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Assisting Suicide

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Assisting Suicide
PHI 200 Mind and Machine
Instructor: Jon Stern
August 22, 2011

Being in a situation to end someone’s life due to pain and suffering would make you feel responsible for their death. In Susan Wolf’s situation her father’s health was decling affecting his physical and mental state. She described her father as “a smart, savvy lawyer, the family patriarch. She could see his spark for life start to fade at the end when he could not even read, do the New York Times crossword puzzles he used to knock off in an hour, or even watch television (Wolf, 2008).” At this point she knew her father’s condition was not getting any better, that’s when he said he wanted to stop. There are doctors that are comfortable with assisting suicide like Jack Kevorkian, which were known as “Death Doctors”. “Dr. Kevorkian has been known as “Dr. Death” since at least 1956, when he conducted a study photographing patients’ eyes as they died. Results established that blood vessels in the cornea cornea contract and become invisible as the heart stops beating. In a 1958 paper, he suggested that death row inmates be euthanized, and their bodily organs harvested. In 1960, he proposed using condemned prisoners for medical experiments. In 1989, a quadaplegic, too handicapped to kill himself, publicly asked for assistance, and Dr. Kevorkian began tinkering on a suicide machine. But a different patient – Janet Adkins, a 54-year-old with Alzheimer’s – was the first to test the device. It worked. Kevorkian the provided services to at least 45 and possibly more satisfied customers. In 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Americans who want to kill themselves – but are physically unable to do so – have no constitutional right to end their lives Kevorkian was sentenced to 10-25 years in prison, but was paroled in 2007, with failing health and nearing his own

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