Right to Die

This house believes that active physician assisted suicide should remain illegal in the state of Texas because a legalization of the procedure would lead to an increase in the number of physician assisted suicides as a result of patients that are terminally ill or in excruciating pain feeling as though they were a burden to society.

Many argue that patients that are terminally ill or in an excruciating amount of pain should be given the chance to partake in physician assisted suicide. Studies have shown that there are measures of treating anywhere between 90 and 99 percent of all patients experiencing uncontrollable pain. Doctor Kathleen Foley, the Chief of Pain Services at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City is quoted as saying “We frequently see patients referred to our Pain Clinic who request physician-assisted suicide because of uncontrolled pain.  We commonly see such ideation and requests dissolve with adequate control of pain and other symptoms, using combinations of pharmacologic, neurosurgical, anesthetic, or psychological approaches.” The biggest challenge to this theory is the idea that many patients and doctors are not fully educated on the availability of technological advances in pain medications. Patients often will fail to report experiencing pain for fear of being over prescribed powerful pain medications. On the other hand, many Doctors fear that an overdose of such medications will lead to a patient’s addiction to such drugs. Instead of trying to legalize physician assisted suicide, efforts should be focused towards educating doctors and patients on the reliability and availability of powerful pain medications.

The American Journal of Psychiatry published an article in 1986 concerning a study that confirmed that terminally ill patients seek suicide as a result of serious depression rather than the illness itself. Another study in 1990 confirmed this discovery with the stifling statistic that 90 percent of those...