Euthanasia as Marker Points Out,

Euthanasia

As Marker points out, the privilege of euthanasia can be abused. Unscrupulous family members, doctors and health care centers might view euthanasia as a cost-saving alternative to continued care. However, every single legal right we have as Americans can be abused and it is up to the courts to rectify those rare cases. Restricting the rights of citizens for fear of abuse creates an unnecessarily, illogically intolerant society. For the most part, legalizing physician-assisted suicide would end the enormous pain suffered by a sizable number of terminally ill patients. Moreover, such patients might not want to remain hooked up to life support systems indefinitely, their suffering on display and their family members forced to foot the bill as well as the emotional trauma.

Euthanasia is never a spur-of -- the moment decision. Were it legal, a set of strict regulations and laws would be in place to ensure that neither doctor nor patient abused the privilege. Certain conditions must be met before a doctor could even consider assisting a patient's suicide. The patient would be protected from making rash decisions based on acute pain by a thorough examination and reasonable evaluation of the prognosis. In this way, scare scenarios would be avoided.

Girsh places euthanasia in a rights-based framework, indicating that physician-assisted suicide should be a right protected by the law. Furthermore, she notes that doctors should never have to endure the humiliation of imprisonment or the scourge of losing their job and sabotaging their careers. Euthanasia is not the evil that many Americans perceive it to be. It does not entail wanton killing of innocent persons against their will and it also does not entail allowing a person to commit suicide on a whim, because they are temporarily in pain. Euthanasia is permissible in certain extreme circumstances such as when a terminal disease has reached an end stage. If laws are drafted clearly and interpreted correctly by the courts then euthanasia will not be an abused privilege like many fear, but a legitimate way to ensure quality of life for all American citizens.