Euthanasia Argumentative Analysis

“Dying is not a crime.” Jack Kevorkian We live in a world where we constantly make life decisions and choose how we want to live. Euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide (PAS) has become a controversial topic over the past years because everyone has their own opinion of it. For centuries debates have been dating since ancient Greece and Rome. Euthanasia originates from two Greek words “eu” which means well and “thanatos” which means death. Euthanasia is defined as “a deliberate act undertaken by one person with the intention of ending life of another person to relieve that person 's suffering and where the act is the cause of death” (Gupta, Bhatnagar and Mishra, 2015). Euthanasia can fall into several catogories in which it may be voluntary,

There has been many cases involving euthanasia or PAS, but one six-minute video sparked a global conversation about death with dignity. In the spring of 2014, 29 year old Brittany Maynard learned she had terminal brain cancer. The doctors informed her that she might live up to six months. Her story was viewed more than nine million times in the first month of October on YouTube. She recognized how unfair it was that the majority of the people living in the United States do not have access to death with dignity. In order for Brittany to die with dignity, she had to move from California to Oregon since it isn’t allowed in her home state. After settling in Oregon, Brittany got in contact with Compassion & Choices which is the nation’s leading end-of-life choice advocacy organization. Her goal was to help advocate options for terminally ill Americans. Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act, was the first in the nation and legalizes PAS, but it specifically prohibits euthanasia in which a physician or other person directly administers a medication to end another 's life. Brittany made sure that the disease didn’t control how she lived her life. She finally decided to end her battle with cancer on November 1, of 2014 surrounded by her loved