Argumentative Essay_AP English Language 4

Contemporary life is marked by controversy. Choose a controversial local, national, or global issue with which you are familiar. Then, using appropriate evidence, write an essay that carefully considers the opposing positions on this controversy and proposes a solution or compromise.

Contending against one’s destiny with a single injection became reality. Some patients have practiced euthanasia to end the deathly agony of serious diseases. Loss of function due to illnesses, loss of sense of oneself and fears about the future have driven patients to commit suicide with medical assistances. However, the feasibility of euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide has been questioned and criticized due to morality and concerns for minorities.

           Doctors have a moral responsibility to keep their patients alive. The most essential ethical principle restraining the physician’s power is the dignity and power of human life itself rather than autonomy or freedom or the patient. According to the Hippocratic Oath, an oath of physicians swearing to practice medicine ethically, Hippocratic physicians reject the view that the patient’s choice for death can justify the suicide. For the physicians, human life commands respect and reverence by its very nature. As respectability for life does not depend upon human agreement, revocation of one's right to live does not deprive one's living body of respectability. Since we cannot make vitality or energy by artificial method, the action of abjuring life by artificial method must not take place. Therefore, euthanasia should not be legalized and human lives must be respected for one reason or another.

           Legalizing euthanasia will also motivate the poor and the disabled to terminate lives in order to save money. We must recognize that euthanasia will be practiced by those who are most vulnerable to abuse, error, or indifference-the poor, minorities, and those who are least educated and least empowered. According to a newspaper article I read a few years ago, a poor patient who could recover from his illness rather chose euthanasia not to burden his family for the cost of the treatments. Likewise, when euthanasia is legalized, it can be used as an extreme but quick way to escape from difficulties of our lives. Thus, the laws against euthanasia should be reinforced to prohibit abandonment of precious lives of minorities.

           Relinquishing a patient’s right to live with a shot of medical drugs should not be allowed because of doctors’ obligation to save the patients and a need to protect minorities. Hippocratic Oath and a case of a poor patient enhance the position, by supporting the moral concerns about euthanasia. One’s life should be considered as the most inviolable right.