I’m writing a very important essay on euthanasia and I need some help?

I have written about a page so far but need to do a LOT more and I am running out of ideas. I am writing a persuasion essay for euthanasia being made legal. Please help guys. It’s due for tomorrow and I put off doing it last week!

A conclusion would be really helpful…A good title? PLEASE give me some ideas on what/how to write. Thanks so much guys!

Legalizing euthanasia would not empower terminally ill patients, argues Herbert Hendin in the following viewpoint. Instead, he contends, it would give more power to doctors and lead to the killing of patients without their full consent. Hendin advocates better pain relief to help the terminally ill enjoy a good quality of life and die a good death. Hendin is medical director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and professor of psychiatry at New York Medical College. He coauthored The Case Against Assisted Suicide: For the Right to End-of-Life Care.

As you read, consider the following questions:

What did the 1990 and 1995 studies of euthanasia in the Netherlands reveal, according to Hendin?
As cited by the author, how many Dutch physicians stated that they had terminated the lives of patients without an explicit request from the patient to do so?
According to Hendin, what does the situation in Oregon reveal about palliative care when euthanasia is legal?

Does our need to care for people who are seriously or terminally ill and to reduce their suffering require us to permit physicians to end these patients’ lives?

Awareness of the inadequacies of the care we provide to those who are dying makes it not surprising that if people are asked: “Are you in favor of euthanasia?” a majority reply that they are. Further questioning reveals, however, that they mean little more than that they would rather die painlessly than die painfully. When people are asked: “If terminally ill, would you rather be given treatment to make you comfortable or have your life ended by a physician?” their responses are quite different.

What most people do not know is that such relief is now possible. Having experienced the painful death of a family member or friend, many assume it is not. When a knowledgeable physician addresses the desperation and suffering that underlie the request for assisted suicide and assures the patient that he or she will continue to do so until the end, most patients change their minds, no longer want to hasten death, and are grateful for the time remaining to them. But at this time only a minority of patients receive such care.

Better Care Is Needed for the Terminally Ill

In varying degrees compassion for suffering patients and respect for patient autonomy serve as the basis for the strongest arguments in favor of legalization. Compassion, however, is no guarantee against doing harm. A physician who does not know how to relieve a patient’s suffering may compassionately (but inappropriately) agree to end that patient’s life. Patient autonomy is an illusion when physicians do not know how to assess and treat patient suffering, and the choice for patients becomes continued agony or a hastened death. Only recently have we recognized the need to train general physicians in how to relieve the suffering of terminally ill patients. It is not surprising that studies show that the more physicians know about palliative care, the less they favor assisted suicide or euthanasia; the less they know, the more they favor it.

Opposition to legalization in the United States is strongest among physicians who know the most about caring for terminally ill patients, i.e., palliative care specialists, gerontologists, psychiatrists who treat patients who become suicidal in response to medical illness, hospice physicians, and oncologists. They know that patients requesting a physician’s assistance in suicide are usually telling us as strongly as they know how that they are desperate in their need for relief from their suffering, and that without such relief they would rather die. They are making an anguished cry for help and a very ambivalent request to die. When treated by a physician who can hear their ambivalence, understand their desperation, and relieve their suffering, the wish to die usually disappears. For the small number with intractable symptoms, sedation at the end of life can at least insure a painless death.

Euthanasia Empowers Doctors, Not Patients

What happens to autonomy and compassion when assisted suicide and euthanasia are legally practiced? With 20 years’ experience, the Netherlands, the only country in which assisted suicide and euthanasia have had legal sanction, provides the best laboratory to help us evaluate what they mean in actuality. I was one of three foreign observers to have had the opportunity to study the situation in the Netherlands extensively and to discuss specific cases with leading Dutch practitioners as well as interview Dutch government-sponsored euthanasia researchers about their work. All three of us independently concluded that the guidelines established by the Dutch for the practice of assisted suicide and euthanasia—a competent patient who has unrelievable suffering makes a voluntary request to a physician, who before going forward must consult with another physician and afterwards must report the case to the authorities—were consiste

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