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Essay on Assisted Suicide
Why have physician-assisted suicide and voluntary active euthanasia taken on such vitality in recent years? Some authors stress the conjunction of powerful medical and cultural trends. The advances of modern medicine in association with its overwhelming bias to treat have engendered widespread and increasing fear. More than death itself, what seems frightening is the very real prospect of losing control over one's own dying process. (Callahan 224-25) The reaction to this exorbitant sway of medicine has been nourished since the 1970s: patients' empowerment or, more generally, the liberal individualism that has vigorously extended into the medical system.
In response, advance directives, health care proxies, and other devices founded on the right to forgo medical treatment aim to "protect" patients from physicians, medicine, and hospitals' institutional imperatives. From the perspective of this recent history, physician-assisted suicide and even voluntary active euthanasia are just one more necessary and justified step in this process. It is as if what modern medicine has expropriated from individuals could be returned to them through physician-assisted suicide: control over their own deaths.
These considerations condense two widespread current assumptions in the debate over aid in dying. The first is that these practices are, for better or for worse, paradigmatic expressions of patients' autonomy. Although proponents and opponents evaluate very differently the adequacy and the limits conferred to self-determination in this context, they both endorse this general assertion. The second assumption is that physician-assisted suicide and voluntary active euthanasia are ultimate brakes on the unrestrained use of medical technology at the end of life. They are instruments to promote the "demedicalization" of death.
These assumptions can be challenged. It can be argued that physician-assisted suicide does not demedicalize death; rather, it medicalizes suicide. By this it is meant that it transforms a private act (suicide) into a medical event. Indeed, physician-assisted suicide implies not a resistance to but an extension of medical power over life and death......
