Assisted suicide/euthanasia should be legal

In your response, you cite the Hippocratic Oath as a reason why physician-assisted suicide should stay illegal and claim that all medicine in this country is practiced by it. Would this be the same Hippocratic Oath that also says a physician must treat the person who taught him medicine as a parent, as well as teach others this "art' for free? If doctors are really bound by the Hippocratic Oath, then every doctor who takes any pay from a medical school that charges students to attend there would be violating the oath. Later on in the oath, it says that doctors will "not use the knife". So I guess surgeons are violating the oath as well. And the part that everyone does know, the "first, do no harm" (and apparently the only part you are aware of), it says "I will keep them from harm and injustice". Since the rest of the oath has been subjectively revised so as to keep up with the times, I can and will easily say that keeping patients from harm includes keeping them from needless pain and suffering. In addition, keeping patients from injustice can and should also mean keeping other people's values and morals off of an individual's or a family's personal and private decision. The fact of the matter is that the Hippocratic oath has been amended significantly, and is often not even used. In the 1970's, many schools abandoned the oath because of its archaic principles. My guess is that many medical schools dropped it because of its call to teach medicine for free and only to men. Other schools use some other versions of the Hippocratic Oath, or other oaths developed by other doctors or medical associations. In short, claiming that the Hippocratic Oath is universally accepted, universally used and universally adhered to is simply false. I never claimed that morality has no place in medicine, just not a morality that is being imposed by people outside of the doctor/patient/family relationship. Go back and read what I wrote in round 1. I said "I believe it to be the height of arrogance that someone can feel as though they can enforce THEIR morality on someone suffering from a terminal disease". Unless you are the person dying, or a family member of yours is the one dying, you should have no say in what decision they make. A physician should use his own moral code to direct his actions regarding euthanasia, but many doctors feel that such a practice should be allowed, especially when they are forced to watch a person waste away from a terminal disease. If a doctor has a problem with it, he or she can refuse to perform the procedure, the same as any doctor with performing an abortion. The issues surrounding guidelines and legal standards are the strongest parts of your argument. Even so, it doesn't seem to bother people in Oregon. They don't seem to have any trouble figuring it out. While I could use Oregon as an example and leave it at that, I will instead try to give common sense answers to your questions. If we went by the "Kevorkian method", as you call it, that doesn't seem to be such a bad thing. By Kevorkian's account from last night, he only assisted 1 in 5 that came to him for help because the others did not fit a medical need. That's a lot of discretion for someone you seem to feel is blood thirsty. If there would be any guidelines used, perhaps the guidelines that doctors follow when they determine that someone does not stand to gain from any further medical intervention and recommend hospice care. That seems common sense enough to me. In addition, most people have seen so many doctors by the time they reach this point that the requirement to get a second opinion would have been reached long ago. There should be no need for a psychologist if a person has been determined to be terminal and he wishes to end his life on his own terms. To require a psychological workup would be an unnecessary governmental intrusion, much like what we have to deal with now. The concerns of the family are taken into account by the patient himself. But this is one of the points of allowing euthanasia: to help keep patients from getting to the point where they can't make their own decisions. If they are incapacitated, then living wills and advanced directives override family desires anyway. For example, if a patient has ordered that they are DNR, or Do Not Resuscitate, the directive overrides the family in the event of a medical emergency. If there are no directives or living wills, then the family should be able to make the decision after consulting with the doctors in charge of their loved one's care, just as they do now. In fact, making euthanasia legal would make episodes like Terry Schaivo much better for everyone involved because they would have access to physicians who would be able to end her life much more humanely than simply pulling her feeding tube. She didn't have to die like that. It was conservatives and their use of the government to impose the laws that we have that starved her to death. If someone is determined to be terminal by at least two doctors, then if euthanasia were legal, their terminal status should invalidate the no-suicide clause. In my view, and in a view that I feel would hold up legally, physician-assisted suicide should be no different than when someone desires to be listed as DNR. The doctors and nurses could prolong a patient's life by intervening in a medical crisis, but their choice to be DNR hastened their death from the crisis, much the same as assisted-suicide. As I know from personal experience, insurance companies and pensions still pay out when a family member dies while being listed as DNR. These are doctors we're talking about, not lawyers. I'm not sure how many "shysters" are out there running around, but I'm sure there aren't that many. The procedure would not take a lot of time for the doctor, nor would it take much in the way of equipment or drugs. So in relation to other procedures that the doctor could be spending his time on, assisting someone to commit suicide would probably not be very lucrative for the doctor. If there are a lot of shysters running around trying to milk money out of desperate people, then I think we have a much larger problem in our medical system that needs to be addressed ASAP. I actually didn't get to see him speak last night. I couldn't get a ticket to go and was left to read about it this morning in the paper. But I have supported this position for a long time now. I supported it before Terry Schaivo and before my dad very nearly avoided a situation much like hers. If my family had faced the same kind of intrusive intervention that Michael Schaivo faced, I would be a lot more militant about it than I am now. Fortunately for me, though, I don't have to go through the same thing he did to empathize.