“I solemnly pledge myself before God and in the presence of this assembly, to pass my life in purity and to practice my profession faithfully. I will abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous, and will not take or knowingly administer any harmful drug”
These words proceed out of the mouth of every person to graduate medical school, so why is it that in four of the fifty United States, physicians can assist their patients in suicide by administering a lethal dose of medication? Oregon, Washington, Vermont and Montana all have laws that support physician-assisted suicide, and with each new state adopting this law, more lives are ending before their time. According to an article in Life News, in 2012, Oregon alone had 115 prescriptions written for the lethal amount of barbiturates needed to result in death. Of those, 77 lives were ultimately taken due to suicide. Jeannine Young says that “Doctors told my father that he would not live through the winter of 1962-63, so my eldest sister moved her wedding date up from June 1963 to December 1962, so he could walk at least one of his six daughters down the aisle…In 1978, when my husband’s job was taking us to California, I said good-bye to my father in intensive care at the hospital in Burlington. I thought I would never see him alive again."
In order to be eligible to pursue physician-assisted suicide, a patient must be a mentally competent adult diagnosed with a terminal disease. There are also several rules before a prescription for the lethal drugs can be received. For example, the patient must make two oral requests, 15 days apart. He or she must make a written request under the supervision of two witnesses. Additionally, the physician must inform the patient of alternatives to assisted suicide. Sometimes physician-assisted suicide is referred to using different terms such as voluntary active euthanasia. The connotation of these two phrases are very different, and can even entail two separate meanings. According to the World Federation of Right to Die Societies, “physician-assisted suicide entails making lethal means available to the patient to be used at a time of the patient’s own choosing,” while “voluntary active euthanasia entails the physician taking an active role in carrying out the patient’s request, and usually involves intravenous delivery of a lethal substance."
Cases of physician-assisted suicide can be seen as far back as 500 BC. During this time, the ancient Greeks and Romans, although bound by the Hippocratic Oath, are thought to have often performed voluntary mercy killings as well as support the idea that voluntary killing was better than prolonged agony. Between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, support for euthanasia diminished due to an ascendancy in Christianity. As time passed, controversy over the church’s right to interfere in ethical matters arose, but the rejection of suicide and euthanasia remained firm.
In the United States, it wasn’t until 1828 that the first United States statute was enacted that outlawed assisted suicide in New York. In the 1900’s, debate over physician-assisted suicide became a more prominent issue as advances in technology allowed the debate to be addressed on television, radio and even movies such as "The Black Stork" in 1917. As time passed, groups both in support of and opposing physician-assisted suicide were organized, rates of support continuously fluctuated and new rules and regulations were put in place regarding the act. In November of 1994, Oregon became the first state to legalize the Death with Dignity act, or the right to physician-assisted suicide, followed by Washington and Montana in 2008 and most recently Vermont in 2013. Despite the legalization of physician-assisted suicide in four states, it should not be legal in the United States because it removes all chances of that person ever getting better, it introduces a double standard between physical and mental suffering, and it also causes more pain and grief of the patient’s loved ones.
