A terminally ill patient in Canada once said, "If I cannot give consent to my own death, whose body is this? Who owns my life?"
    Sue Rodriguez brought the issue of assisted suicide into the spotlight in 1992.
    As it stands today, assisted suicide is illegal in Canada — as in the United States — with the exception of the state of Oregon, where it is legal only if the terminally ill is assisted by a licensed physician. The topic of whether assisted suicide should be legal has been a controversial one.
    This is a moral question many have difficulty answering. No one wants to contemplate what it could be like to be terminally ill, to have the doctor give a date of how many days are left,  or get the truth that there is not going to be any "pulling through."
    There are many reasons why patients who are terminally ill would want to end their lives. They might feel they are a burden to their loved ones, either emotionally or financially. Also, many of these patients are stuck with illnesses that are very painful and take a large toll on the bodies they infect. 
    Often the patients are reduced to shadows of their former selves and stripped of their dignity. Their bodies begin to fail, preventing the patient from performing even the simplest of tasks.
    Sue Rodriguez had Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease, an illness that affects nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord, ultimately slowing and stopping nerve activity that allows the brain to send messages to the muscles in the body to tell them to move.
    No one can say you do not have the right to make decisions about what effects your own body. In this nation we are first guaranteed rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And if no other person's rights are infringed upon, people should be allowed to do whatever they feel they should to pursue happiness. 
    These poor, terminally ill people merely want to die with dignity. With legalization allowing assisted suicide, like in Oregon, the process can be done very safely and professionally by a licensed doctor. It makes no sense that the law should be able to go so far as to tell someone that they must be kept alive, despite the fact that they have an illness that will kill them.
    These patients are prevented from experiencing death with dignity as they are pumped full of drugs to try to numb out the pain. These people are sovereign over their own bodies, and the fact that it is illegal for them to end their own lives is absurd.
    It is a very heated issue in which the religious right and the liberal left have been fighting over for many years, and it doesn't look to slow down anytime soon. 
    Sue Rodriguez eventually committed assisted suicide in 1994 with the help of an anonymous doctor.


Mark Erbacher is a junior in political science. Please send comments to opinion@spub.ksu.edu.