Assisted Suicide Essay

Assisted Suicide
PHI 200 Mind and Machin

A person has the right to ask for termination of his life because of pain and suffering, but done so in a humane way. Assisted suicide is a very heated debate. Many will argue that the quality of life is an issue, and others believe that at all costs of life must be preserved. There are moral and legal ramifications from both sides of the argument. Proponents of assisted suicide believe that the church and state have no right to interfere with a person’s right to die. Opponents voice the opposite opinion; that no one, but God has the authority to determine when a person is to die (WiseGeek.com). Life is a gift from God and precious, to end it prematurely is to reject that gift (Mosser, K. 2010).
Euthanasia is the process of painlessly helping a terminally ill person to die. Known also as assisted suicide or mercy killing, euthanasia is illegal for humans in the United States (WiseGeek.com). I never thought about this situation happening to me, and what I would do if my father became terminally ill or had some kind of incurable disease that would keep him in a lot of pain and suffering. I read about and listened to the trial of Jack Kevorkian in 1990, but it was not something that was put to thought as to the question, What if?
              Doing this assignment has forced me to think about, what if, and what would I do, if I was in Ms. Wolf’s place. Putting me in Wolf’s place is really tough. First of all, I would struggle with the burden of making and following through with a decision that would terminate my dad’s life if that was his wish. I would surely not want to see my father suffer or endure long bouts of pain at anytime. On the other hand, I would rather let my father live his life to the end, without the help of assisted suicide or euthanasia to shorten his life.
Watching my father each day growing weaker and more fail would be hard, but to cherish and share another day of live with my father would mean...