Montoya1

Henry Montoya
Professor Miguel Noh
English 114A
October 21,2015
Arguments FOR/AGAINST Assisted Suicide

Pro Assisted Suicide

A state's categorical ban on physician assistance

"At the Hemlock Society we get calls daily

to suicide -- as applied to competent, terminally

from desperate people who are looking for

ill patients who wish to avoid unendurable pain

someone like Jack Kevorkian to end their

and hasten inevitable death -- substantially

lives which have lost all quality...

interferes with this protected liberty interest and

Americans should enjoy a right guaranteed

cannot be sustained."

in the European Declaration of Human

ACLU Amicus Brief in Vacco v. Quill.

10 Dec. 1996. Web. 19 Oct. 2015.
<http://euthanasia.procon.org/sourcefiles/Vaccov
QuillAmicus.pdf>.

Rights -- the right not to be forced to suffer.

It should be considered as much of a crime
to make someone live who with
justification does not wish to continue as it
is to take life without consent."
ProConorg Headlines. N.p., n.d. Web. 21
Oct. 2015.
<http://euthanasia.procon.org/view.source.
php?sourceID=721>.

Montoya2

Against Assisted Suicide

"The history of the law's treatment of assisted
suicide in this country has been and continues to be
one of the rejection of nearly all efforts to permit it.
That being the case, our decisions lead us to
"Activists often claim that laws against euthanasia
conclude that the asserted 'right' to assistance in
and assisted suicide are government mandated
committing suicide is not a fundamental liberty
suffering. But this claim would be similar to saying
interest protected by the Due Process Clause."
that laws against selling contaminated food are
-Washington v. Glucksberg
government mandated starvation.
June 26,1997
Laws against euthanasia and assisted suicide are in
place to prevent abuse and to protect people from
unscrupulous doctors and others. They are not, and
never have been, intended to make anyone suffer."
-International Task Force on Euthanasia and
Assisted Suicide(January 2010)