Alex Kozlov

Professor Batty
English 28
2 May 2017

Nothing More Permanent: The Legality of Assisted Suicide

Id rather be dead, a patient once told me on the way to his convalescent home after his

discharge from the Emergency Room. I worked as an Emergency Medical Technician for three

years and this was a common conversation with patients. Assisted suicide is always a difficult

topic to discuss. Primarily due to the fact that it is difficult to look at a person suffering in a

hospital and tell them it is okay to kill him or herself or rather, that they dont have a right to kill

him or herself. Assisted suicide or physician assisted suicide should remain illegal for moral,

financial and logistical reasons. The legalization of suicide affects our a society in a negative

manner, by paving the way to more problems for our society through funding death rather than

better living in our hospitals, the potential lawsuits against the medical system, and the logistical

disaster that is deciding which cases are justified.

It is not morally sound to spend more money on lethal drugs to kill patients rather than

using that money to improve the patients quality of life. We should use that money to improve

care, as Michael Hamming, a registered nurse and writer for LAMP magazine, puts it,

that there are cases of people suffering unbearable pain from terminal illnesses is a sad indictment
on our profession that we are not delivering or advocating strenuously for the required level of
care to be provided [] then the answer is not to have assisted painless killings, but to improve
the standard of palliative care.

This idea of focusing on a swift death rather than treating the pain goes against the whole point

of our medical system as summarized by the Hippocratic Oath: I will give no deadly medicine

to anyone if asked, nor suggest any such counsel. Though aspects seem outdated about the

original fifth century text, the Oath has been modernized countless times and the message is
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always the same: do not cause permanent harm. Then I must ask, is there anything more

permanent in life than death? These patients are emotionally vulnerable. Regardless of if they

consent to death, this should not be an option to someone wanting to die regardless of their

situation. As Lawrence R. Huntoon, a board-certified neurologist, states in the Journal of

American Physicians and Surgeons: The elderly and those suffering from severe debilitating

illnesses, who may be depressed and lonely and who may not have the will or the energy to fight

back to preserve their lives, are at risk (3). Patients in hospital settings are more susceptible to

being depressed due to the dreadful feeling of being confined to the bed, on top of the reason

why they were originally admitted. These patients have faith that their physician and nurses

know what is best for them, and if the hospital staff propose assisted suicide as an option, who is

to stop the depressed patient from agreeing to death?

Legalizing assisted suicide is not financially reasonable for us as a society. Some might

say that, a patient would cost less money to the hospital after his/her death rather than keeping

the patient alive at the hospital. The idea that a person is better off dead in the hospital rather

than alive because it would cost less money to the hospital, goes against the reason for hospitals

and their funding. However the potential lawsuits against doctors from the family members of

the deceased and nurses incapable of administering life ending drugs due to their religion or

other reasons could cost the hospital more than the patients life support.

It is also logistically complicated to try to justify which cases are acceptable for death and

which cases are not. Where do we chose which pain is justifiable for death? Do we just limit

physician suicide to patients who have a short term life expectancy or do we make it available to

all illnesses that cause pain regardless of life expectancy? If we recognize all pain as justifiable
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for suicide, then if a patient is generally feeling depressed over a temporary issue such as missing

his/her favorite television show, then would we as a society be hypocritical for denying his/her

right to death? Some might question, what if a patient in palliative care is simply being kept on

a ton of morphine because they have terminal cancer that is extremely painful to them? What if

the patient does not want the end of their life to be in a drug-induced state and they make the

conscious choice to not go through that? To that I say, if we legalize assisted suicide, we would

simply be focusing on treating the product of the cancer rather than focusing on the source of the

cancer. Although the patient with cancer suffers, if we put more funding into addressing the

source of cancer, we can lessen cancer in our society and not just the pain that comes from it. If

assisted suicide is an option, then the funding gets cut between lethal drugs and the research into

cancer. Worst of all, what is to stop doctors from promoting it and not reporting all the cases?

Such as when Doctor Southam gave patients a syringe loaded with malignant cancer cells to see

how it would infect the patient as described by Rebecca Skloot in in The Immortal Life of

Henrietta Lacks. The terrifying fact about this case is that after this scandal was publicized,

Dr.Southam lost his license for only a year, then returned to the field.

Henry Beecher published a study in the New England Journal of Medicine showing that
Southams research was only one of hundreds of similarly unethical studies. Beecher published a
detailed list of the twenty-one worst offenders, including researchers whod injected children with
hepatitis and others who had poisoned patients under anesthesia using carbon dioxide. Southams
study was included as example number 17 (Skloot).(136)

With Henry Beechers published list of medical experiments that didnt provide informed

consent, it is easy to want to limit the amount of power these doctors have with us: the current

and/or future patients.

Assisted suicide should remain illegal because it has a negative moral, financial and

logistic impact on our society. It is important that we as a society ensure that assisted society is
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illegal because legalizing suicide provides more problems for our us. Rather than focusing on

comfort in death,we need to cherish the people in our life, we should focus on constantly

improving everyones quality of life, which is the only way we as a society can thrive.
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Works Cited
Hamming, Michael. "Is Euthanasia Really 'The Right Thing to Do'?." Lamp, vol. 74, no. 1, Feb.
2017, p. 7. EBSCOhost,
"Hippocratic Oath." Encyclopdia Britannica. Encyclopdia Britannica, Inc., n.d. Web. 25 Apr.
2017.
Skloot, Rebecca. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. New York: Broadway, 2017. Print.