Speech on Physician-Assisted Suicide

by David Stevens

        To begin, I’m going to create an image, so please close your eyes if you want to. Now picture this: you’re in a hospital bed, recovering overnight from a recent chemotherapy treatment. You have Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a common kind of cancer. You were diagnosed a couple of years ago, and you’ve been in and out of chemotherapy. The only thing is, all the radiation and chemo and medication have stopped really working. The tumors have spread elsewhere, and your doctor has told you that there’s nothing they can really do. In fact, he told you that you have about three, maybe four months to live. You now face the end of your life, which will follow a long, painful deterioration in your physical condition as the cancer multiplies. This is the last thing anybody wants to suffer through, but for people in this situation, an option called physician-assisted suicide, or PAS, can help. This is when a patient takes a lethal prescription to die with dignity and to avoid the crushing pain of a terminal illness. Physician-assisted suicide should be legalized in the United States, with a few limitations, because it provides relief from inevitable pain and suffering.

         There are currently about four states in which physician-assisted suicide is legal: Oregon, Washington, Vermont and Montana. Oregon was the first to legalize the practice with the Death with Dignity Act in 1994. Under this law, [quote] "An adult who is capable, is a resident of Oregon, and has been determined by the attending physician and consulting physician to be suffering from a terminal disease, and who has voluntarily expressed his or her wish to die, may make a written request for medication for the purpose of ending his or her life in a humane and dignified manner” [end quote]. Basically, this law allows PAS, but with a number of limitations. For example, patients must self-administer the medication; they have to be physically capable of taking the drug on their own. Patients must receive a prescription from a licensed doctor. Also, patients need more than one prognosis predicting that they have fewer than six months until their expected death. And there are more rules. These safeguards help protect against abuses of the law, and they mirror those in the other states with a law allowing physician-assisted suicide.

         The arguments against assisted suicide fall into two main categories. First, many people worry that legalizing PAS will allow doctors to take it too far and possibly kill patients against their will. A famous case on this subject is that of Dr. Jack Kevorkian. He helped over 130 people commit suicide in the 1990s, some of whom were not terminally ill. Kevorkian was convicted of second-degree murder and served eight years in prison. This would still be illegal with proper assisted-suicide laws, however, because of self-administration and the terminal illness requirement. As long as sensible restrictions are in place, this won’t happen, not legally. Another view posits that PAS contradicts a doctor’s oath to “do no harm,” and that suicide is always wrong. But isn’t it the patient’s choice whether or not to live through months of inevitable pain and suffering? Patients should be allowed the option of physician-assisted suicide because, in the long run, that may end up doing the least harm possible.

         All things considered, suicide is a terrible thing. But some things can be worse that death. That’s why states should allow physician-assisted suicide: people should have the choice to die with dignity if they are terminally ill. I don’t encourage this practice in excess, only with strict and nuanced regulations. But in the end, the decision is not mine to make. More states should follow the model of Oregon and others because it’s not the state’s decision; it’s not the doctor’s decision; it’s the patient’s decision.