Physician-Assisted Suicide
Physician-Assisted Suicide
How would it feel to be totally reliant on medical machines, losing all bodily integrity and personal dignity? Some people when faced with a decision such as this see physician-assisted suicide as the best way out. Physician-assisted suicide has been a topic of debate for a long time. Physician-assisted suicide, as its name implies, is suicide assisted by a physician. In PAS, a physician helps to bring on the patient's death by providing the means to do it or by giving necessary information on how to do it, and the patient performs the legal act. When people decide if they are for or against assisted suicide, lots of factors come into play. Things like morality, ethics, and religion come into play. On one side, people feel that a person has the right to decide if he or she should live or not. On the other, people feel that this decision is not in a person's hands and he or she does not have the right to decide.
Christian opponents of PAS say that according to their beliefs, the sovereignty of God and the human responsibility for stewardship limit our freedom to control life. God has absolute dominion over life, and we share that dominion only as limited creatures. They say that freedom lies not just in having control but also in submitting to what cannot be controlled. This means we exercise freedom by accepting ourselves as creatures of God and by admitting our powerlessness before death.
Opponents also say that there is a moral difference between withholding treatment when nothing more can be done, and intervening to put the patient to death. Allowing a person to die is a natural biological process. When the cause of death is natural, no one can be held responsible. But if the death results from the human action of ingesting or injecting lethal medication, then someone can be held accountable.
Another important opinion of opponents of PAS is the fact that human beings really do...
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