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No one has the right to take someone’s life, but people have the right to choose to prolong their lives or to end their sufferings. There are many people with terminal diseases that have to decide whether or not to end their lives or prolong treatments by using life support systems. Doctors should allow their patients to make this decision and if they choose to end their lives, at their own wish, and how and when should occur. I strongly agree with this statement because I would not like my family members to experience the physical suffering, and financial devastation this can cause.

The United States Supreme Court is opening doors to many such laws across the nation for ending lives of the terminally ill through lethal injection. This practice is illegal in every state, except, Oregon. Oregon has only law in the United States that allows a physician to prescribe lethal doses of medication to terminal ill patients who wish to end their lives. Other states including Hawaii and California have made movements toward similar legislations. According to a March report from Oregon’s Department of Health and Human Services, seventy-nine percent of patients who chose physician assisted suicide suffered from cancer. Meanwhile, my life, and my death is my decision. (Fox News.com)

The proponents take the views of the terminally ill patients because that people can not be force to stay alive in vegetative state. United States House of Representatives Pain Relief Promotion Bill, which made it an offense for doctors to prescribe barbiturates, is the principal supporting of this practice. For instance, proponents believe euthanasia respect a terminally ill patient’s dignity and meets ethical principles of autonomy and beneficence. While the opponents do not support people who are suffering terminal disease and they do not want those people to end their lives. Some organizations such as CURE (organization for rights of patients) and other religions are against unplugging the machines of patients with terminally illness and disease. They believe that human life is sacred because it is given by God, and a removed person from feeding tubes is against to God. (Euthanasia.com)

This practice is called euthanasia. Euthanasia is defined as the act or practice of killing or permitting the death of hopelessly sick or injured individuals as person in a relatively painless way for reasons of mercy. (Pakistan Time.com)

On March 26, 1999, Dr. Jack Kevorkian was charged with first degree homicide and delivery of a controlled substance (administrating a lethal injection to Thomas Youk) Dr. Kevorkian’s license to practice medicine had been revoked eight years previously; thus he was not legally allowed to posses the controlled substance. The judge sentence Dr. Kevorkian to serve a 10-25 years prison. He was paroled on June 1, 2007, due to good behavior. (Daily News.com)

On February 25, 1990, Terri Schiavo collapsed at her home, and her brain was deprived of oxygen for five minutes. This woman with severe brain damage was living a vegetative life 15 years ago, and her husband Michael Schiavo had been asking for 8 years to let her die by removing his wife’s feeding tube but Terri’s parents did not want to take her off the feeding tube and seeked U.S. authorities, including President George Bush and Congress. Another court decision (which court?) was in Michael Schiavo’s favor, which was based largely on his assertion that, before his wife’s heart attack, Terri told him she would not want to be kept alive on artificial life support, “She said, No tubes for me”. The local court’s decision to disconnect Schiavo from life support was carried out, on March 18, 2005 and Schiavo died of effects of dehydration at a Pinellas Park hospice on March 31, 2005, in Pinellas County, Florida..

Robert Wendland was injured in a car accident on September 29, 1993. He woke from a coma in January 1995, and had shown some limited improvement since then, although he remained profoundly disabled, unable to speak or walk on his own. Wendland required a feeding tube to deliver food and fluids needed to survive. However, his wife began the court case in 1995 when she asked for his feeding tube to be removed, asserting that Wendland “would have wanted to die in his condition. Mrs. Wendland told the Times that doctors at Lodi Memorial Hospital informed her July 2 that her husband had an infection. One of his lungs collapsed July 8, and doctors were not able to drain all the fluid from it. He was diagnosed with pneumonia, and was given antibiotics. Robert Wendland died on July 17, 2001 after 8 years on life support. The case that the California Supreme Court decided centered on the decision-making powers of guardians of incompetent patients. The State Court of Appeals ruled on February 24, 2000, that California law allowed guardians to make life-ending decisions as long as they act in good faith based on medical advice. (Lodi News.com)

Medicare is the prime insurance provider of hospice care in the United States for people age 65 and over. Presently, aside from hospice care, no other third-party reimbursement is available to support non-traditional palliative care. It is important to bear in mind that the key element of the debate of legalizing euthanasia is to reduce the cost of health care. One danger of this is that euthanasia would be seen as a “convenient” solution to the heavy demands on care made by certain types of patients. The kind of humane impulses which have sustained the development of hospice medicine and care would be undermined because too many would think euthanasia is a cheaper and less personable demanding solution. With managed care, the quality of care is paramount. But that quality of care is compromised when cutting cost is a factor. Therefore, those patients requiring quality care are overshadowed by reduction of care (Smith 1997). Voluntary euthanasia will reduce the cost of health care but at a cost of a patient’s life. If a patient makes a decision to terminate its own life an advanced directive must be prepared. (Pak-times.com)

People who have a loved ones on long-term life support let the person suffer, they want to play god, and feel guilty, if they do disconnect. For example, on September 11, 2005, Haleigh Strickland was severely beaten by her stepfather; she was in a vegetative state. A day before they were going to pull the machines, she started to breath on her own, and move her eyes. Now Haleigh is in a rehabilitation center. She can eat, walk and do every day tasks. Doctors said it was a miracle because they do not have a medical answer for her recovery.

In my opinion, people who are terminally ill and live in a vegetative state do not have much of a life. Is it not better to end suffering and pain than to spend 25 years waiting for a miracle?