Public Opinion About Life and Death - Physician-assisted Suicide

Many advocates of physician-assisted suicide believe that people who are suffering from uncontrollable pain should be allowed to end their lives with a lethal dose of medication prescribed by their physician. Dr. Marcia FIGURE 11.6
Survey of teens on thoughts of suicide, 2004 Angell, for example, former executive editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, claims that "those with cancer, AIDS, and other neurologic disorders may die by inches and in great anguish, despite every effort of their doctors and nurses." She believes that if all possible palliative efforts have failed to provide pain relief, then physician-assisted suicide should be permitted.

Public Support

In March 2002, 40 percent of respondents to an ABC News/Beliefnet poll thought that doctors should be legally permitted to help terminally ill patients commit suicide by giving them prescriptions for lethal drugs, compared with 48 percent who disapproved. When the survey specified that eligible patients "would have to be diagnosed as having less than six months to live, get a second opinion from another doctor, … ask for the drugs three times [and] there would be a 15-day waiting period before the prescription could be filled," a slightly higher percentage (46 percent) supported legalizing physician-assisted suicide. Still, 48 percent of respondents felt that even with these added safeguards, physician-assisted suicide should be illegal.

Personal Consideration

Just as the public is divided about the right of patients to physician-assisted suicide, so it is divided about suicide as a personal option. A 1997 survey by the Gallup Organization for the Nathan Cummings Foundation and Fetzer FIGURE 11.7
Survey of teens on suicide attempts, 2004 Institute asked whether respondents could imagine a situation where they might seek physician-assisted suicide; half (50 percent) could conceive of asking a doctor to help them painlessly end their lives (Roper).

A 1999 Los Angeles Times survey found only 12 percent of respondents said they had ever considered suicide, while 86 percent claimed never to have considered it. Nonetheless, Americans believe that suicide will claim more lives in the future. The majority (68 percent) of respondents to a 1999 Harris Interactive survey thought suicide would kill more people ten years in the future than it does today (Roper).

A greater proportion of teens than adults say they have considered suicide. When 1,985 young people aged 13 to 17 years were asked in a 2004 Gallup Youth survey whether they had "ever talked or thought about committing suicide," 22 percent responded that they had. Girls were more likely (28 percent) than boys (15 percent) to have had suicidal thoughts. (See Figure 11.6.) When asked if they had ever tried to commit suicide, however, only 4 percent of girls and 9 percent of boys had. (See Figure 11.7.)

Public Opinion on Physician-Assisted Suicide

In the United States, public opinion has changed only slightly with regard to physician-assisted suicide between FIGURE 11.8
Public opinion on whether doctor-assisted suicide should be legal, 2001–2004 2001 and 2004. According to Gallup Values and Beliefs polls, 65 percent of those surveyed in 2001 said "yes" when asked whether doctors should be allowed by law to end a patient's life by some painless means if the patient and his family request it and the patient has an incurable disease. That percentage rose to 72 percent in 2002, stayed steady in 2003 and declined to 69 percent in 2004. In general, over two-thirds of the American public are in favor of legalizing physician-assisted suicide under conditions of incurable disease. (See Figure 11.8.)