how it works is very …show more content…
What if one had a daughter like the Quinlan family. They had decided to take their daughter off of life-support after she was in a coma. Judge Roger J. Miner said, “Physicians do not fulfill the role of ‘killer’ by prescribing drugs to hasten death any more than they do by disconnecting life-support systems.” If a doctor prescribed someone medication that would kill them, it would be the same thing as taking a person off of life-support. The Second Circuit of the Appeals Court ruled that people who have a life-threatening sickness should get the same rights as Quinan’s daughter did. The controversy of physician assisted suicide has been compared to the abortion case of Roe v. Wade. If someone can make the choice to get an abortion, then one should be able to make the decision when and how they die (Hallock,