Assisted Suicide Should Not Be Legal In Connecticut

To start with, physician assisted suicide refers to the state when a competent person, regardless of the incentives, decides to end their life prematurely by seeking the assistance of a physician. There are no specific laws regulating Assisted suicide in most legal systems. In fact, it is considered a crime in most parts of the world except in a minuscule number of countries. Though there are countless voices out there promoting the idea that physician assisted dying is a compassionate way of ending the suffering of many patients ,with life threatening illnesses, PAD (physician assisted dying) or PAS (physician assisted suicide) shouldn’t be legalized because there are many alternatives including palliative care, better social integration, religious, moral, ethical education and better physician education and awareness.

palliative care could be an alternative for people seeking physician assisted dying. The purpose of palliative care is to aid patients, that are terminally ill, have a better life with minimal or no pain at all.

This type of treatment addresses many aspects including but not limited to emotional, social, and spiritual related causes that may cause some individuals to resort to a life ending choice. When these problems are properly treated, it makes patients feel better about the quality of their lives. If palliative care is widely advertised on a larger scale to patients that may profoundly benefit from its impact, they wouldn’t find themselves backed in the corner out of options and thus forced to consider seeking early death. We have an obligation to expand our health care system to adopt advanced facilities that offer the most comfortable forms of care to our most underprivileged citizens.

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Raising awareness about the positive effects of palliative care can be better enhanced if physicians, doctors and caregivers are well educated and are continuously informed regarding the newest methods available in health care. According to the authors of the article entitled “enhancing informed consent for physician aid in dying: potential role of handout on possible benefits of palliative care”, there is an obvious lack of easier accessibility to palliative care in its entirety to patients that are in dire need for it and those physicians that are participating in assisted suicide. The latter mentioned article “stresses the fact that handouts explaining the possible benefits of palliative care could be a fruitful method in transferring the necessary knowledge that could possibly help targeted patients consider treatment instead of losing hope in life.”

Thoughts of suicide are often regarded to have a direct link to severe depression and Social isolation. Life is that only irreplaceable thing that we all humans seem to cling to until our last breath. Everyone aspires to live a long life. Instinctively, most of us wish to live to be at least a hundred or older. Amongst the prevalent birthday wishes we use is “May you have many more birthdays to come”. It is natural to love life. On the other side of the coin, wanting to end one’s life is not natural and not something most people desire. In some cases, some individuals may be experiencing some degree of intolerable chronic pain physically or psychologically.

Some others might have lost their path in life and thus fall into a state of total despair, which consequently lead them to seek physician assisted suicide or dying (PAS, PAD). No one can deny that depression when its profound may inhibit some individuals from interacting well in the society, which in most cases makes them feel alienated and abandoned. Notably, this feeling can potentially lead to the development of suicidal thoughts. In an attempt to reverse this effect, we should expand our health care system to offer extensive education to social workers, open up locations where these people can go to interact with others who had experienced depression before or attend group meetings that address this phenomenon and offer ways to cope with their problems. This may tremendously help those individuals who once considered dying as their only choice to embrace life again and seek a treatment path. Consequently, treating depression by targeting the causing roots would slightly reduce the overwhelmingly high rates of suicide seekers if not reduce it dramatically.

Assisted suicide is considered unethical and a shameful crime on a worldly scale. According to Harry Peled, Kathleen E. Bickel, and Christina Puchalski, “physician aid in dying (PAD) is legal in seven jurisdictions in the United States: Oregon (1994),Washington (2009), Vermont (2013), california (2016), Colorado (2016), and the District of Colombia (2017).” Alternatively, many parts of the world still consider assisted suicide illegal even though they witness cases of suicide seekers daily. “According to the authors of, “The Role of Challenges for Psychologists in Physician Assisted Suicide”, Shara M. Johnson, Robert J. Cramer, Mary Alice Conroy, and Brett O. Gardner, “not only is the practice of PAS widely considered to be a criminal offence in most parts of the world but also is a highly controversial topic from an ethical standpoint.” Furthermore, the tasks assigned to practicing physicians in this matter are not clear or predictable when it comes to performing PAS (physician assisted suicide) and they don’t have an agreed upon chart to follow to determine patient eligibility when it comes to competence.

Some view the act of serving in assisted dying as an act that is totally opposed to the initial purpose of psychologist and doctors. Psychologists and / or doctors prescribe medicine that is intended to alleviate pain no matter its’ cause and severity. They have access to an abundance of different types of pain killers that would work for just about any patient suffering from excoriating chronic pain. However, killing a patient isn’t what medical professionals go to medical schools for. In fact, there is a dearth of information for psychologists when it comes to how to prescribe death to their patients. Some consider that assisted dying or euthanasia are methods copied from veterinary medicine; in the sense that; animals that don’t produce are put to sleep. In addition, a fraction of people believe that PAS was adopted from the strongholds of Nazism who used to kill individuals that oppose their policies by prescribing them death using lethal injections. According to Inez D. de Beaufort1 .Suzanne van de Vathorst1,2, countries that have legalized assisted dying “have been accused of truly sliding down the slippery slope by murdering their elderly citizens.”

Even though I stand firm in my opinion against legalizing assisted dying, I cannot dismiss the fact that there is an opposing side who are pro assisted dying or euthanasia by either administered lethal dose or by being prescribed meds that would slowly kill a patient. Amongst these promoters, some hold the fact that when an individual is in tremendous uncurable suffering, they should have the right to decide to hasten their death via assisted dying or euthanasia.

However, the problem with legalizing assisted dying faces many loopholes since pain is subjective and only can be assessed by the very individual that is suffering, participating physicians can’t determine if people seeking death fall into the category of patients who qualify for it as their lawful right or vice versa in regions where assisted dying is legal. Secondly, seeking death might become an appealing option amongst senior citizens and individuals diagnosed with depression or dementia. Thirdly, if this path becomes easily accessibly for just about anyone wanting an early exit from life, pharmaceutical engineers and medical researchers would not be as encouraged and motivated to explore areas of how to modernize our medical advancement to be able to invent a cure for todays considered terminally illnesses.

I strongly believe that the medical field has one goal which is to use all its faculties within its capability to fix people that are sick and alleviate their pain and suffering not to kill them. According to the author of “AMA Reconsiders Opposition to Physicians-Assisted Suicide,” Ralph A. Capone, MD, “opposition to physician-assisted suicide has its roots in the words of the ancient Hippocratic oath: “I will not give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked, nor will I advise such a plan.” Furthermore, the author emphasizes that “The current AMA stance defines that “physician-assisted suicide is inconsistent with the role of the physicians as healers.”

Assisted suicide is a cruel, inhumane and unethical. Finally, by providing a comprehensive modern palliative care access to both patients and physicians and by informing patients of the ethical, religious stand when it comes to assisted dying, we would undoubtedly cut down on the number of people opting to end their lives resulting in a community that cherishes it’s profound love for life. Last but not least, based on all the reasons stated in this paper, assisted suicide can’t, shouldn’t and won’t be legalized in the state of Connecticut.

Work Cited

1. de Beaufort, I.,D., & van, d. V. (2016). Dementia and assisted suicide and euthanasia. Journal of Neurology, 263(7), 1463-1467. doi:http://dx.doi.org.becker.idm.oclc.org/10.1007/s00415-016-8095-2
2. Johnson, Shara M., et al. “The Role of and Challenges for Psychologists in Physician Assisted
3. Suicide.” Death Studies, vol. 38, no. 9, Oct. 2014, pp. 582–588. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/07481187.2013.820228.
4. Peled, Harry, et al. “Enhancing Informed Consent for Physician Aid in Dying: Potential Role of Handout on Possible Benefits of Palliative Care.” Journal of Oncology Practice, vol. 13, no. 10, Oct. 2017, p.