On June 26th 1997 the cases of Vacco v. Glucksberg were decided as the prohibition against assisting suicide was not unconstitutional. They also went on to explain that it is each individual states job to decide what policy it would care to have regarding this issue. They felt that America needed to go on and be a democratic society as it always had been. This is not to say that rules prohibiting are unconstitutional nor are those that allow such actions. Many lawyers and bill makers have already set up on the field to start with legislation for and against such bills. There are many in the medical field that are trying to get their points out on the topic.
The emphasis is on the idea of doctors playing an active role in the death of their patients. Much of this comes from the idea that withholding treatment is allowing a disease to run it's course and not interfere with it coming to it's final end of death. Whereas with physician assisted suicide the physician is taking an active roll in giving a patient a lethal drug to quicken the process so that the end result of death may be quicker.
An argument against this is that a doctor is playing an active roll in the death of a patient when he takes the patient off of life support. Where it becomes unclear is that when a person is on life support is that person dieing of the underlying disease or is it something other then that that is killing the persons. For example if a women is taken off of feeding tubes the disease does not kill her but rather she starves. Another part of this argument is that the doctor is participating in an act that he knows will lead to the patient's death whether or not it is by withholding treatment or by giving them a lethal pill. .
It is also a very used practice to give terminally ill patients medication that will ease pain while hastening death it seems that you are assisting in suicide of that patient and some people would say you are killing them.