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Death and Physician-Assisted Suicide: A Gray Area

Rebekah Kamer and Sarah Yamaguchi Junior Division Group Website

Process Paper:
We chose our topic by going online and looking up the keywords rights and responsibilities. While doing so we came across the topic called Angel of Death: The Trial of a Suicide Doctor. After reading about the topic we decided it would be an interesting, out of the box topic for the National History Day theme: Rights and Responsibilities. We had never considered the prospect of choosing our own death, so learning about this decision made us curious. Previously having minimal knowledge on the option to choose your own death we figured it would be an efficient way to learn about a major news headline of the 1990s. We began our research by simply finding as much information on our topic as we possibly could so we would be more familiar with physician-assisted suicide. We went to organizations having to do with our topic and found out about their experience with euthanasia and their opinions on the matter. We also went to local college libraries such as the University of Washington and read books and articles written by a man in the central prospect of our topic, Jack Kevorkian. We chose to find sources by Kevorkian to understand his thought process. We looked into multiple sides of the debate: the supporters, the opposition, patients, physicians, and people in the legality of physician-assisted suicide. We came across several different opinions helping us formulate our claim. After that we wrapped up our research with a couple of interviews and came to a conclusion. We selected the presentation category website because we thought that we could best display our research and argument through web design. By putting our visual art skills and writing abilities together we felt like we would be applying ourselves in the best way possible. We also have previous experience with web design. Creating a web page also happens to be more conducive to partner work because you do not have to be together to work on your project. Together we decided this would be the best route to showcase our strengths. We created our presentation by gathering all of our research that proves our thesis. Then we created a skeleton outline for our website organizing in a way for people to best understand the sequence and reasoning behind or topic. Afterwards we began formulating our website starting with making pages and then enhancing the design. Then we drew it to a conclusion and created our final project. Physician assisted suicide relates to rights and responsibilities because terminally ill patients had the right to die but had to fight to gain the right to make their own choices about their death. The terminally ill patients also had the responsibility of performing the procedure themselves, thus taking the responsibility off the physician, who would have the job to provide the patient with needed tools and equipment. The biggest question asked was who is eligible to do so. That inquiry led to whom should be responsible for terminally ill patients seeking death.