Archive for the ‘Blog’ Category

To sum up: The definition of physician-assisted suicide: With physician-assisted suicide (PAS), following a patient-initiated request, a physician provides the means for the patient to end his or her life. Typically, the physician offers counseling, information and instruction, prescribes (and sometimes delivers) medications but does not otherwise participate in the final act. The presence of […]

The case studies of Karen Ann Quinlan, Nancy Cruzan, Terri Schiavo and others show that the courts were moving toward a greater acceptance of the right-to-die long before any legislation was passed that allowed physician-assisted suicide. As I indicated at the beginning of these blogs, only one state had approved physician-assisted suicide by 1995. That […]

I mentioned two landmark cases in my previous blog – Karen Ann Quinlan and Nancy Cruzan. The ethical question for Quinlan involved not only the principle of autonomy but also beneficence and nonmaleficence. The Quinlans believed that the ventilator was intrusive and harmful to Karen (“do no harm”). Likewise, they believed that the thing most […]

As someone who has developed and trained hospice ethics committees since 1991, I have always stressed that ethics committees should use a principle-based approach. That is, they should look at the situation in light of well-established ethical principles. These principles are generally recognized as beneficence, nonmaleficence, autonomy, justice and fidelity. The principles of beneficence and […]

I digress a bit from my blog on assisted-suicide to reflect on the “right to die.” On April 15, 1975, I was working on a doctoral degree at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. The university is located just a few miles from the Newton Memorial Hospital, where on that day a bright and energetic […]

Wikipedia defines physician-assisted suicide as “suicide committed with the aid of another person, sometimes a doctor’ and it has been described as “medical aid in dying in the United States for terminally ill, mentally capable adults who self-administer medication to shorten their own dying process.” As the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) was being discussed as […]

Neil Gorsuch, Hospice and the Right to Die One of the most haunting and disturbing images in American literature is Thomas Wolfe’s description of the death of his own brother as depicted by Ben Gant in LOOK HOMEWARD ANGEL. “Ben’s thin lips were lifted in a constant grimace of torture and strangulation, (and the) sound […]