mentally competent to make and informed request to die, such as a comatose.
patient (Beauchamp, 2002).
With all the progress that the medical profession has gained, people who are terminally ill have more options (such as advanced pain control, more access to proper health care, hospice facilities, etc.). Why then, are these options not enough? Through the continued efforts of many, the terminally ill in some places have already been granted the right to choose when it is time to die. In many cases, physicians have assisted them. I wondered how this could be. I have always believed that the main goal of a physician was to preserve life, not to fulfill what James F. Bresnahan, in his article "Killing vs. Letting Die," defines as "desperate measures." Mr. Bresnahan also states that these measures offer "justification in exceptional cases where every effort has first been made to care adequately for the dying person by other means. These justifications are constantly challenging and attempting to change the physician's main goal." .
The main argument for the support of euthanasia and physician assisted suicide appears to be that people should have the right to control their life and death. Many view this decision as a private choice however, when people need legal sanctioning it becomes .
a public matter---a political choice. Although, the quality of life seems to be the motivating factor that drives the euthanasia supporter, according to Dr. Herbert Hendin, Medical Director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention "physician assisted suicide should not become our solution for it" (Hendin 1998). .
The legalization of euthanasia would cause many changes. Physicians would need to be trained in more areas regarding this, such as information about medications and dosage, and about the mentality of the patient. Even though many physicians would gain the expertise in understanding a patient's motivations for wanting to die, assessing their mental status, and diagnosing their level of depression, society runs the risk of having "the care we provide for terminally ill patients become markedly worse" (Hendin 1998).