Assisted vs. 'Private' Suicide (original) (raw)
A physician's position on physician-assisted suicide
Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, 1997
On April 29, 1996, Dr. Quill offered testimony at an Oversight Hearing on "Assisted Suicide in the United States," before the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the House of Representatives Committee on the Judiciary. That testimony is reproduced here, with permission of the author.
The Legalization of Physician-Assisted Suicide
New England Journal of Medicine, 1996
Physician-assisted suicide, a suicide made possible by a physician providing a patient with the means to kill themselves, and euthanasia, the mercy killing of one individual by another, are highly controversial topics. Even countries which share a great deal of their philosophical and moral foundations, such as the United States and much of Western Europe, come to very different conclusions and create very different legislation in this area (Battin, p. 281). However, I believe that there are some basic conclusions that argue both for and against PAS and euthanasia, and when they are weighed against each other there is a much stronger case for legalizing the practices than for banning them.
The Case for Physician-Assisted Suicide: How Can It Possibly Proven?
In her paper, The case for physician assisted suicide: not (yet) proven, Bonnie Steinbock argues that the experience with Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act fails to demonstrate that the benefits of legalising physician assisted suicide outweigh its risks. Given that her verdict is based on a small number of highly controversial cases that will most likely occur under any regime of legally implemented safeguards, she renders it virtually impossible to prove the case for physician assisted suicide. In this brief paper, we suggest some ways that may enable us to weigh the risks and benefits of legalisation more fairly and, hopefully, allow us to close the case for physician assisted suicide.
New England Journal …, 1996
Background. There has been a continuing public debate about assisted suicide and the proper role, if any, of physicians in this practice. Legislative bans and various forms of legalization have been proposed.
The physician's role in physician-assisted suicide
Palliative and Supportive Care, 2012
A philosophical, existential, ethical, legal, and medical debate regarding the availability of Physician-Assisted Suicide (PAS), and the more current term, preferred by proponents, Physician Assisted Dying (PAD), has taken place over the last 2 years in the editorial pages of Palliative and Supportive Care (Breitbart, 2010a; Rich, 2011). Intelligent people of good will can disagree. On December 31, 2009, the Montana Supreme Court ruled that nothing in state law prevents patients from seeking physician-assisted suicide (PAS), thus paving the way for the procedure to take place legally in Montana, without any of the guidelines in place in states like Oregon and Washington where PAS is already legal. In my 2010 editorial (Breitbart, 2010a), on the events in Montana that made PAS permissible, I argued against PAS as an option for palliative care clinicians and physicians in general, from my 28 year perspective as a psychiatric palliative care clinician, and researcher (studying the causes of requests for PAS and interventions to ameliorate the suffering leading to requests for PAS). My argument was based on a variety of issues, including the fact that the communication of a request for PAS by a distressed patient with a terminal disease was extraordinarily complex and required an intensively sophisticated response that utilized an interdisciplinary care team, including mental health professional. I argued that the solution to suffering was the elimination of suffering not the elimination of the sufferer, perhaps by utilizing new interventions developed for despair at the end of life by researchers like Chochinov (2011) and Breitbart (2010b, 2012). I argued that the potential for abuses of legalizing PAS would adversely affect vulnerable populations in our society (e.g., the under-insured, the uninsured, the elderly, the disabled, those whose voices are under-represented in the health care system). I also ultimately
Assisted Suicide, Euthanasia, and the Law
Theological Studies, 1997
As a contribution to analyzing an increasingly prevalent social phenomenon, this Note on Moral Theology discusses recent developments related to physician-assisted suicide, euthanasia, and the law; in particular Compassion in Dying v. Washington and Quill v. Vacco, the decisions of the Ninth and Second Circuit Courts of Appeals that found a constitutional "right to die" on behalf of competent, terminally ill patients.] I s rr EVER morally right intentionally to kill innocent human beings in order to spare them the suffering that continued life would bring? If so, under what circumstances? If not, why not? Furthermore, which courses of action count as intentional killing in the context of medical decision making? When is it morally acceptable to forgo certain medical care, although it will likely prolong a patient's life? When it is permissible to seek certain treatment, despite the fact that it will probably hasten a patient's death? 1 These are the first-order moral questions raised by the closely related matters of assisted suicide and euthanasia. They are not unfamiliar to the readers of this journal. In recent years both Lisa Sowie Cahill and John Paris have discussed here bioethical issues relating to the end of life. Cahill devoted the majority of her attention to the controversial issue of whether or not artificial nutrition and hydration may be withheld or withdrawn from patients in a persistent vegetative state; she also probed contemporary discussions of whether taking active steps to end a patient's life might be justified in exceptional M. CATHLEEN KAVENY, whose area of special competence is the relationship between law and morality, is associate professor at the University of Notre Dame's Law School. She received her J.D. from Yale Law School and a Ph.D. in ethics from Yale University. She recently contributed to TS (June 1996) a study entitled "Discrimination and Affirmative Action." In addition to articles on the health-care industry and on immigration jurisprudence, she is preparing a book on constitutional law, minority religious communities, and postliberal philosophy.