Blog 3

I did deeper research this time concerning the public’s opinion on assisted suicide and looked at some polls taken on www.dyingwithdignity.org. According to this website, 82% of the public supports the choice of assisted dying for terminally ill adult patients. I was curious as to how they received their statistic and what exactly they mean when they say “general public.” The population they polled includes: the general public, people of faith, and people with disabilities. It turns out (still according to www.dyingwithdignity.org)  86% of disabled people, and 79% of religious people are in favor of changing the law to support assisted suicide. This is an interesting statistic to me, especially since they could not have polled all disabled individuals or people from every religion. However, the high percentages look respectable for their website and are probably great for gaining support from others.

In a different poll done by the Pew Research Center (http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/22/americans-of-all-ages-divided-over-doctor-assisted-suicide-laws/ )the statistics were a little different. This poll was a little more thorough and focused mainly on getting an opinion from each major age group of adults about the issue. The poll was split into four age groups but overall it showed that 49% of U.S adults oppose assisted suicide laws and 47% of U.S adults support assisted suicide laws. I found this article interesting because the statistics were not just a little bit different from the ones I found on deathwithdignity, they were immensely different. I would also like to mention; in this article they provide information about questions they asked the people they were polling. They asked people the famous question… do people have the moral right to end their life in certain situations? There was no pattern displaying that people of different ages feel contrarily about the morality of suicide.

Moving on to Jack Kevorkian, he is notorious for being the face of assisted suicide and was convicted of 2^nd degree murder for assisting in over 130 suicides of his patients. He of course, never looked at from a malicious perspective and always displayed himself to the public of a man of mercy. When it comes to Kevorkian, or as many people called him Dr. Death, people had split opinions. Many people viewed him as a true humanitarian and a man that helped his patients, not a criminal.

There is an opinion article I found on NY times (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/06/opinion/06douthat.html ) and the author clearly is not a fan of Dr. Kevorkian. There are several articles with good and bad about Dr. Kevorkian but no one else does it with as much class and finesse as this guy does and that’s why I found it fascinating.

“Even when death is inevitable and inevitably painful, it is not considered merciful to prescribe an overdose to a cancer victim against her will, or to gently smother a sleeping Alzheimer’s patient.” This in particular caught my eye, it’s powerful and his entire article is a jab towards assisted suicide in general. He believes that many of the arguments surrounding assisted suicide are arbitrary and “everyone is dying day by day do the terminally ill really occupy a completely different moral category from the rest?”