Imagine being terminally ill and in an insufferable amount of pain; would you prefer to suffer or permanently relieve the pain? Until 1999, a man by the name of Jacob “Jack” Kevorkian offered assistance to people who wished to end their own life with a physician assisted suicide also known as Euthanasia. The term Euthanasia was first used in the 17th century as a medical term to describe an easy, painless, and happy death. There are two types of Euthanasia, passive and active. Passive euthanasia is when a patient refuses their medical treatment which may hasten their passing; this is also considered legal euthanasia. Active euthanasia is the acceleration of death by the use of drugs and it can be either physician assisted or done by the patient themselves and is also considered illegal euthanasia. While active euthanasia is illegal in most of the United States as well as the world, there is controversy that it should be the terminally ill patient’s choice as to whether or not they live in pain or suffer. How can helping someone relieve pain and suffering be illegal?
The ethics of euthanasia have been a debate since the 1800’s, with debates peaking every couple of decades. Many of the debates against euthanasia fall back to the ethics and how euthanasia can be used as a solution to lower medical costs, a failure to provide care for people with disabilities, or even that the doctor themselves would be going against the very Hippocratic Oath they are sworn to. First and foremost euthanasia was first used to relieve terminally ill patients from pain and suffering only if that patient was able to provide consent to the physician for an assisted death. Dr. Kevorkian performed his first physician assisted death in 1990 on a 54 year old woman who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease which resulted in Dr. Kevorkian being charged with murder