Argumentative Essay: The Issue Of Assisted Suicide

  Suicide is an issue that is plaguing our society.   Many people see suicide as a way to get away from their problems.   A superficial reader of the poem "Summer Solstice" by Sharon Olds, might assume the poem is about a man ready to commit suicide, but actually the poem represents the end of one life emerging into a new beginning.           The readers of the poem do not know why the man is going to commit suicide, but he wants his life to end.   People that try commit suicide often assume that the world  has turned its back on them.

Assisted Suicided Every 16.2 minutes, there are people in the world that take their own life by killing themselves.(Purity, 9) There are are over 40,000 people every year that commit suicide.(Purity, 10) Suicide is the leading cause of death for those of the age of 15-24 years old.(Purity, 13) However, coming up in the media through the last 20 years has been the idea of ending your life by assisted suicide. Assisted suicide is the practice of ending someone 's life.(Newton, 7) A terminal illness is when you have a disease that will end your life within the near future.

Assisted suicide has caused many divisions in the medical field on whether assisted suicide should be legalized. In September 1996 issue of the BMA news review, the results of a survey of over 750 GPS and hospital doctors showed that 46 percent of the doctors supported a change in the law to allow them to carry out the request or a terminally ill patient for voluntary euthanasia, 44 percent were against euthanasia and supported the present law and 37 percent said they would be willing to actively help end the life of a terminally ill patient who had asked for euthanasia and so assisted suicide, if the law allowed it.” (www.idebate.org/debatebase/debates/assisted-suicide/house-belives-assisted-suicide-should-be-legalized) What we should all know is that we have a God given right to choose how we want to live our lives within the limits of the law. We choose how we want to live and where, we also choose our career paths our significant others as well as

Physician assisted suicide has been an intensely debated problem for years but if used properly, could be an effective way to help those who are suffering at the end of their life. Countless people have been advocating for physician assisted suicide for years and the most famous advocate for assisted suicide was Dr. Jack Kevorkian. He was a pathologist but received the nickname Dr. Death after it was estimated that between 1990 and 1999 he assisted 130 terminally ill individuals in their assisted suicides (“Jack Kevorkian”). Dr. Kevorkian is considered a crusader for physician

The right to assisted suicide in the United States is a controversial and significant topic that seems to concern people all throughout the country. The debate goes back and forth about whether a terminally ill patient has the right to decide to die with the assistance of a physician. Of course, several people are against it, more commonly because of religious, ethical or moral reasons. Many competent dying patients in extreme uncontrollable pain and suffering request their attending physician to assist them in performing active euthanasia. Euthanasia is “ a mode of ending life in which the intent is to cause the patient’s death in a single act (also called mercy killing)” Nordqvist.

When suicide gets mentioned the first thing that usually comes to mind is someone who is very depressed ending their life. The thought of someone who is terminally ill wanting to commit suicide usually never crosses someone's mind because they are supposed to keep strong, to keep fighting their illness and stay alive. Jack Kevorkian was a physician who made a suicide machine specifically to help ill people who can't function normally to commit suicide, he helped around 130 people commit suicide. When people found out about jack kevorkian and what he was doing they were outraged, how could someone help another person end their life when you should help them have a life worth living? The people wanted him imprisoned and the people got what they wanted, he was sentenced 10-25 years in prison but was released after 8 years as long as he did not continue to assist in any suicides.

Durkheim defined suicide as “applied to every case of death which results directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act, carried out by the victim himself, knowing that it will produce this result.”(Durkheim,1951). The similarity between the two definitions shows how Durkheim 's work has continued to effect our understanding of suicide today.

Rapid and Dramatic developments in medical technology has given us the power to save more lives than we ever have before. New treatments and technology allows us to reduce suffering and cure diseases that were once fatal or painful in the past. However, such advances in medicine have also given us the ability to sustain life, or prolong deaths, of patients whose physical or mental capabilities cannot be restored, and their pain cannot be eliminated. Like the woman suffering from Lou Gehrig’s disease, people do resort to end their pain and suffering. But under present law, assisting in suicide is a crime.

Losing a loved one is very difficult to handle throughout your life. Have you ever felt like giving up on life as well because your other behalf or your loved one passed away due to suicide and not being able to see them again until the afterlife? Suicide is the act of ending your own death at your own hand to escape the pain or suffering from the world. It should be meant to enjoy life like everyone else and not taking your own life just by the opinion of others or by the disaster of the world or by any body failure you might be experiencing. Accordingly, to the organization of the American Foundation of Suicide Prevention, suicide becomes the 10th leading cause of death in the U.S.

“The Pew Research Center’s survey, conducted Nov. 9-27, 2005 among 1,500 adults, finds that while overall attitudes are largely stable, people are increasingly thinking about and planning for their own medical treatment in the event of a terminal illness or incapacitating medical condition.” Based upon the article, “Strong Public Support for Right to Die,” 70% of the people believe individuals should have been allowed to die, while 22% believed it was up to the doctors to try and help and save the patients. The normative perspective would argue, people who commit suicide are violating the normative consensus of organized society. However, in this situation, normative perspective could discuss, dying with dignity or assisted suicide means

Not many companies, movies, or TV shows want to talk about suicide because it’s a deep and dark topic.  It is very hard for people to understand and explain, so people tend to stay away from the topic as a whole.   To show suicide is a positive and useful ways requires the use of one of the five themes (Collings).  These themes are public responsibility, media framing of suicide, professional practice, personal experience, and restricted reporting (Collings).

Ending life is not the right path to proceed Suicide means ending your own life. It is sometimes a way for people to escape pain or suffering. Suicide is not the only solution to a temporary problem there are strategies that you can use to make a memory less prominent. There always an option and we should not include there committing suicide. According to Merriam Webster, suicide is the act of killing yourself because you do not want to continue living, but it is not the right path to proceed.

Over the years the issue of suicide has been slowly increasing. It is now the third leading cause of death among young people. The effects of suicide are tragic and felt long after the individual has taken their own life. Some people who consider suicide, however, never make a “serious” attempt at it. For every attempted suicide, there is said to be more than one person whose thought of suicide has never translated into an actual attempt.

Secondly,an elaboration on the theory of suicide followed the three types of suicide which are altruistic,egoistic and anomic. Durkheim 's (1885) definition: “Suicide is applied to all cases of death resulting directly or indirectly from a positive or negative act of the victim himself, which he knows will produce this result.” For suicides, according to Durkheim, do not constitute a wholly distinctive group of "monstrous phenomena" unrelated to other forms of behavior on the contrary. They are related to other acts, both courageous and imprudent, by an unbroken series of intermediate cases. Suicides are simply an exaggerated form of common practices.

The statistics about teenage runaways, alcoholism, drug problems, pregnancy, eating disorders, and suicide are startling. Every year, thousands of people succeed in taking their lives and even more have attempted suicide at some point in their lives. Although we have reached the stage that hearing about suicide is now common, it is was viewed as trivial and petty back then. It seems like a reverse spectrum