The Claim: Physician-Assisted Suicide should be legal and available to those who choose to use it. According to the American Medical Association, physician-assisted suicide occurs when a physician aids the death of a patient by providing them with the means or information that will enable them to perform a life-ending act. The physicians’ core values of fidelity postulate that a patient has the right to refuse treatment, which includes life-sustaining treatment, and as such, the patient’s right of self-determination should be respected.
The counter-argument to this claim is that physician-assisted suicide should not be made legal because allowing this practice would lead to a downward spiral in the medical industry, a phenomenon referred to as ‘the slippery slope.’ And instead, they argue that hospitals should focus on improving the quality and accessibility of hospice and palliative care as a means of discouraging people from seeking the physician-assisted suicide option.
The sources making this claim are the medical practitioners who believe that physician-assisted suicide goes against their moral integrity and their role as healers. According to (Baumann and Schaber, 2017), this section of physicians speculated that we use the claim that patients have a right to die. It means we are imposing on the doctors the duty to kill, which goes against their code of conduct that requires them to be healers. The doctors against the claim have also cited the Hippocratic Oath that states, “do no harm.”
The other parties interested in this claim is the religious community. Major religions, including Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, are against physician-assisted suicide based on the premise that life is sacred, and only God should determine when life ends because He is the giver of that life. The other argument that these parties have made against physician-assisted suicide is that it has cheapened the value of human life and taken away the redemptive quality of suffering. The government’s law enforcement agencies are also interested in how physician-assisted suicide will be regulated to ensure that there are checks and controls around the exercise. The general concern in public is that if there are no safeguards, the chances of unscrupulous parties who would coerce patients to involuntary medical aided death for their gain like in organ harvesting (Simmons, 2018).
II.The Types of Information about Physician-Assisted Suicide
Physician-assisted suicide has become one area where physicians are in a dilemma between upholding the code of conduct within their profession, which requires them to be healers or respecting the right of the patient’s self-determination. Many physicians have come out to strongly oppose this practice saying it violates their ethical and moral standards. Some have gone as far as invoking the Hippocratic Oath in the medical profession that states, “do no harm.” However, another faction of the physicians has come out in support of the procedure, claiming that they are mandated to relieve suffering.
When we consider the fact that patients have the right to live, then using this school of thought, we can establish that patients have a right to die. Battin (2017), talks about the rights of patients to refuse treatment, which includes life-sustaining treatment. Patients who choose this path mostly have already established that their prognosis shows their symptoms are unmanageable and therefore, would like to die on their terms. This school of thought has also been known as controlling their end of life story people feel that they should not go through the emotional stress that comes with the managing of a condition that is not treatable, for them and their family members or care-givers.
In the United States, the jurisdictions that have legalized physician-assisted suicide are; Oregon, which was the first state to ever approve the Death with Dignity Act through a general election in November 1997. Montana was the second state to pass the law through a Supreme Court decision in 2009 and Washington the Death with Dignity Act in the same year. Vermont signed the Patient Choice and Control at End of Life Act into law in May 2013. The state of California passed the End of Life Option Act in September 2015. Colorado’s End of Life Options Act took effect in December 2016. Then in the District of Columbia, the law took effect in February 2017. Hawaii’s “Our Care, Our Choice Act,” New Jersey, and Maine are the latest states to assent to the bill that makes physical-assisted suicide legal in 2019. The methods used in the exercise vary through each state, but the law requires that it involves prescription from a licensed physician that is state-approved. The bill also propagates the use of the term physician-assisted death (PAD) as opposed to suicide when describing the act. The most common illnesses of patients that turned to physician-assisted are the combination of all cancers, then followed by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. When we consider the case of Oregon, which was the first state to legalize the practice, in the period from 1998 to 2016, seventy-seven percent of the patients who choose to undergo physician-assisted suicide had cancer, and 8 percent had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
When I consider the background information in evaluating the viability of this claim, it clear that it does not conflict with my observation because the information that I have collected about physician-assisted suicide sufficiently backs-up the claim (Battin 2015).
- Rhetoric and Fallacies used concerning this claim
The first fallacy around physician-assisted suicide postulates that improved palliative and hospice care will reduce the need for patients to pursue the option. This, according to Clark (2017), is a wrong ideology because some medical conditions result in persistent and untreatable suffering, which cannot be managed even with the best end-of-life care.
The other rhetoric that is being perpetuated, especially with the people who are against physician-assisted suicide, is the moral issues around the practice. As claimed by Moore, Parker, Rosenstand, and Silvers (2015) the deontological arguments that are raised about the practice touch on the worth of human life, with some physicians saying the act is against their role as healers with the other side citing the importance of moral autonomy and self-determination.
Some parties also claim that patients who seek physician-assisted suicide are clinically depressed. This assertion is not true because the law requires that the mental capacity of every patient who wants to pursue this option is mentally evaluated by a certified psychiatrist to ensure they are of sound mind and under no undue influence. The process also involves other medical practitioners who are proficient in the physician-assisted field and other witnesses.
The slippery slope is another rhetoric that has been used with this claim. Those parties that oppose physician-assisted suicide claim that making the practice legal will lead to social depravity. The fear is that the exercise might lead to other illegal practices such as involuntary euthanasia in the disguise of physical-assisted suicide. This is a concern, especially for patients with cases of dementia.
- Scientific Findings of Physician-Assisted Suicide.
A report of physicians’ beliefs about physician-assisted suicide shows that 60%percent of physicians in the United States believe the practice should be legalized. These physicians also felt the need to have proper training around the method to ensure they can execute the mandate proficiently. “It is clear from these responses that physicians think that patients should have the option to choose PAS; however, doctors would be unwilling to perform it because it is outside the scope of their practice. On the one hand, this unwillingness could be due to a lack of training or expertise with respect to PAS. Perhaps if some of these physicians had specific training in performing PAS, they would be more willing to perform it” (Hetzler, Nie, Zhou, and Dugdale, 2019).
In another similar study, a professor in psychiatry Linda Ganzini did research that demonstrated that patients who requested physician-assisted suicide wanted to have some form of control in their death—and also needed to avoid being a burden to their family members. Research from Oregon state shows that patients preferred dying at the comfort of their homes as opposed to hospitals.
The best way to assess the probabilities of this claim is through ensuring that strict laws and regulations are put in place to protect the practice from abuse. Once proper safeguards have been put in place, the public will slowly start changing their attitudes towards the claim. Another way is to train more physicians in the field of assisted dying to improve their confidence in the area most of the medical practitioners have sighted lack of knowledge as the reason for their reluctance in performing the act.
Proper screening of the patients is also very crucial to establish their condition. An appropriate diagnosis of the patient should be done in the presence of witnesses and more qualified medical personnel to confirm the viability of a patients’ request for physician-assisted suicide.
- Conclusion
Every patient should be allowed to have control over their life circumstances. Those parties who vehemently oppose this practice from a theoretical standpoint do not have the first-hand experience of the patients who are going through pain and suffering. Giving a chance for open discussion with the patient about his end-of-life options is a chance for the physicians to establish the best kind of quality care to administer. Those parties fighting physician-assisted suicide in a bid to push for accessible and quality hospice and palliative care need to realize that there is a form of suffering that cannot be treated with that kind of attention. Also, whatever sort of experience or pain the patient is going through is only felt by the patient, meaning they are in a better position to pick their options. Judgment impairment of patients and fear of other errors that might occur can be mitigated through proper regulation and standardization measures that will protect both the patient and the physicians involved in the process.