Euthanasia(from the Greek εὐθανασία meaning "good death": εὖ, eu (well or

good) + θάνατος, thanatos (death)) refers to the practice of ending a life in a manner which relieves pain and suffering. According to

the House of Lords Select Committee on Medical Ethics, the precise definition of euthanasia is "a deliberate intervention

undertaken with the express intention of ending a life, to relieve intractable suffering."

Euthanasia is categorized in different ways, which include voluntary, non-voluntary, or involuntary and active or passive. Euthanasia is usually used to refer to active euthanasia, and in

this sense, euthanasia is usually considered to be criminal homicide, but voluntary, passive euthanasia is widely non-

criminal.

The controversy surrounding euthanasia centers around a two-pronged argument by opponents which characterizes euthanasia as either voluntary "suicides", or as involuntary murders. (Hence,

opponents argue that a broad policy of "euthanasia" is tantamount to eugenics). Much hinges on whether a particular death was considered an "easy", "painless", or "happy" one, or

whether it was a "wrongful death". Proponents typically consider a death that increased suffering to be "wrongful", while

opponents typically consider any deliberate death as "wrongful". "Euthanasia's" original meaning introduced the idea of a "rightful

death" beyond that only found in natural deaths.

Euthanasia is the most active area of research in contemporary bioethics.

EtymologyLike other terms borrowed from history, the "euthanasia" has had different

meanings depending on usage. The first apparent usage of the term "euthanasia" belongs to the historian Suetonius who described how the

Emperor Augustus, "dying quickly and without suffering in the arms of his

wife, Livia, experienced the 'euthanasia' he had wished for." The word "euthanasia" was first used in a medical context by Francis Bacon in the 17th

century, to refer to an easy, painless, happy death, during which it was a "physician's responsibility to alleviate the 'physical sufferings' of the body." Bacon referred to an "outward euthanasia"—the term "outward" he used to

distinguish from a spiritual concept—the euthanasia "which regards the preparation of the soul."

Classification of euthanasiaEuthanasia may be classified according to whether a person gives informed consent into three types: voluntary, non-voluntary and

involuntary.

There is a debate within the medical and bioethics literature about whether or not the non-voluntary (and by extension,

involuntary) killing of patients can be regarded as euthanasia, irrespective of intent or the patient's circumstances. In the definitions offered by Beauchamp & Davidson and, later, by

Wreen, consent on the part of the patient was not considered to be one of their criteria. However, others see consent as essential. For example, in a discussion of euthanasia presented in 2003 by the European Association of Palliative Care (EPAC) Ethics Task

Force, the authors offered the unambiguous statement:

Medicalized killing of a person without the person's consent, whether nonvoluntary (where the person in unable to consent) or

involuntary (against the person's will) is not euthanasia: it is murder. Hence, euthanasia can be voluntary only.

Voluntary euthanasiaMain article: Voluntary euthanasia

Euthanasia conducted with the consent of the patient is termed voluntary euthanasia. Active voluntary euthanasia is legal in

Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. Passive voluntary euthanasia is legal throughout the U.S. per Cruzan v. Director,

Missouri Department of Health. When the patient brings about his or her own death with the assistance of a physician, the term

assisted suicide is often used instead. Assisted suicide is legal in Switzerland and the U.S. states of Oregon, Washington and

Montana.

Non-voluntary euthanasiaMain article: Non-voluntary euthanasia

Euthanasia conducted where the consent of the patient is unavailable is termed non-voluntary euthanasia. Examples

include child euthanasia, which is illegal worldwide but decriminalised under certain specific circumstances in the

Netherlands under the Groningen Protocol.

Involuntary euthanasiaMain article: Involuntary euthanasia

Euthanasia conducted against the will of the patient is termed involuntary euthanasia.

Procedural decisionVoluntary, non-voluntary and involuntary euthanasia can all be

further divided into passive or active variants. A number of authors consider these terms to be misleading and unhelpful.

Passive euthanasiaPassive euthanasia entails the withholding of common

treatments, such as antibiotics, necessary for the continuance of life.

Active euthanasiaActive euthanasia entails the use of lethal substances or forces to

kill and is the most controversial means.

Legal status

Map of the legality of euthanasiaMain article: Legality of euthanasia

West's Encyclopedia of American Law states that "a 'mercy killing' or euthanasia is generally considered to be a criminal homicide" and is normally used as a synonym of homicide committed at a

request made by the patient.

The judicial sense of the term "homicide" includes any intervention undertaken with the express intention of ending a

life, even to relieve intractable suffering. Not all homicide is unlawful. Two designations of homicide that carry no criminal punishment are justifiable and excusable homicide. In most

countries this is not the status of euthanasia. The term "euthanasia" is usually confined to the active variety; the University of Washington website states that "euthanasia generally means that the physician would act directly, for

instance by giving a lethal injection, to end the patient's life". Physician-assisted suicide is thus not classified as euthanasia by the US State of Oregon, where it is legal under the Oregon Death with Dignity Act, and despite its name, it is not legally classified

as suicide either. Unlike physician-assisted suicide, withholding or withdrawing life-sustaining treatments with patient consent (voluntary) is almost unanimously considered, at least in the

United States, to be legal. The use of pain medication in order to relieve suffering, even if it hastens death, has been held as legal

in several court decisions.

Some governments around the world have legalized voluntary euthanasia but generally it remains as a criminal homicide. In the Netherlands and Belgium, where euthanasia has been legalized, it

still remains homicide although it is not prosecuted and not punishable if the perpetrator (the doctor) meets certain legal

exceptions.

Physician sentimentA survey in the United States of more than 10,000 physicians

came to the result that approximately 16% of physicians would ever consider halting life-sustaining therapy because the family

demands it, even if believed that it was premature. Approximately 55% would not, and for the remaining 29%, it would depend on

circumstances.This study also stated that approx. 46% of physicians agree that physician-assisted suicide should be

allowed in some cases; 41% do not, and the remaining 14% think it depends.

Should euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide be legal?

Proponents of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide (PAS) contend that terminally ill people should have the right to end

their suffering with a quick, dignified, and compassionate death. They argue that the right to die is protected by the same constitutional safeguards that guarantee such rights as

marriage, procreation, and the refusal or termination of life-saving medical treatment.

Opponents of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide contend that doctors have a moral responsibility to keep their patients

alive as reflected by the Hippocratic Oath. They argue there may

be a "slippery slope" from euthanasia to murder, and that legalizing euthanasia will unfairly target the poor and disabled

and create incentives for insurance companies to terminate lives in order to save money.

“DEATH”

"death (death) (deth) the cessation of life; permanent cessation of all vital bodily functions. For legal and medical purposes, the following definition of death has been proposed-the irreversible

cessation of all of the following: (1) total cerebral function, usually assessed by EEG as flat-line (2) spontaneous function of the

respiratory system, and (3) spontaneous function of the circulatory system...

brain d[eath]. irreversible brain damage as manifested by absolute unresponsiveness to all stimuli, absence of all

spontaneous muscle activity, including respiration, shivering, etc., and an isoelectric electroencephalogram for 30 minutes, all in the absence of hypothermia or intoxication by central nervous system depressants. Called also irreversible coma and cerebral d[eath]."

1. Introduction

The twin issues of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide have sparked intense debate over the years, from Jack Kevorkian, to the Terry Schiavo battle, and to the recent Supreme Court ruling on Oregon's Death With Dignity Act.

Proponents of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide believe that it is the compassionate choice. They feel that terminally ill people should have the right to end their pain and suffering with a quick, dignified death.

Opponents of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide worry about a "slippery slope" from euthanasia to murder. They value life at all stages and fear that legalizing euthanasia will unfairly target the poor and disabled.

Doctors, lawyers, philosophers, and religious leaders have been debating the euthanasia issue for over two millennia. The topics below are arranged to give readers an overview of the modern debate.

2. Definitions and Language

What is euthanasia?

"Euthanasia is the deliberate killing of a person for the benefit of that person.

In most cases euthanasia is carried out because the person who dies asks for it, but there are cases called euthanasia where a person can't make such a request.

A person who undergoes euthanasia is usually terminally ill, but there are other situations in which some people want euthanasia...

Euthanasia has many definitions. The Pro-Life Alliance defines it as: 'Any action or omission intended to end the life of a patient on the grounds that his or her life is not worth living.' The Voluntary Euthanasia Society looks to the word's Greek origins - 'eu' and 'thanatos', which together mean 'a good death' - and say a modern definition is: 'A good death brought about by a doctor providing drugs or an injection to bring a peaceful end to the dying process.' Three classes of euthanasia can be identified - passive euthanasia, physician-assisted suicide and active euthanasia - although not all groups would acknowledge them as valid terms."

-- BBC "Euthanasia Special Report," www.bbc.co.uk

July 1, 1999

Is there a moral difference between active euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide?

PRO: "As a matter of common sense, killing yourself is a lot harder than having someone do it for you. Assuming this bit of common sense is correct, there is reason to suppose that people, on average, are less susceptible to being pressured into killing themselves than they are into letting someone kill them...

A second consequence of the common sense point concerns the acts of suicide and submission to euthanasia that would in fact occur as a result of legalization. One natural way to understand the thought that killing yourself is harder than having someone do it for you is that killing yourself requires firmer resolve. The element of

CON: "In the recent bioethics literature some have endorsed physician-assisted suicide but not euthanasia. Are they sufficiently different that the moral arguments for one often do not apply to the other? A paradigm case of physician-assisted suicide is a patient's ending his or her life with a lethal dose of a medication requested of and provided by a physician for that purpose. A paradigm case of voluntary active euthanasia is a physician's administering the lethal dose, often because the patient is unable to do so. The only difference that need exist between the two is the person who actually administers the lethal dose - the physician or the patient. In each, the physician plays an active and

passivity involved in your letting another perform the unpleasant task of putting you out of your misery means that your will is not as active as it would be if you performed the task yourself, and thus weakness or irresolution in the will is less likely to cause failure, less likely to cause an interruption in the lethal action.

Conversely, then, a completed act of suicide warrants more confidence in its having issued from a will that was strong or resolute than does a completed act of submission to euthanasia. Accordingly, though any act by which a person deliberately hastens his or her death raises concerns about its voluntariness, there is less reason to worry, other things being equal, about the voluntariness of suicide than about the voluntariness of submitting to euthanasia..."

-- John Deigh, PhD Professor of Philosophy and Law,

University of Texas at Austin"Physician-Assisted Suicide and

Voluntary Euthanasia: Some Relevant Differences"

Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology

2002

necessary causal role.

In physician-assisted suicide the patient acts last ... whereas in euthanasia the physician acts last by performing the physical equivalent of pushing the button. In both cases, however, the choice rests fully with the patient. In both the patient acts last in the sense of retaining the right to change his or her mind until the point at which the lethal process becomes irreversible.

How could there be a substantial moral difference between the two based only on this small difference in the part played by the physician in the causal process resulting in death?"

-- Dan Brock, PhD Frances Glessner Lee Professor of Medical Ethics and Director of the

Division of Medical Ethics, Harvard Medical School

"Voluntary Active Euthanasia"The Hastings Center Report

1992

3. Moral Questions

  Would legalizing voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide create a slippery slope to involuntary euthanasia?

PRO: "In debates with those bioethicists and physicians who believe that euthanasia is both deeply compassionate and also a logical way to cut health care costs, I am invariably

CON: "This [slippery slope] argument is singularly implausible if one who makes it means that there is a logical connection between the killings in question such that one who endorses

scorned when I mention 'the slippery slope.' When the states legalize the deliberate ending of certain lives -- I try to tell them -- it will eventually broaden the categories of those who can be put to death with impunity.

I am told that this is nonsense in our age of highly advanced medical ethics. And American advocates of euthanasia often point to the Netherlands as a model -- a place where euthanasia is quasi-legal for patients who request it...

Yet the Sep. 1991 official government Remmelink Report on euthanasia in the Netherlands revealed that at least 1,040 people die every year from involuntary euthanasia. Their physicians were so consumed with compassion that they decided not to disturb the patients by asking their opinion on the matter."

-- Nat Hentoff Columnist, The Village Voice

"The Slippery Slope of Euthanasia"Washington Post

Oct. 3, 1992

the first cannot without inconsistency refuse to endorse the last. The fact that in one case a person is killed in his own interest because he requests it, whereas in the other a person is killed in the interest of others without (or contrary to) his consent, is surely a morally relevant difference. Since this is so, the question 'How can we draw the line?' should not perplex one for long. No one thinks that making killing in self-defense an exception to criminal homicide starts one on a slippery slope which logically must end in the abolition of the crime of murder; no one should think the same about legalizing voluntary euthanasia...

In the Netherlands we have a living laboratory in which the euthanasia experiment in being conducted, and it is claimed that active non-voluntary and involuntary euthanasia are openly practiced there, exactly as predicted by the slippery slope argument. But the claim of the open and common practice of involuntary euthanasia has been often repeated but has never been substantiated, and indeed has been repeatedly challenged."

-- Derek Humphry Founder and Former Executive

Director, Hemlock Society"The Case for Assisted Suicide and

Active Voluntary Euthanasia"www.near-death.com

Dec. 13, 2006

  Is the debate over euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide primarily religious in nature?

PRO: "The primary opposition to the idea that terminally ill, mentally competent people should be able to

CON: "Many proponents of legalization maintain that opposition to legalization is fundamentally religious in nature and

choose to hasten death with medical assistance often comes from religious sources, primarily the Catholic hierarchy and, more recently, the right-to-life movement."

-- Compassion and Choices "Frequently Asked Questions,"

www.compassionandchoices.orgMay 11, 2007

that secular objections are only a cloak for underlying moral convictions concerning the sanctity of life...

It is worth noting that such nonreligious organizations as the American Medical Association, the American Geriatrics Society, the American Hospital Association, and the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization are strongly opposed to legalization for reasons that are obviously medical and social."

-- Kathleen Foley, MD  and Herbert Hendin, MD

IntroductionThe Case Against Assisted Suicide: For

the Right to End-of-Life Care2002

4. Law and Public Policy

  Is there a legal right to die?

PRO: "While some people refer to the liberty interest implicated in right-to-die cases as a liberty interest in committing suicide, we do not describe it that way. We use the broader and more accurate terms, 'the right to die,' 'determining the time and manner of one's death,' and 'hastening one's death' for an important reason. The liberty interest we examine encompasses a whole range of acts that are generally not considered to constitute 'suicide.' Included within the liberty interest we examine, is for example, the act of refusing or terminating unwanted medical treatment...

Casey and Cruzan provide persuasive evidence that the Constitution encompasses a due process liberty

CON: "This Court has...recognized, at least implicitly, the distinction between letting a patient die and making that patient die.

In Cruzan v. Director, Mo. Dept. of Health (1990), we concluded that '[t]he principle that a competent person has a constitutionally protected liberty interest in refusing unwanted medical treatment may be inferred from our prior decisions,' and we assumed the existence of such a right for purposes of that case. But our assumption of a right to refuse treatment was grounded not, as the Court of Appeals supposed, on the proposition that patients have a general and abstract 'right to hasten death,' but on well established, traditional rights to bodily integrity and

interest in controlling the time and manner of one's death -- that there is, in short, a constitutionally recognized 'right to die.'"

-- Compassion in Dying v. Washington (280 KB) 

United States 9th Circuit Court of Appeals

Mar. 6, 1996

freedom from unwanted touching. In fact, we observed that 'the majority of States in this country have laws imposing criminal penalties on one who assists another to commit suicide."

-- Vacco v. Quill (40 KB) United States Supreme Court

1997

 

 

 

 

 

  Should the government be involved in patients' end-of-life decision-making?

PRO: "Cases like Schiavo's touch on basic constitutional rights, such as the right to live and the right to due process, and consequently there could very well be a legitimate role for the federal government to play. There's a precedent -- as a result of the highly publicized deaths of infants with disabilities in the 1980s, the federal government enacted 'Baby Doe Legislation,' which would withhold federal funds from hospitals that withhold lifesaving treatment from newborns based on the expectation of disability. The medical community has to have restrictions on what it may do to people with disabilities -- we've already seen what some members of that community are willing to do when no restrictions are in place."

CON: "We'll all die. But in an age of increased longevity and medical advances, death can be suspended, sometimes indefinitely, and no longer slips in according to its own immutable timetable.

So, for both patients and their loved ones, real decisions are demanded: When do we stop doing all that we can do? When do we withhold which therapies and allow nature to take its course? When are we, through our own indecision and fears of mortality, allowing wondrous medical methods to perversely prolong the dying rather than the living?

These intensely personal and socially expensive decisions should not be left to governments, judges or legislators

-- Not Dead Yet Research Analyst Stephen Drake

"End of Life Planning: Q & A with Disabilities Advocate"

Reno Gazette-JournalNov. 22, 2003

better attuned to highway funding."

-- Los Angeles Times Editorial: "Planning for Worse Than

Taxes"Mar. 22, 2005

5. End-of-Life Medical Care

    Would legalizing euthanasia undermine the quality of palliative care that patients receive?

PRO: "Once a patient has the means to take their own life, there can be decreased incentive to care for the patient's symptoms and needs. The case of Michael Freeland is an example. Michael had been given a lethal prescription and when his doctors were planning for his discharge to his home from the hospital, one physician wrote that while he probably needed attendant care at home, providing additional care may be a 'moot point' because he had 'life-ending medication'. His assisted suicide doctor did nothing to care for his pain and palliative care needs. This seriously ill patient was receiving poor advice and medical care because he had lethal drugs."

-- Physicians for Compassionate Care

"Top 10 FAQs," www.pccef.orgAug. 14, 2006

CON: "Assisting death in no way precludes giving the best palliative care possible but rather integrates compassionate care and respect for the patient's autonomy and ultimately makes death with dignity a real option...

The evidence for the emotional impact of assisted dying on physicians shows that euthanasia and assisted suicide are a far cry from being 'easier options for the caregiver' than palliative care, as some critics of Dutch practice have suggested. We wish to take a strong stand against the separation and opposition between euthanasia and assisted suicide, on the one hand, and palliative care, on the other, that such critics have implied. There is no 'either-or' with respect to these options."

-- Gerrit Kimsma. MD  andEvert van Leeuwen, PhD

"Assisted Death in the Netherlands: Physician at the Bedside When Help Is Requested"

Physician-Assisted Dying: The Case for Palliative Care & Patient Choice

2004

  Is a physician ever obligated to help a patient die?

PRO: "A doctor's commitment to acting for patients' good creates a clear obligation to help a patient avoid an agonizing, protracted death. Allowing a patient to suffer when the suffering could be ended is an obvious violation of the duty of beneficence...

Sometimes, because of special features of the need, or because of the special relationship, or because of the uniqueness of the knowledge involved, a physician may have a professional obligation to assist in a suicide or perform euthanasia."

-- Rosamond Rhodes, PhD Professor of Medical Education and

Director of Bioethics Education, Mount Sinai School of Medicine"Physicians, Assisted Suicide,

and the Right to Live or Die"Physician Assisted Suicide:

Expanding the Debate1998

CON: "Medicine surely owes patients assistance in their dying process -- to relieve their pain, discomfort, and distress. This is simply part of what it means to seek to relieve suffering, always an essential part of caring for the living, including when they are in the process of their dying. But medicine has never, under anyone's interpretation, been charged with producing or achieving death itself. Physicians cannot be serving their art or helping their patients -- whether regarded as human beings or as persons -- by making them disappear."

-- Leon Kass, MD, PhD Addie Clark Harding Professor,

Committee on Social Thought and the College, University of Chicago"'I Will Give No Deadly Drug':

Why Doctors Must Not Kill"The Case Against Assisted Suicide: For

the Right to End-of-Life Care2002

6. Health Care Implications

  Would legalizing euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide save money for the American healthcare system?

PRO: "Legalized euthanasia and assisted suicide would have the potential to save financially strapped government programs, such as Oregon's Medicaid plan, millions by eradicating people whose care is expensive. Perhaps that is why, when Measure 16 [the Oregon 'Death With Dignity' Act] passed, the director of Oregon's Medicaid plan announced that assisted suicide would be considered 'comfort care' and thus paid for by the state's Medicaid plan."

CON: "Even though the various elements that make up the American healthcare system are becoming more circumspect in ensuring that money is not wasted, the cap that marks a zero-sum healthcare system is largely absent in the United States... Considering the way we finance healthcare in the United States, it would be hard to make a case that there is a financial imperative compelling us to adopt physician-assisted suicide in an effort to save money so that others could benefit..."

-- Wesley Smith, JD Anti-Euthanasia Activist

Forced Exit1997

-- Merrill Matthews, Jr., PhD Director,

Council for Affordable Health Insurance"Would Physician-Assisted Suicide

Save the Healthcare System Money?"Physician Assisted Suicide:

Expanding the Debate1998

  Would legalizing euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide save money for insurance companies?

PRO: "Health Maintenance Organizations (HMOs) may attempt to reduce health care costs by refusing to pay for expensive or 'unnecessary' procedures. What better way to cut costs than on those people who won't be here much longer anyway?

If this sounds farfetched, consider the following: While discussing the recently passed Oregon right-to-die law, a spokesperson for QualMed Oregon Health Plan confirmed that it would cover lethal medications 'as a prescription' while its 'value option' plan limits hospice care to $1,000...

Just think of all the money that could be saved by HMOs if they spared the expense of treating AIDS patients or the disabled, many of whom could easily be classified as terminally ill..."

-- George Runner California State Senator

"Valley Perspective; Suicide Is Not a Treatment for Anything;

he 'Right to Die' Plus Managed Care is a Dangerous Combination"

Los Angeles TimesApr. 4, 1999

CON: "One large managed-care plan currently enrolls approximately 1.7 million adults and has an annual budget of almost $4.5 billion. In 1995, approximately 13,000 of the enrolled adults died, including 3,800 who died of cancer. Over the last six months of life, the mean cost for patients enrolled in this managed-care plan who died of breast cancer was $21,329 (in 1995 dollars), with about $9,500 spent in the last month of life. Assuming that 2.7 percent of the patients who died would have chosen physician-assisted suicide (351 patients), forgoing an average of four weeks of life at an average savings of $9,500, the managed-care plan's expenditures would have been reduced by $3.3 million, or less than 0.08 percent of its total budget. For other managed-care plans that tend to have higher proportions of young, healthy patients with lower death rates, the absolute and relative savings are likely to be even smaller...

Physician-assisted suicide is not likely to save substantial amounts of money in absolute or relative terms, either for particular institutions or for the nation as

a whole."

-- Ezekiel Emanuel, MD, PhD and Margaret Battin, MD

"What Are the Potential Cost Savings From Legalizing Physician-Assisted

Suicide?"New England Journal of Medicine

July 16, 1998

7. Special Groups (Disabled and Elderly)

    Would legalizing physician-assisted suicide endanger people with disabilities?

PRO: "Though often described as compassionate, legalized medical killing is really about a deadly double standard for people with severe disabilities, including both conditions that are labeled terminal and those that are not. Disability opposition to this ultimate form of discrimination has been ignored by most media and courts, but countless people with disabilities have already died before their time...

Legalized medical killing is not a new human right, it's a new professional immunity. It would allow health professionals to decide which of us are 'eligible' for this service, and exempt them from accountability for their decisions. Killing is not just another medical treatment option, and it must not be made any part of routine health care. In these days of cost cutting and managed care, we don't trust the health care system, and neither should you."

-- Not Dead Yet Disability Rights Organization

"About Us"www.notdeadyet.org

May 11, 2007

CON: "We do not believe that the right to assisted suicide is premised on a diminished quality of life for people with disabilities. It is based on respect for the autonomy of terminally ill individuals during their final days... It does not deny people with disabilities suicide prevention services, protection against murder, or protection from other abuses. We further contend that, though we must always be vigilant in preventing abuses, the right will not necessarily be expanded to individuals or situations for which it was not intended...

Those who oppose a right to assisted suicide predict that a substantial number of people with disabilities would be killed against their will if assisted suicide were legalized. However, there is no evidence that this has happened to people on life-support systems, who have had the right to die at least since the Cruzan decision in 1990. We believe that abuses of assisted suicide, to the extent they are now occurring behind closed doors, are less likely to continue once assisted suicide is

legalized and appropriately regulated."

-- Andrew Batavia, JD Former Associate Professor, Health

Law and Policy, Florida International University

"Disability and Physician-Assisted Dying"

Physician-Assisted Dying: The Case for Palliative Care & Patient Choice

2004

    Would legalizing physician-assisted suicide endanger the elderly?

PRO: "In an era when resources are increasingly being squeezed while the population ages and health care needs increase, the elderly and the dying compete against other portions of the population for health care services. Given the high and seemingly disproportionate costs of health care for the elderly and those in the final phase of life, these 'users of excessive medical resources' may be the targets of cost-saving efforts...

The calls for legalizing physician-assisted suicide arise in a social system that is inattentive to the complex physical, emotional, and spiritual needs of people as they near the end of life. Additionally, abuse is a real risk, especially among those who are elderly..."

-- Felicia Cohn, PhD  and Joanne Lynn, MD

"Vulnerable People: Practical Rejoinders to Claims in Favor of

Assisted Suicide"The Case Against Assisted Suicide:

For the Right to End-of-Life Care2002

CON: "The [Oregon assisted suicide] law has not had the dire social consequences that some opponents predicted. There is no evidence that it has been used to coerce elderly, poor, or depressed patients to end their lives, nor has it caused any significant migration of terminally ill people to Oregon.

As compared with Oregonians who died naturally from similar diseases in 2004, those who died by means of physician-assisted suicide tended to be younger (median age, 64 versus 76 years)."

-- Susan Okie, MD Contributing Editor,

The New England Journal of Medicine"Physician-Assisted Suicide -

Oregon and Beyond"New England Journal of Medicine

Apr. 21, 2005

8. Euthanasia Timeline

1938 - On Jan. 16th, 1938 Charles Francis Potter announces the founding of the National Society for the Legalization of Euthanasia (NSLE), which is soon renamed the Euthanasia Society of America (ESA).

1950 - The World Medical Association votes to recommend to all national medical associations that euthanasia be condemned "under any circumstances." In the same year, the American Medical Association issues a statement that the majority of doctors do not believe in euthanasia.

1967 - The first living will is written by attorney Louis Kutner and his arguments for it appear in the Indiana Law Journal.

1972 - The U.S. Senate Special Commission on Aging (SCA) holds the first national hearings on death with dignity, entitled "Death with Dignity: An Inquiry into Related Public Issues."

1973 - The American Medical Association adopts a "Patient's Bill of Rights" which recognizes the right of patients to refuse treatment.

1976 - The New Jersey Supreme Court rules in the 1976 In re Quinlan case that 21-year-old Karen Quinlan can be detached from her respirator.

1980 - Derek Humphry forms the Hemlock Society, a grassroots euthanasia organization, in Los Angeles.

1990 - Jack Kevorkian, MD, assists Janet Adkins, a Hemlock Society member, in committing suicide in Michigan. Adkins death is the first of many suicides in which Dr. Kevorkian assists.

1994 - The Oregon Death With Dignity Act is passed, becoming the first law in American history permitting physician-assisted suicide.

1997 - The Supreme Court rules in Washington v. Glucksberg and Vacco v. Quill that there is not a constitutional right to die.

2005 - The Terri Schiavo case garners national media attention. After a Florida Circuit Judge ruled that Terri Schiavo' feeding tube be removed and the Florida Supreme Court overturned "Terri's Law," a law intended to reinsert the feeding tube, the United States Supreme Court refuses for the sixth time to intervene in the case. Terri Schiavo dies on Mar. 31, 2005, 13 days after her feeding tube is removed.

2006 - The Supreme Court, in a 6-3 opinion in Gonzales v. Oregon, holds that

the Controlled Substances Act does not authorize the Attorney General to ban the use of controlled substances for physician-assisted suicide. Oregon's Death With Dignity Law is upheld.

 

“EUTHANASIA”Mercy killing

Pro-life? Or

Pro-choice?

A Case Study about

Morality

Presented to:Ms. Catherene P. CruzIn Partial Fulfillment

InChristian Values Formation II

Presented by:

Jessica Mae C. SayocB.S.I.T 1