People with illnesses like terminal brain cancer and ALS who have a short time to live should be able to decide when they want to die, instead of dying slowly and painfully. In hospice centers, when a person is about to die, they are deprived of food and water and forced to wait to die through hunger and dehydration. Sometimes the person lives longer than expected and has to feel the pain of hunger and thirst for a prolonged period of time. It makes me wonder how ethical it is to let someone be deprived of resources and slowly deteriorate, when they could live peacefully with antibiotics administered through euthanasia. The sad upside is that hospices would be able to admit new patients sooner and spend less money per patient. The money saved from shorter hospice stays would most likely feed into funds for the assisted suicide process, which would, in some ways, balance out. I like to call this procedure the “lesser of two evils,” because on one hand you would let someone suffer and on the other you would kill them to end their suffering. Rather, I believe that a person should stop feeling pain instead of continuing to let it happen. Although it may be difficult to determine whether the dying person is related to you, you need to think about how they are feeling. If it gets to the point where they are begging for the pain to stop or to die, it may be time to put the process in place.