As of now, there are seven states that allow for medically-assisted suicide; well those seven states and Washington D.C.
Those states are California, Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Vermont, and the newest state to pass legislation, Hawaii; if you noticed I missed one, it is Montana, but you need a court order in Montana.
Now euthanasia has been a topic of debate for nearly centuries now; I know my parents remember when Dr. Kevorkian, Dr. Death himself, was still on the news.
There are a lot of moral issues when it comes to suicide in general, and there is no real way to remove the stigma around it. So for those that promote medically-assisted suicide, I assume you have already confronted yourself with those hard hitting questions: Is it still considered murder? Will society ever be able to accept something so controversial?
A hard one to ask because it’s not usually a question anyone would ask is: Who is eligible to die and who isn’t? According to these states, you must be a resident of the state, over 18 years of age, and you must have been diagnosed with a terminally ill disease that is professionally considered to cause death in the next six months. In order to prove this you need an oral confirmation from two doctors at least 15 days apart and one written confirmation by a third doctor.
Hawaii recently made the decision to allow for euthanasia clinics in the state; the law itself will take effect on January 1, 2019. Often the people that request these sort of procedures are those that are slated to pass in the following months, yet there have been out of country examples that don’t exactly fit that scenario.
One Belgium case had an acid attack victim request to go through the process. After an attack from his former partner, he was left badly injured, his doctors stating that “he was on the threshold of tolerable pain.” In cases like these, when it comes to intolerable pain, I find myself frozen in uncertainty; unable to choose whether or not that such a thing is morally right.
Regardless of that, I am usually one to believe that only we can really face ourselves, and only we can come up with the solution. To seek a way out, I would hope that someone would reach out for help long before making the ultimate decision to end their lives. However, in cases like these, when we talk about suffering, agony, and hopelessness, I can’t help but think of something akin to mercy.