s legal than in one where it is not. Additionally, several of them mentioned that the involvement of physicians in assisted dying might adversely affect the healing ethos of the medical profession, resulting in further erosion of the public trust in doctors. The remaining 15% supported that patients’ rights of autonomy should also include access to physician aid in dying. The option of an assisted death, proponents believe, would allow terminally ill patients to preserve their autonomy and exert one final element of control over their lives.But to assist these suicides is evil. “Assisted suicide is not an act of caring, it is an act of killing,” says Dr. Michael H. Levy, M.D., Ph.D., director of Supportive Oncology and chairman of the Medical Ethics Committee at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, when interviewed by Gabrielle Saveri, corespondent of the “People” Magazine. “If all patients had access to skilled pain management, along with psychological and spiritual support, we wouldn’t need to resort to such desperate measures,” he adds.However, the effect of watching, or hearing about, needless pain and suffering at the end of life clearly has a powerful appeal to the people. And for many the core belief that life is a gift of God has been replaced by the notion that life is an accident of nature. With such scenarios in mind, people drive the movement for physician-assisted suicide. People who have watched parents, spouses, friends, even children dying painfully, or who fear a painful end for themselves, may become ready supporters of proposals that would allow physicians to legally prescribe lethal doses of drugs with which dying persons kill themselves. It seems simple enough to execute. Furthermore, it plays into a “well-honed” instinct - to be able to choose for oneself. But things are not so simple, and the “right to die” does not certainly ...
