Question

What are your thoughts about the topic of assisted suicide and death with dignity acts? Defend your answer.

Answer 1

What are your thoughts about the topic of assisted suicide and death with dignity acts?

Ans…

• Suicide and Death with Dignity

The assisted suicide and deaths with dignity acts are specially designed to help the patients who are suffering from chronicle disease and who cant help themselves better than this way. Their illness can't be cure and they want to end this suffering from long time pain. It's one good way to end suffering for the people who are diagnosed with terminally ill people. Certain people with illness that is worst than death and in that case assisted death and death with dignity would help relieve from that painful suffering.

Suicide is a response to two, often-overlapping stimuli, pain and despair. Pain may be physical or psychological. In either aspect, it consumes the person until he seeks only release. A person experiences despair when he concludes that he can no longer hope for an acceptable experience of life. Cluster headaches, so called ‘suicide headaches’, typify the kind of pain that might drive a person to suicide. A person might despair in response to her prognosis of her glioblastoma multiforme, ‘the most aggressive and lethal form of brain cancer’.

the first American state to pass a PAS bill, which it titled ‘Oregon Death with Dignity Act.

The law permits Oregonian citizens with less than six months to live due to a terminal illness to request and receive lethal medication to end their own lives.

More than ten years later, Washington became the second state with its ‘Washington Death with Dignity Act’, modeled off Oregon's act.Vermont, California, Colorado,¹and the District of Columbiahave all adopted similar acts.

FIRST The most common justifications cited for supporting a Death with Dignity Act (DWDA) have been the principles of autonomy and dignity. First, patients themselves have said so. ‘Losing autonomy’ is the most cited reason for DWDA patients to choose PAS: 91% of Oregonian respondentsand 87% of Washingtonian respondentsnamed it a concern. Further, they said that autonomy was far more universal a concern than both ‘[i]nadequate pain control or concern about it’ (26%, 41%) and ‘[l]osing control of bodily functions’ (47%, 43%). Further, ‘[l]ess able to engage in activities making life enjoyable’ (90%, 84%) and ‘[l]oss of dignity’ (77%, 66%) were the second and third most common responses. Pain and loss of physical control (to a lesser extent) correspond to the pain stimulus. However, each of the other three concerns—those most commonly cited—are signs that the patient has despaired; they are intellectual and reasoned responses to their situation.

Second, politicians and judges have emphasized loss of autonomy, even more than relief from suffering. The states that have legalized PAS title their acts with either some form of ‘Death with Dignity’or with reference to ‘choice’ or ‘option’.Further, Colorado cited three reasons to support its PAS ballot initiative, the first two of which emphasized that the law would expand ‘options’ and allow individuals to ‘decid[e]’ for themselves and give them a ‘choice’.

Third, prominent third-party advocates also emphasize autonomy over relief from pain. The mission of the Death with Dignity National Center—the author of the first DWDA in the United States and a prominent advocate of PAS—is, in part, ‘to provide an option for dying individuals’. Brittany Maynard, the 29 year old who sparked California's DWDA while preparing for her own PAS, said in her CNN.

politicians to third-party advocates, the main interest they all seek to vindicate is autonomy.