TOPIC: Physician Assisted-Suicide

Prompt: For this essay, you will identify an issue in your current major (Nursing) you are interested in pursuing, or your field of work. You will then establish an argument and support that argument with research and relevant evidence.

Specifically, the following critical elements must be addressed:

1. Writing Plan: Use this writing plan as a way to gather your thoughts and determine your strategy for writing your critical analysis essay. This process will allow you to develop a potential structure for effectively communicating and supporting your claim. This plan will be helpful in keeping your thought process on track when you begin writing and revising your essay.

   Describe the argument to be addressed in your persuasive essay. Explain how the argument relates to your major, the major you are considering pursuing, or your field of work.
   Determine three key points that will be helpful in supporting your argument.
   Identify the audience who will be reading your essay. What potential challenges will you encounter in supporting your argument with this demographic?
   Establish a goal that you hope to accomplish with this essay. What will this essay need to be successful?
   List potential resources that could be used as supporting evidence for your argument, and provide a brief description of each and how they will reinforce your argument.
   Align key points of your argument with supporting resources for establishing an effective essay structure.
   Based on your argument, determine at what points in the essay integrating evidence would be most effective, and explain why.
   Describe a revision strategy that would be most effective while writing this essay. Why would this strategy be effective?
   Review your writing notes assignment and the feedback provided by your instructor. How does this feedback influence your progress moving forward? What changes did you make to your writing plan after receiving this outside feedback?

Guidelines for Submission: Your writing plan must be 1–2 pages in length. Use double spacing, 12-point Times New Roman font, and one-inch margins.

Running head: PHYSICIAN-ASSISTED SUICIDE 1

PHYSICIAN-ASSISTED SUICIDE 2

Physician-Assisted Suicide Persuasion

Physician-Assisted Suicide

The major I am pursuing is my Bachelors in Nursing, and with my persuasive essay I intend to convince healthcare providers in this persuasive essay that physician-assisted suicide (PAS) must be considered illegal and it should not be practiced in any hospital that values human life. I had to tell them while observing the ethical aspects and value of a human soul alongside the biblical worldview that physician assisted suicide is killing regardless of how you stage or justify the act. Doctors, before they start practicing their profession, make the vow of helping patients and help with the progression of medication. On the off chance that a patient is critically ill, they can be made comfortable with drugs like morphine that are deliberately given through IV or orally to help reduce or stop any pain or misery the patient is experiencing.

There are several reasons that support my argument. Some of them are positive while others are negative. But, since the benefits exceed the negative ones, this practice should be dismissed. For one, we ought not, as a rule, give physicians the privilege to help kill their patients. The entire history of medication has been one of improved healing or, in terminal cases, reduced pain; killing, which debases life to the point of liquidation, is the exact inverse of good and mindful medical care (Knaplund, 2010). To legalize suicide along these lines is to weaponize the therapeutic system against the very individuals to which it ought to be generally attentive. A second reason why PAS may sound interesting is that individuals believe that others ought to be put out of their misery in the event that they are in pain. Rather than having the doctors take the easy way out and simply recommend lethal drugs to the patient, I figure physicians should search for better approaches to relieve the pain. Another issue with allowing individuals to be prescribed lethal dosages of medication is that the prognosis the physician gave them could not be right. According to Brueck & Sulmasy (2019), PAS is practiced legally in three states only in the United States. Montana, Washington, and Oregon allow doctors to perform PAS under the guidelines of the Death with Dignity Act. The act contains stringent patient eligibility measures. For example, the Oregon Death with Dignity Act (ODDA) allows doctors to give a lethal dose of the drug to diagnosed fatally sick patients. The patients understand that this medication when taken will take their life within a couple of moments of taking the medication. All together for an individual to acquire this prescription as expressed before in the Death with Dignity Act, they must have a prognosis of a half-year or less, in which a patient would be considered Hospice or on Hospice care. Who is to state that what the physician or doctors said is 100 percent sure? It isn’t, and that ought to be considered. Since we’ve looked at the issues that emerge with PAS and why it ought to be kept illegal, we should look at an alternative in contrast to PAS and how we can keep this illegal.

This essay is meant for the doctors who oppose the fact that physician-assisted suicide should not be declared illegal because they are the key victims of assisting patients in killing themselves. I had to remind them that it is just a few states that legalize mercy killing, and majority of the states are against the act and law is clear that on the off chance that a physician is found guilty of murder indictments. So in addition to the fact that PAS is a shameless act but unlawful. In this manner mercy killing ought not to be allowed because it conflicts with the ethical beliefs that human life is relevant (Elmore, Wright & Paradis, 2018). My challenge is to reaffirm to physicians the moral and ethical aspects of valuing human life even in critical conditions.

To ensure proper completion of this essay, there will be need of using various resources. One of the resources would be data from various healthcare facility cases about physician-assisted suicide. This data according to Brueck & Sulmasy (2019) will assist in giving the proper demographic of the doctors and patients who participates in this illegal act. Another important resource would be conduction of interviews among patients to enable get proper data and the feeling of those who choose mercy killing using lethal drugs by the aid of physicians. This will enable come up with a content loaded paper.

My goal in this persuasive essay is to assist individuals in separating their private wishes for what we each may would like to have access for ourselves sometime in the not so distant future — an expectation that frequently neglects to see how assisted suicide really works — and, rather, focus on the significant risks we put ourselves into when we legalize PAS as public policy in our society today. PAS would have many unintended consequences.

These resources will greatly help in coming up with a valid essay on PAS. For instance, data from various facilities will help in confirming the assertion that People on both sides of the PAS debate care about suffering people and want to prevent intolerable suffering (Byock, 2016). PAS is more rampant to terminally ill patients. This data will thus act as undisputable evidence. The interview conducted among various groups of people will give the patients, and doctors who want the act legalized an opportunity to confess themselves that they support the practice. These resources will help me from a stronger foundation for the essay.

It is of great essentiality to persuade physicians who assist patients to kill themselves when they are terminally ill that it is against human right and it devalues the dignity of a person. Certainly killing and assisted suicide will keep on being popularized and authorized. But, we should oppose this tenacious march of sanitized, commended demise. A civilized culture doesn’t murder the most fragile, most debilitated and generally powerless of its people; we are better than this, regardless of whether barely some states are definitely not.

References

Byock, I. (2016). The case against physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia. The Oxford

handbook of ethics at the end of life, 366.

Brueck, M. A., & Sulmasy, D. P. (2019). The genealogy of death: A chronology of US

organizations promoting euthanasia and assisted suicide. Palliative & supportive care, 17(5), 604-608.

Elmore, J., Wright, D. K., & Paradis, M. (2018). Nurses’ moral experiences of assisted death:

A meta-synthesis of qualitative research. Nursing Ethics, 25(8), 955-972.

Knaplund, K. S. (2010). Montana becomes third our state to allow physician aid in

dying. American Bar Association Section of Real Property, Trust, and Estate Law eReport, Forthcoming.

Feedback for 2-2 Assignment: Writing Notes

I left a lot of notes on the doc and rubric, so I won’t go deep here, but it seems to me if your argument is to take into account that this has been legal in a few states for a while now, it should really focus on what has happened in those states that is a negative consequence of the policy. I was trying to mentally align the concerns you listed with the actual policy, and I wasn’t sure I was getting a compelling reason not to practice this, but a list of concerns ABOUT its practice. Are you arguing for abolishing the practice, or more stringent guidelines and things that doctors should consider before even entertaining this as an option?

Below are the areas of the paper with feedback to be revised.

Writing Plan: Argument

· Describes the argument to be addressed through the essay, including how the argument is derived from major that is being considered or field of work

Writing Plan: Key Points

· Determines key points and rationale that will be helpful in supporting the validity of the argument.

· Mostly aligned with argument, but you mentioned one line about unintended consequences that got me thinking. This is already legal in some places. What exactly are the unintended consequences? I mean, people who want to die, die. Is that it? See note on doc.

Writing Plan: Audience

· Identifies audience and determines potential challenges

· Doctors? Or voters? I was a little confused.

Byock, I. (2016). The case against physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia. The Oxford

handbook of ethics at the end of life, 366.

The article is by Byock (2016) and it presents the case against physician-assisted suicide and euthanansia. It seems the source is arguing against allowing euthanasia and the physician assisted suicide. It presents the case that the euthanasia and suicide weakens the moral grounding as well as the structural integrity of the medical profession when it is allowed. This source is using evidence such as articles and peer reviewed sources to support the argument against euthanasia and physician assisted suicide. A counterargument for one of the provided sources could be that the euthanasia and physician assisted suicide has been used to alleviate suffering of various people who face pain in their lives. Personally, I believe the source is doing a good job of supporting its arguments because it has cited sources which are peer reviewed. At the same time, the authors have also cited each section with the source that has supported the argument. I think this source will be very helpful in supporting my argument because it has good points on why euthanasia and physician assisted suicide should not be allowed.

Brueck, M. A., & Sulmasy, D. P. (2019). The genealogy of death: A chronology of US

organizations promoting euthanasia and assisted suicide. Palliative &

supportive care, 17(5), 604-608.

The source is by Brueck (2019) and it looks at the organizations in the United States which promote assisted suicide and euthanasia. It seems the source is arguing that there are several organizations which continue to come up and exist over the years in the United States supporting euthanasia. The source is using evidence from peer reviewed sources such as journals and government registration documents. Official government websites and those of organizations are used as part of the material. A counterargument for one of the provided sources could be that these organizations have struggled to get euthanasia and assisted suicide legalized in the United States. Personally I believe the source the doing a good job in supporting its arguments because it has exhaustively looked at the genealogy of the organizations which have pushed for legalization of the two items over the years in the United States. I think this source will be very helpful in supporting my argument because it shows the organizations which have fought for the legalization but have failed over the years because of the approach and what they have stood for.

Elmore, J., Wright, D. K., & Paradis, M. (2018). Nurses’ moral experiences of assisted

death: A meta-synthesis of qualitative research. Nursing Ethics, 25(8), 955-972.

The authors of this article look at the moral experiences of nurses when it comes to assisted death. It seems this source is arguing that the experiences and perspectives of nurses are underrepresented in the ethical discourses about assisted death. The source is using six databases to support the argument: CINAHL, Medline, EMBASE, Joanna Briggs Institute, PsycINFO, and Web of Science. A counterargument for one of the provided sources could be that the views are not taken from nurses on the ground working but using databases which might not be reliable and valid. Personally, I believe the source is doing a good job of supporting its arguments because it represents the results which are 879 from these databases. The databases are credible sources on medical data. I think this source will be very helpful in supporting my argument because it represents the views of the nurses who are actually working with the patients till their last moments. The