Assisted Suicide: Legal and Moral Implications

Running head: ASSISTED SUICIDE
Assisted Suicide
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1ASSISTED SUICIDE
Assisted Suicide is one of the most highly controversial topics of the recent times. This
phenomenon is mostly raised when a person, mostly terminally ill or disabled, commits suicide
with the assistance of a physician or maybe with the assistance from a medical professional. It
can be sometimes confused with the term euthanasia, however; the basic difference lies within
the process (Buijsen, 2018). In euthanasia, the person assisting the lethal process of killing is in
control, whereas in assisted suicide, the person willing to die is in complete control of the
process and completes the process of suicide themselves with assistance from the healthcare
professional. In this case, the person Matthew Donelly wanted to die and for that he was assisted
by his brother, Harold, which was a case of assisted suicide. The entire topic of discussion lies in
whether or not the concept of Assisted Suicide is legally and socially acceptable or not on which
Harold’s guilt or innocence can be justified (Barone, Hentoff & Murphy, 2014). It is to be
mentioned that Matthew was already dying and under a lot of pain due to the harmful effects of
X-rays which had resulted him losing his eyesight, nose, fingers, left hand, part of his jaw and lot
of other body parts and internal organs.
The thesis statement in this argument is that, when a person is terminally ill or disabled
with no hope of being recovered from their condition and can further sink into a worsened
condition, it is viable that only then the person should be put out of his or her misery with an
assisted suicide. Any other state of the person, like just the thought of attempting suicide would
not be accepted and the person assisting to the suicide would be charged as guilty. The following
essay would discuss on this argument and would focus on proving the thesis statement right.
There are various arguments on whether or not the assisted suicide should be accepted
both by the law and the society equally. Various arguments have been countering the matter of
assisted suicide to be ousted from the law as well as the society completely (Radbruch et al.,

2ASSISTED SUICIDE
2016). These counter arguments are stating that the medical personnel who are assisting these
terminally ill or disabled people with their suicides should be considered as equal as cold-
blooded murderers and they should be trialled with as much less mercy than the murderers are
trialled.
These arguments do not acknowledge assisted suicide as a legalized act because; it is
believed that given the condition of the medical advancements, people have been dying less and
even the people who are afflicted with fatal diseases are being able to be saved now (Nelson,
2015). Sustaining lives have become much easier than it was before; even for the people who are
affected with terminal diseases have hopes to be saved given the latest condition of advanced
medical environment. Even diseases like advanced stages of cancer now has cure.
There are three well explained arguments that counter the thesis statement and they can
be stated as follows:
 If medical and healthcare personnel who have been assisting the suicide it would
do more harm than it does good. It turns a professional healer into a killer.
 The legalization of the assisted suicide further makes the safeguarding of the ill
and weak people to be inadequate (Ellis, 2016). They become vulnerable as they
are treated like chattel for offering death as a last resort.
 Societal approval to killing is what is delivered to the legalization of the assisted
deaths. This can further give acceptance to the practise as an incentive to the cost
saving options.
Although there have been incidents recorded and reported about the assisted killings in
which, out of mercy the medical personnel have helped a terminally ill person into committing