Assisted suicide: Introduction

It is widely thought that life is a free gift to humankind. The next question that often crops up is whether it is also free to end at will? The act of premeditating death or ending one’s own life on request and enlisting for either professional or non professional assistance for the exercise is what has always been referred to as assisted suicide (AS) or euthanasia. This is the controversial issue being debated among many states that are struggling to come up with laws and legislations to govern the act. Assisted suicide or euthanasia has elicited strong reactions among its supporters and opposers on a wide scale. Assisted suicide has prompted a lot of debates across the global society (Kluge, 39-43). This paper seeks to discuss the case of assisted suicide in Florida Vs Oregon.

Introduction

The World Health Organization (WHO) has attributed 35 million deaths totalling to about 60% every year to non communicable diseases such as cardiovascular diseases, chronic respiratory diseases, cancer and diabetes. Diabetes is one of those dubbed as the world's leading killer diseases today, having caused about 1.3 million deaths with global prevalence of 10% among adults aged 25 years and above in 2008 (World Health Organization, 2008). "Diabetes is a chronic, debilitating and costly disease associated with severe complications, which poses severe risks for families, Member States and the entire world and serious challenges to the achievement of internationally agreed development goals, including the Millennium Development Goals."(UN Resolution 61/225).

“With the acknowledgement that child abuse is a social problem, there have been increasing demands for information about its prevalence. However the definition of child abuse is a social construction and therefore statistical data are bound to be elusive and contradictory” --

Ryder, Duncan and Gray (1993)

Introduction

Obesity is becoming a complex problem that is leaving health scientists to lag behind in dealing with it. Although analysts agree that genetic factors may be responsible, a combination of metabolic, hormonal and behavioral factors may be contributing a lot. According to Harvard School of Public Health (2013), it has become difficult for doctors to figure out why individuals may be accumulating a lot of fats. Although nations have establishes that the rate of this condition in their country is relatively increasing, the US prevalence one has dramatically become the highest. As analysts note, the American obesity prevalence has increased dramatically over the last forty years by 50%. This has also been accompanied by related diseases such as heart, diabetes and hypertension diseases as the closest consequence of the condition. However, there have also been increases in depression, fatty liver diseases, arthritis, cancer and erectile dysfunction. All said, overweight conditions and obesity has accounted for nearly 10% of all causes of deaths as they drain American society an amount of $223 billion a year (MSN. (2013).