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These days, the issue of physician assisted suicide has come to the fore front, mostly because of the tremendous advances in medical technology over the past three decades. ... Because of the growing awareness of these possibilities, movements have sprung up in the United States to legalize physician-assisted death in such terminal cases. ... ”
Some wonder about the religious aspect of physician-assisted suicide. ... Henry Van Dusen and his wife, Elizabeth, both of them in pain and with no prospect of recovery, joined in a suicide pact. ... In a suicide note, Elizabeth Van Dusen wrote, "There are too many helpless old people who, without modern medicine, would have died, and we feel God would have allowed them to die when their time had come. ... The events that led to the suicides, for example, the betrayal of Jesus by Judas, are condemned, but the Bibles comments on each of the acts of suicide are neutral.
Although the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church has been emphatic in its opposition to euthanasia, spending millions to defeat such propositions at the polls, there are respected voices raised within that church in support of physician-assisted death. Dick Westley, philosopher and ethicist at Loyola University of Chicago, has published a book in which he says there is historical justification for church support of physician assisted suicide, going back to the Middle Ages.
Approximate Word count = 960
Approximate Pages = 3.8
(250 words per page double spaced)
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