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I believe they do. If someone is in agony and there's no cure, I don't see why you should let the person suffer. It's practically torture.
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A right to end their own life? Sure.
A right to allow another person to do it, essentially creating loopholes for government approved mercy killings? No.
In my not so humble PERSONAL opinion . . . Suicide is the cowards way out.
Wether we like it or not, death just happens to be a part of life, albeit the final part. How we exit this life should be with dignity and grace. Suicide is neither dignified nor graceful. I have seen way too many suicides in my career and the result is always a disaster left for those left to clean up. Having a loved one pass away is one of the most painful things a person can go through, and the pain is compounded a thousand fold when that loved one takes their own life – be it assisted or not.
I know all of you who support assisted suicide for the terminally ill think I am being very cruel hearted in my belief that the terminally ill should not be so selfish in relieving themselves of the pain and discomfort of a long and slow demise. However, should I ever be struck by such an end to this long and rewarding life of mine, I shall only have my loved ones comfort in mind and shall choose to exit in a dignified way. Most of those in my immediate family are very religious and in their religion suicide – assisted or not – is a sin that would send one to an eternal life in Hell, and I shall not leave them with that thought of where I might end up for all eternity (even though I am not personally that religious of a man). Those that are terminally ill need to take great consideration for those who will be left in the living world. After all, when the end happens, all the pain and discomfort vanishes – regardless of your personal beliefs. I would rather suffer for a short while in order to give those who are my loved ones peace and comfort for the rest of their lives. Not trying to be noble here, (I am far from that sort of thing) just being a little practical.
While I agree with you about assisted suicide (I don't believe in such a thing, and I'll refer to it as mercy killing in the rest of this post), it seems like you are extending that to suicide. I'm not sure we can effectively ban suicide. I mean if people want to kill themselves then we're pretty powerless to stop them without locking them up under surveillance and force feeding them. I agree that I'm no fan of suicide (lost a good friend that way) but I don't see a viable way to stop them, and a law you can't possibly enforce is by definition a bad law.
Though I'm totally with you on mercy killings. I don't trust courts or legislators or bureaucrats to approve any situation where another person has the right to kill me. If I ever did want to die (maybe if I came down with alzheimer's and knew that I was going to slowly forget everything and everyone that ever mattered to me while becoming a continuously greater burden to my loved ones) I'd have the guts to do it myself rather than putting that kind of thing on somebody else to do.
There's a big difference between suicide and the death of the terminally ill. The terminally ill may also include people on life supporting measures such as feeding tubes or breathing machines, or may be rendered completely dysfunctional by heavy doses of pain medications.
Largely decisions relating to end of life care should be made carefully, and if at all possible, ahead of time consulted with your family and doctors so that they can be made with dignity. They do not have to include active measures that will kill a patient so much as passively accepting one's fate and meeting it comfortably rather than expending every measure possible to extend one's life. It would seem to imply that the latter method of "hero medicine" should be used whenever possible if the terminally ill are not to have the choice to control this (supposedly) momentous decision for themselves. I find this a very poor allocation of time, energy, and resources and, moreover, it overrides many individual wants and decisions at the behest of a few moral quibbles of others, others often unrelated to the decisions and the circumstances they involved as they are being made (see: Schiavo, Terry).