Death with Dignity
November 16th,2014 posted by: Danielle Santiago
When suffering with a terminal illness the quality of life you once knew is gone. The decision to end your life, and ultimately end your suffering is a hard one to make, not only for yourself but for your family as well. If someone is suffering with no end insight until they eventually succumb to their illness, should they be able to end their life on their own terms?
Imagine yourself laying in a bed like a vegetable, unable to form coherent thoughts, sentences, or have any form of interaction with the people you love because your doped up on the strongest drug possible to keep you from suffering. That's no way to live. 29 year old Brittany Maynard recognized this and chose to move out of the state she was living in, California, and to Oregon so she can exercise her right to end her life through assisted suicide.
Maynard suffers from a malignant brain tumor and was told she only has six months to live. So why not end her life on a good note?
During the early onset of illness you have a small window of time where you can live your life to its full capacity and still have the ability to decide whether you want to continue on and receive treatment in the hopes that the good days will outweigh the bad ones or to bow out without having your quality of living be whittled down to relying on machines to make it through the day.
Due to the separation of Church and state, no matter what you believe in everyone should have the natural right to be able to make the choice independent of any legislation that would prohibit it.
Everyone is the ruler of their own body. Just as abortion is a common topic surrounded by controversy because it involves the right on an individual to exercise their right to choose, religious beliefs enter a debate where it has no place.
A common fear that comes along with the legalization of assisted suicide is the trepidation that the access to the help of medical personnel in ending your own life will be taken advantage of by those who aren't fatally ill. This is a viable concern that not only do the citizens have but law makers as well. In the fight to legalize human euthanasia the quality of life is a reoccurring theme in the arguments for it and as well in the arguments against it. People who are against the legalization tend to be more on the religious side and are completely up in arms about committing suicide because it goes against what they believe in, that you should value the life god has given you. This is where strict regulations on the laws of using medical aid to ultimately commit suicide come into play. Just like palliative care the only people who should be taken into consideration for this type of treatment are the ones who desperately need it, not for the people who want a way out and are looking to get it through an assisted overdose.
"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb into his skin and walk around in it." - spoken by Atticus Finch, written by Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird . At the end of the day its hard for someone who hasn't experienced being terminally ill or has had a family member go through that type of suffering to have perspective on the situation. Before people start throwing around opinions on why a patient of an incurable, terrible, fatal illness should do with their own body, and their own life.
For more on Brittany's fight read the links below:
http://reason.com/blog/2014/10/06/29-year-old-woman-moves-to-oregon-for-le
http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/07/opinion/maynard-assisted-suicide-cancer-dignity/
