Louis Vernacchio

Louis Vernacchio argues in the following viewpoint that physician participation in assisted suicide violates the moral tenets of the doctor’s profession by blurring the distinction between allowing terminally ill patients to die and killing them. Physician-assisted suicide, he maintains, puts doctors in the untenable position of deciding who should live and who should die. Doctors should not engage in the practice even if it becomes legal, he concludes. Vernacchio is a physician at Children’s Hospital in Boston.

As you read, consider the following questions:

1. In Vernacchio’s opinion, how does physician-assisted suicide contradict the doctor’s duty to do no harm"
2. What are the four conditions that must be met under the principle of the double effect, according to the author"
3. In the author’s view, what...