The reasons so many people support physician-assisted suicide--and why these reasons are not convincing.

It would be hard to deny that there is a great deal of support in this country--and ever--growing support-for legalizing physician-assisted suicide (PAS). Why is this so? I believe there are a considerable number of reasons. In this article, I shall discuss five common reasons and explain why I do not find any of them convincing. The Compelling Force of Heartrending Individual Cases Many people, understandably, are greatly affected by the heart-wrenching facts of individual cases, e.g., a person enduring the last stages of ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), who gasps: "I want ... I want ... to die." In this regard the media, quite possibly inadvertently, advances the cause of PAS. A reporter often thinks that the way to provide in-depth coverage of the subject of assisted suicide and euthanasia is to provide a detailed account of a particular person suffering-from a particular disease and asking: "How can we deny this person the active intervention of another to bring about death?" Or "What would you want done if you were in this person's shoes?" But we should not let a compelling individual case blot out more general considerations. The issue is not simply what seems best for the individual who is the focal point of a news story, but what seems best for society as a whole. Everyone interested in the subject of PAS and active voluntary euthanasia (AYE) has heard emotional stories about people suffering great pain and begging for someone to kill them or help them bring about their death. But people like Kathleen Foley, the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center's renowned pain control expert, and Herbert Hendin, the American Suicide Foundation's executive director, can tell very moving stories, too--stories militating against the legalization of PAS and AVE. They can tell us how suicidal ideation and suicide requests commonly dissolve with adequate control of pain and other symptoms or how, for example, after much conversation with a caring physician, a suicidal patient--one who had become convinced that suicide or assisted suicide was his best option--changed his mind, how his desperation subsided, and how he used the remaining months of his life to become closer to his wife and parents.(1) I can hear the cries of protest now. "Let terminally ill people (and perhaps others as well) obtain assistance in committing suicide if that is what they want. They're not bothering anybody else. Letting them determine the time and manner of their death won't affect anybody else." But I am afraid it will. "We are not merely a collection of self-determining individuals;" "[w]e are connected to others in many different ways."(2) Therefore, PAS and AVE are social issues and matters of public policy.(3) Suppose a healthy septuagenarian, who has struggled to overcome the hardships of poverty all his life, wants to assure that his two grandchildren have a better life than he did. So he decides he will sell his heart for $500,000 and arrange to have a trust fund established for his grandchildren. This does not strike me as an irrational or senseless act. But would "society" allow this transaction to take place? I think not. But why not? How can a prohibition against selling one's body parts be reconciled with the view that we have full autonomy over our lives and our bodies? This article is being written at a time when the firmly established right to refuse or to terminate lifesaving medical treatment is being used as a launching pad for a right to PAS.(4) However, the issue of assisted suicide is ultimately resolved, it will reflect society's views about life and death, as did resolution of the debate over disconnecting the respirator and pulling the feeding tube. Many want to believe--and loose talk about the "right to die" encourages them to do so--that the termination of life support for dying or seriously ill patients, a considerable number of whom are no longer competent, is merely an exercise of individual autonomy. …