Euthanasia: Legal Considerations Euthanasia, Doctor-Assisted

Euthanasia: Legal Considerations

Euthanasia, doctor-assisted suicide, and mercy killing of any type is prohibited by law in the United States. In June of 2007, 79-year-old retired pathologist and patient rights activist Jack Kevorkian was released from federal prison, after serving eight years for his second-degree murder conviction (Martindale, 2007).

Prior assisting in the 1998 suicide of Tomas Youk, then in the final stages of Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis ("Lou Gehrig's Disease"), Kevorkian had always been very careful to avoid crossing the line between merely advising his patients and documenting their suicides and actually assisting them or implementing their requests by his own hand.

In 1998, Kevorkian deliberately and purposely crossed that line to force his own prosecution and thereby bring national attention to the need for legal reforms pertaining to doctor-assisted suicide.

The Ethics of Physician-Assisted Suicide and the Role of Law:

In Kevorkian's view, euthanasia is sometimes warranted by the ethical desire to end the suffering of patients with fatal illnesses who wish to end their lives instead of enduring unnecessary pain before inevitably succumbing to their ailments. Many contemporary medical ethicists agree with Kevorkian, reasoning that the Hippocratic

Oath to which physician licensed in the United States swear before beginning their medical practice, was conceived long before modern medical science, at a time when life expectancy, and specifically, continued survival after the onset of debilitating disease were virtually inconceivable (Humphry, 2002). Kevorkian and other who share his position believe that the physician's primary role is to prevent suffering, and that this aspect of medical ethics is even more important than the prolongation of life, merely for life's sake (Abrams & Bruckner, 1983).

Proponents of legalizing physician-assisted suicide acknowledge the essential role of legislation to establish guidelines, definitions, criteria, and appropriate regulation. In that sense, physician-assisted suicide is no different from other aspects of medical ethics and law. Ironically, before Dr., Kevorkian deliberately forced the hand of prosecutors by crossing the line between advice and action, all his prior involvement in assisting terminally ill patients to end their lives precisely demonstrated many of the very ethical principles that would be crucial to the application of laws to the physician's role in the choice to end one's life (Humphry, 2002).

Kevorkian restricted his efforts in that regard to patients who were already suffering from terminal illness; he eliminated clinical depression or other medical or psychological conditions known to cause suicidal desires; he interviewed patients extensively along with their families, he reviewed their medical histories carefully to confirm diagnoses; and he very specifically documented his patients' expressed desires in writing as well as on videotape in the presence of witnesses (Humphry, 2002).