Should Doctors Be Allowed to Help Terminally Ill Patients Commit Suicide?

YES
It would be a great comfort to people who face terminal illness to know they could
get help to die if their suffering became unbearable.
All pain cannot be controlled, and it’s arrogant for anybody to say that it can.
Quality of life decisions are the sole right of the individual.
Its nonsense to say that death shouldn’t be part of a doctor’s job—it already is.
We all die. Death is a part of medicine. One of a doctor’s jobs is to write death
certificates. So this idea of the doctor as superhealer is a load of nonsense. The
fact is that it’s not so easy to commit suicide on your own. It’s very hard for
decent citizens to get deadly drugs. Even if they do, there’s the fear that the
drugs won’t work. There are hundreds of dying people who couldn’t lift their hand
to their mouth with a cup of coffee, let alone a cup of drugs. They need
assistance.
Of course, people who are depressed or who feel they are a weight on their
families should be counseled and helped to live. But you have to separate those
instances from people who are dying, whose bodies are giving up on them. If you
think there is a cure around the corner for your malady, then please wait for it.
That is your choice. But sometimes a person realizes that her life is coming to an
end, as in the case of my wife, whose doctor said, “There is nothing else we can
do.”
We’re not talking about cases in which a depressed person will come to a
doctor and ask to be killed. Under the law the Hemlock Society is trying to get
passed, the doctor must say no to depressed people. A candidate for assisted
suicide has to be irreversibly, terminally, hopelessly ill and judged to be so by two
doctors.

Derek Humphry is the founder of the Hemlock Society and author of Final Exit, a
book advising terminally ill people on how to commit suicide.

NO

If it’s a question of someone’s wanting the right to die, I say jump off a
building. But as soon as you bring in somebody else to help you, it changes the
equation. Suicide is legally available to people in this country. Just don’t ask a
doctor to help you do it. That would violate the traditions of medicine and raise
doubts about the role of the physician.
One of my worries is that people will be manipulated by a doctor’s suggesting

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suicide. A lot of seriously ill people already feel they’re a burden because they’re
costing their families money. It would be easy for a family to insinuate, “While we
love you, Grandmother, and we’re willing to spend all our money and not send the
kids to college, wouldn’t it be better if . . . ?” There is no coercion there, but you
build on somebody’s guilt. We’d have a whole new class of people considering
suicide who hadn’t thought about it before.
Then, too, I don’t believe that you could successfully regulate this practice. The
relationship between the doctor and the patient begins in confidentiality. If they
decide together that they don’t want anybody to know. there is no way the
government can regulate it. The presumption is that physicians would only be
helping people commit suicide after everything else had failed to end their
suffering. But a lot of people won’t want to be that far along. None of the
proposed regulations takes into account a person who is not suffering now, but
who says, “I don’t want to suffer in the future. Let me commit suicide now.” I can
imagine a doctor who would say, “Yes, we’re going to make sure that you don’t
have to suffer at all.”

Daniel Callahan is a bioethicist and director of the Hastings Center, a medical

ethics think tank in Briarcliff Manor, New York.

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