Over the past twenty years major controversy has spawned over the issue of euthanasia: a person's right to die. The American courts have been burdened with determining whether or not the Constitution gives the American people the right to allow others to take their lives, and have failed to come up with a definitive answer.

There are several aspects to suicide and the law, but we are only going to discuss a few of them. First of all we will examine why anyone would want to take their own life and decipher the differences between a rational suicide and an irrational suicide. Secondly we will look at ways assistance has played in the area of suicide. Next, we'll look at what the constitution says and see if any of the states have allowed suicide. Finally, we'll study some of the cases that have been brought before the American courts.

Suicide has become a big part of American society; year after year more people are taking their own lives for many different reasons. A lot of philosophers have broken down all the reasons of suicides in

The law has been determined by the states and the states alone, the Supreme Court has not interfered yet. The states have done one of three things says Francis, "First, twenty-five states, including nine with recent penal code revisions, contain no separate statutory treatment of assisting suicide. Only a few of these have passed on the question of whether assisting suicide falls within their criminal homicide statutes. Of those states that have, most, like Michigan, have argued that assisting suicide is murder. A second approach is to make assisting suicide a form of manslaughter... The third approach is to treat assisting suicide as a separate statutory offense altogether." This approach has led to what is called the Model Penal Code-

As of now you have the right to commit suicide anytime you want. Yet depending on what state you live in you could be punished by the law for assisting in a suicide. Only time can tell what will become of suicide and the law. Today there are still cases in the court battling to try and legalize assisted suicide. Suicide is not the way out of everything. However, I understand in some cases that it might be the best thing, like saving a loved one from excruciating pain yet nothing can be so bad that it deserves taking your own life.

What Sullivan is saying is that the Constitution has given us the right to have self-determination over matters in our life. The first amendment alone gives us the freedom to determine what religion we want to believe in, and the right to say what we want when we want to say it. The fourteenth amendment gives us the right to determine what we want for ourselves. Sullivan says, "That assisted suicide is a 'fundamental right' and those are explicitly guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. The Supreme Court has recognized another class of fundamental right whose source lies outside specific guarantees of the Constitution, such as the rights to marital and sexual privacy, the right of a woman to exercise control over her body, the right to travel freely from one place to another, and the right to learn certain subjects in school." Sullivan feels the right to take your own life falls into this category of fundamental rights. Yet he does put a stipulation on the right to euthanasia and that is what he said about showing signs of competency. He just wants to make sure that the person who is about to ask someone to take his life is of sound mind and will not do unnecessary harm to himself or anyone else that is around him.

Assisted suicide is where a patient that is terminally ill comes to a physician or even a friend or family member at times and asks them to help end their life. There are several different ways to assist someone in suicide, you can inject them with a lethal amount of drugs, you can turn off their machines that is helping keep them alive, there have even been cases where the friend has put a bullet in the person's body.

Christ will be honored in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. If it is to be life in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better. But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account.

So if terminally ill patients are the only ones who have a good rational reason to commit suicide, then where does that leave everyone else? Wel

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Approximate Word count = 2322
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)