Assignment 7.4

Physician-Assisted Suicide should be legalized.

The patient has to be spared excruciating pain towards an inevitable end of their life. Furthermore, the end times of such a patient must ensure some dignity is preserved for both the patient and the family. The dependents of the patient also need to reserve some of the resources when the inevitable death of the patient is confirmed.

Legislators and the legal fraternity have held a long history of establishing laws against physician assisted suicide. They have held onto strong counter arguments including claims that there is a need to prevent abuse of such provision as well as offer protection to patients/ families from unscrupulous physicians(Emmanuel, Onwuteaka-Philipsen, Urwin, & Cohen, 2016.) The base of the legislators' arguments is the fact they appreciate the patient's predicament and intention to save the patients from pain, however, preventing legalization of the physician-assisted suicide must not be misconstrued to ignore the patients' suffering. Such laws have never been designed to punish the patient or the physician in terms of guilt for participating in sanctioned 'murder' (Emmanuel, Onwuteaka-Philipsen, Urwin, & Cohen, 2016).

The goal is to establish a logical and transparent system that authorizes, monitors, and evaluates each case that is subjected to physician-assisted suicide at certified healthcare centers.

Medical journals/books/research reports and live debates on the subject at both the national and state level provide invaluable insights that must be considered in customizing the proposed solution to the dilemma.

Statistics and information from patient families of a deceased or terminally ill patient on the verge of death should provide the necessary support for this argument. It is also necessary to extract interviews from physicians serving such patients.

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