Tingting LI (Tingting 2)
Course: Capstone Research Project
Instructor: Donna Stanton
Subject: Should assisted suicide be legalized?
Persuasive Essay
With the rapid development of medicine and technology, many diseases that could not be
cured before may have some efficient treatments nowadays. Medical technology has given
us the power to sustain the lives or to prolong the deaths. At the same time, however,
during the treatments patients usually suffer excruciating pain which can not be eliminated
or even reduced. As medicine saves more and more patients who are struggling at the edge
of death and who are also tortured by painful treatments, questions will come out: do
patients really deserve the miserable pain during their very short remainder of life and are
they really willing to suffer both physical and mental pain so as to prolong the deaths
probably just for several weeks or even couple of days. If patients can’t suffer the
miserable pain, therefore they really want to terminate their own lives but meanwhile they
are unable to do it by themselves. At this moment, assisted suicide should be
comprehensible and necessarily accepted.
In United States, according to present law of majority of states, suicide is not a crime, but
assisted suicide is. People have different attitudes towards the issue of euthanasia and
assisted suicide. Therefore, the legalization of assisted suicide has been an issue of
controversy for a long time. There is no doubt that we should respect human life, which
could be interpreted as no permission to assist others in destroying their lives. Quite the
