Euthanasia Should Doctor-Assisted Suicide Be Lagalized Essay, Research Paper
Over the past ten to twenty years a big issue has been made over a
person+s right to commit suicide or not. The American courts have had
to deal with everything from assisted suicides to planned suicides,
and whether the constitution gives the American people the right to
take their own lives or whether it says they have the power to allow
someone else to take their lives. They have had to determine in some
cases whether or not homicide charges needed to be brought up and
others times whether or not it was done for an underlying reason such
as insurance fraud. Suicide has become a big part of American society,
year after year more people are taking their own lives for many
different reasons. A lot of philosophers have broken down all the
reasons of suicides into two different categories, rational suicide
and irrational suicide. A rational suicide has been given five basic
criteria that usually must be met for the person’s act to be
considered rational. The five criteria, which a person must show for
their suicide to be considered rational, are, “the ability to reason,
realistic world view, adequacy of information, avoidance of harm, and
accordance with fundamental interests.”(Battin 132) Another opinion of
rationality of suicide is, “it is the best thing for him from the
point of view of his own welfare-or whether it is the best thing for
someone being advised, from the point of view of that person’s
welfare”(Brandt 118). People have to characterize suicides because a
lot of times they don’t understand what that person is going through
so by grouping them and placing criteria on them it allows them to
accept it in an easier manner.
If terminally ill patients are the only ones who have a good rational reason to
commit suicide, then where does that leave everyone else? Well just about everyone else
commits suicide because of a little thing that enters everyone’s life at some time and that
thing is called depression. Depression can come from several different things, such as a
loss of something like a job, a loved one, a limb such as an arm or leg, or anything else
that might be held dear to that person. Other things could be rejection at home or in the
work place, abuse, and sometimes even the thought of getting old and not wanting to
know what tomorrow holds in store. There are a lot of arguments that these are rational
reasons but just because you are having a bad day doesn’t actually mean you have a
rational reason to go out and throw yourself off a building or tie a rope around your neck.
Another big issue about suicide today is the one that deals with assisted suicide. When we
think about this the first person that pops in our mind is Dr. Jack Kervorkian. Yet
Kervorkian was not the first, “The Hemlock Society was founded by Derek Humphry, a
British journalist, in Los Angeles in 1980. The organization advocated active euthanasia,
or aiding the death of a hopelessly ill individual.”(Long 76) This society was responsible
for several deaths because of their “listing of lethal doses of eighteen commonly
prescribed drugs and a manual on suicide, which quickly became a best-seller.”(Long 76)
Dr. Kervorkian is probably the most famous man in America when it comes to assisted
suicide. His cases and his defiance of the law have kept him the spotlight in the American
media and has really brought the issue of do Americans have the right to take their own
lives, and if so is it the legal responsibility of a physician to assist his or her patient if
they are asked. Dr. Kervorkian says “yes”.
Assisted suicide is where a patient that is terminally ill comes to a physician or
even a friend or family member at times and asks them to help end their life. There are
several different ways to assist someone in suicide, you can inject them with a lethal
amount of drugs, you can turn off their machines that is helping keep them alive, there
have even been cases where the friend has put a bullet in the person’s body.
The big question in America is whether or not you have the constitutional, or
moral, right to commit suicide. There have been very strong arguments for both cases.
Joel Feinberg argues that the constitution does not give us that right simply because of
Thomas Jefferson’s famous words “that all men are endowed with certain unalienable
Rights, that among these are Life…” He says, “How could a person have a right to
terminate his own life (by his own hand or the hand of another) if his right to life is
inalienable?…”(Mayo 224).
He makes a good argument, by saying that it does, would infringe on our right to
live that the founding fathers said was ours and that there was no one who could take that
right away from us not even ourselves. Feinberg probably says it best when he says, “The
‘right to life’ is essentially a duty, but expressible in the language of rights because the
derivative claims against others that they save or not kill one are necessarily beneficial-
goods that one could not rationally forswear. The right therefore must always be
‘exercised’ and can never be ‘waived.’ Anyone who could wish to waive it must simply be
ignorant of what is good for him.”(Mayo 225) What he is saying here is that you can not
just decide you want to kill yourself. This is a right given to you by the constitution and it
is established to protect you from anyone who wants to cause harm to you, even yourself.
And anyone who wants to bring harm upon themselves has something wrong with them
and, therefore, needs to be protected from themselves.
Yet others have had a strong argument for the other side also, and their
interpretation of the constitution is totally different. Alan Sullivan argues for this point by
saying “that the U.S. law has never addressed this issue squarely. On the one hand, the
Constitution protects the right of self-determination in many significant matters of
personal choice, including choices involving treatment of one’s own body. On the other
hand, the law also appears to recognize state interests in preventing suicide. Because the
Supreme Court has never spelled out the principle determining which personal choices
are protected from state interference and which are not, the Court cannot be said to have
taken a stand on the issue of suicide. The only resolution to this problem is to go in favor
of a right to self-determination in the matter of suicide, subject to appropriate tests of
competency.”(Mayo 229)
What Sullivan is saying is that the Constitution has given us the right to have self-
determination over matters in our life. The first amendment alone gives us the freedom to
determine what religion we want to believe in, and the right to say what we want when
we want to say it. The fourteenth amendment gives us the right to determine what we
want for ourselves. Sullivan says, “That suicide is a ‘fundamental right’ and those are
explicitly guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. The Supreme Court has recognized another
class of fundamental right whose source lies outside specific guarantees of the
Constitution, such as the rights to marital and sexual privacy, the right of a woman to
exercise control over her body, the right to travel freely from one place to another, and
the right to learn certain subjects in school.”(Mayo 232) Sullivan feels the right to take
your own life falls into this category of fundamental rights. Yet he does put a stipulation
on the right to suicide and that is what he said about showing signs of competency. He
just wants to make sure that the person who is about to take his own life is of sound mind
and will not do unnecessary harm to himself or anyone else that is around him.
Yet the law really can’t do anything to someone who has killed themselves. The
place that the law has really played a major role in American society is in assisted
suicides. There have been many cases where family members and friends have been
prosecuted for aiding or assisting in a suicide. One of the most famous cases was the
People vs. Roberts. According to Leslie Pickering Francis, “It occurred in Michigan, in
1920, Frank Robert’s wife was incurably ill and bedridden with Multiple Sclerosis. At her
request, he mixed poison and left it by her bedside; she drank the poison quite clearly
knowing what she was doing. The Michigan Supreme court affirmed Robert’s conviction
of murder, reasoning that he had intended his wife to be able to take her life as she
wished, and that she would have been unable to do so without his aid.”(Mayo 255)
The law has been determined by the states and the states alone, the Supreme
Court has not interfered yet. The states have done one of three things says Francis, “First,
twenty-five states, including nine with recent penal code revisions, contain no separate
statutory treatment of assisting suicide. Only a few of these have passed on the question
of whether assisting suicide falls within their criminal homicide statutes. Of those states,
which have, most, like Michigan, have argued that assisting suicide is murder. A second
approach is to make assisting suicide a form of manslaughter… The third approach is to
treat assisting suicide as a separate statutory offense altogether.”(Mayo 256) This
approach has led to what is called the Model Penal Code-Section 210.5. Causing or
Aiding Suicide (1) Causing Suicide as Criminal Homicide. A person may be convicted of
criminal homicide for causing another to commit suicide only if he purposely causes such
suicide by force, duress of deception. (2) Aiding or Soliciting Suicide as an Independent
Offense. A person who purposely aids or solicits another to commit suicide is guilty of a
felony of the second degree if his conduct causes such suicide or an attempted suicide,
and otherwise of a misdemeanor. Each state has adopted their own policy and as you can
see some have not even taken a stand on the issue. They have just let it hang in the wind
and hope that nothing ever comes of assisted suicide. Yet the one-place states have been
lenient on is that in the case of families turning life support systems off. This happens
everyday in our society and it usually is left up to the families and friends in deciding the
fate of a loved one who has slipped into an irreversible coma or is technically brain dead.
Suicide is a very touchy situation to most people. Almost everybody has known or
heard of someone they knew, that has committed suicide. And a lot of us will have to
deal with it again. Yet do we have the right to take our own life? There are arguments for
both yet it comes down to your beliefs not only in the law but also in your morals. The
Bible says in Phillipians 1:20-24: Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or
by death. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. If it is to be life in the flesh, that
means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. I am hard pressed
between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. But to
remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account.
William V. Rauscher sums this passage up very well by saying, “The phrase in
Paul’s letter that interests me the most at this point is ‘to remain in the flesh is more
necessary on your account.+ I have emphasized ‘on your account’ because is seems to me
that this is the key to the whole of Jesus’ teaching about both life and death. The suffering
that Paul knew he would be called upon to endure so long as he remained alive was not
for himself. Suicide was, indeed, a tempting ‘way out’ of continued suffering. But he
refused to choose it because of his conviction that his life and his service were intended
to be for others-’on your account.’”(Rauchser 104-5)
As of now you have the right to commit suicide anytime you want. Yet depending
on what state you live on you could be punished by the law for assisting in a suicide.
Only time can tell what will become of suicide and the law. Today there are still cases in
the court battling to try and legalize assisted suicide. Suicide is not the way out of
everything though. I understand in some cases that it might be the best thing, like saving
a loved one from excruciating pain yet nothing can be so bad that it deserves taking your
own life.