We should help those who want to commit suicide

My opponent seems to have constantly misunderstood me throughout this whole debate, therefore I would like to unravel their (quite immensely) flawed argument. Firstly, my opponent rebuts with the quote, "The person themselves have the right to commit suicide, but is not a right to force someone else to help them cause suicide". Not once in my argument have I said anything about the "forced" assist of suicide but still my opponent seems to decide that this is an adequate contradiction to the documented human right "dominion" [1]. This fact alone leaves my opponent's argument almost completely flawed. The title of this debate is 'We should help those who want to commit suicide' not 'We should force doctors into helping those who want to commit suicide'. It's seems my opponent has failed to grasp the concept of this; the idea is choice - people are given a choice in the way they want to live their life [2] and I believe that they should be given a choice in the way they would like to end it too. If a doctor is willing to assist in a patient's suicide then they should. There is no referral to forcing an individual into assisted suicide in my argument, so I would like to ask my opponent where they developed this argument. Con's next shaky argument quotes the Bill of Rights and states that "We cannot take a persons life; so assisted suicide cannot be used." It seems my opponent doesn't know what assisted suicide actually is, which may be why we are on such opposite sides of the suicide spectrum. Assisted suicide is 'The act of deliberately assisting another person to kill themselves' [3] This exact definition or slight variations of it can be found on the NHS website, the Equality and Human Rights Commission website and the US Constitution Rights, which my opponent even quotes from. I agree we cannot take another person's life as this is known as murder [4] (see synonyms below) but there is no claim in the Bill of Rights that assisted suicide is illegal therefore this rebuttal, like the previous, can be swept aside. My opponent then goes on to attempt to disprove my evidently sustained argument. They claim that there is no a safe way to commit suicide and that "There is nothing safe about that [suicide], when one kills themselves; they do any means of measure to get the job done." But where is a source that proves this? There are many sources that show that the most commonly chosen suicide methods are hanging/suffocation and poisoning [5] which disproves my opponent's argument that "they do any means to get the job done."and shows a selective correlation in the ways people commit suicide. As well as this, there are quite obviously more safe ways to commit suicide. Is Con saying that jumping off a bridge onto a busy road is safer than physician-assisted suicide in a controlled area? Con continues with "What damage will occur if the person is dead? He or she will have no life, and wouldn't suffer any damage except taking his or her own life." I can quickly push this argument aside with the quite blatant fact that damage is extremely likely to occur in a suicidal incident. [6] Does a person who jumps off a cliff receive no bodily damage? I would like to answer their question "What damage will occur?" Injuries could be sustained to the person taking their own life, e.g. bullet holes, wounds, organ damage, dismemberment etc. as well as those around them who could be similarly injured not to mention damaged mentally or emotionally. Why hurt others in the process rather than keeping it in a conditioned area? As we carry on down my opponent's argument we see the rebuttal, "a kid will listen 75% of the time but will not listen to all their parents rules." Like the previous statement, I see no sources to prove this apparent statistic so we can therefore regard it as Con's opinion. There are no sources that support the argument that a child would not listen to their parents in the situation of suicide and my opponent tries to hide this fact with 'youth suicide statistics' and 'negative emotions in teens when listening to parent'. Evidence of this is when my opponent states that 'a kid' will not listen to their parents rules then supports it with 'teen' statistics. The fact still remains that anyone under 18 does not have independent ownership over themselves [7] and therefore would not be accepted to be assisted in their death. So there is no way that a child could "get help to die because of a bully". Con then attempts to counter me with my own opinion, "I agree that there are multiple programs and different forms of treatment that could help a depressed individual, and that before being allowed to be put to death, a person should take psychological tests to ensure their decision is a proper one". Yes, I agree that a person should be thoroughly assessed so they don't regret the decision (if it's even possible to regret something once dead) and to make sure that committing suicide is really the final and only solution. In conjunction to this, I would like to address my opponent's earlier quote, "We should not help those who want to commit suicide freely; but help those who are in physical pain." and ask, what is so different about physical and mental pain? In fact, there are several sources which support the opposite view and say that mental/emotional pain is worse than physical pain [8]. Shouldn't a person be given the choice to end their pain? Before concluding, Con states that "assisted suicide ... causes more harm to the physician than the suicidal victim" and gives the seemingly legitimate statistic (though when I accessed the source attached there was no evidence of this) that "30% of physicians kill themselves in a year or so because of grief". Now, these statistics may seem quite large but in conjunction with other facts, the amount of physicians that die after assisted suicide is minuscule. The Assisted Suicide Bill [9] states that 'In practice, only a very small number of patients have an assisted death' and that 'an assisted dying law would not result in more people dying but fewer people suffering'. [10] The same bill shows that only 0.2% of patients in countries where the Assisted Suicide Bill is legal actually choose to have an assisted death. This means that 30% of physicians out of this 0.2% kill themselves. Which then comes out as 0.00666666666% (0.2 divided by 30) of 14% [11] (the approximate proportion of the world where assisted suicide/euthanasia is legal). If we divide this by the number of people in the world, we find that the number of physicians who actually commit suicide over the assisted suicide of a patient is approximately 339,000 (rounded value). This may seem like a large number but compared to other statistics it isn't. Katy Perry has 46,555,829 followers on Twitter. There are approximately 280,000 rubber duckies lost a year [12]. Approximately 1 million people die from suicide each year, which is one death every 40 seconds [13]. And with the data Con has given us, we see that the 0.00666666666% of physicians that kill themselves (though important) are an extremely minuscule amount and that it is very rare for a physician to commit suicide because of assisting someone else during their death. So to answer my opponent's question "How is this any better, when its actually causing more harm than just letting the individual him or herself do the action to themselves?" The harm it is causing to the physicians is quite substantially less than the harm to actual suicide victim and the numbers above support this, therefore it is better. Thank you. :) 1. http://thelawdictionary.org... 2. http://www.equalityhumanrights.com... 3. http://www.nhs.uk... 4. Defined as the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another - synonyms: killing, taking of life , assassination 5. http://lostallhope.com... 6. https://www.afsp.org... 7. http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu... 8. https://www.psychologytoday.com... 9. http://www.scottish.parliament.uk... 10. http://www.dignityindying.org.uk... 11. https://en.wikipedia.org... 12. http://www.mnn.com... 13. http://www.befrienders.org...