The assisted suicide debate is one that has been an equally split into two parties. On the one hand, you’ve got the people who agree with it, arguing that people have the right to choose to die and that it is an act of mercy to help those along who suffer from pain too much to bear. On the other are those that simply say assisted suicide is murder. Well without a doubt, assisted suicide is murder.

     Look at the victims of assisted suicide. What sort of connotations does their decision hold? Compare it to suicide—non-assisted suicide. To most, committing suicide doesn’t straddle the line of right and wrong; everyone should always choose to live rather than take their own lives: that is people’s moral responsibility. No father would ever teach their child to end their lives if life gets too tough. No brother would ever walk out of a room where their sibling is sobbing uncontrollably and holding a gun to their head. A person has the moral responsibility to help those individuals find a reason to preserve their lives, to persevere. Assisted suicide disregards that moral responsibility. Without that moral backing it is nothing more than a crime, nothing more than murder.

     Imagine the ideal scenario for those in favor of assisted suicide. A patient has been lying in a hospital bed for well over 6 months and suffering from intense chronic pain brought on by an incurable illness. Friends and family are wrought by empathy as most times they endure watching their loved one grunt with clenched fist and tense muscles, utterly in pain. Finally during the patients rare lucid periods, he/she asks one of her friends and family to gently end his/her life. Out of mercy, one of them complies and decides to use morphine to usher him/her quietly and peacefully into death. Most wouldn’t think it a bad way to go, and if many could choose a way to die many would probably say “peacefully in my sleep”. But there are things to consider here. What if the patient’s friends or family decided to use a gun instead of morphine? There’s an invisible hate that emanates from the barrel of a gun that says, “I want you dead.” Many would irrevocably disagree with the use of one and no longer consider it assisted suicide, despite the fact that a clean shot to the head with a silenced pistol would be just as quick and painless. The gun, nonetheless, would be murder, and the morphine, assisted suicide. But what’s differentiates the one instance from the other? Merely the tools that are used: morphine is more “humane” than a gun. However, murder doesn’t depend on whether a man kills another with a gunshot to the head, or morphine in the IV, or poison in the scotch, or a push off a building. If a person dies as the direct and, sometimes, indirect result of another that individual who caused that person’s death is guilty of murder.

     Ultimately, assisted suicide fits into the legal definition of murder. The act itself can be deemed as a premeditated taking of human life. It is premeditated in that the person that chooses to kill the victim has time to choose whether to kill them or not. The act is not one of passion, primarily because it is a decision that two parties agree on, and in that agreement lies the premeditation. If a man has time to think of taking the life of another and then follows through, was else could this be but murder? If circumstances weren’t defined and this was all that was said of the crime, wouldn’t this undeniably be an act of murder?

     Assisted suicide can be seen as a murky issue but the facts are clear. Lacking the moral justification, it loses what would differentiate it with murder. Whether it is a humane or inhumane tool that is used, in legal terms assisted suicide is no different than murder. It must be seen as what it is; murder is murder.