Physician-Assisted Suicide as a Constitutional Right

1996 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 198-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
John E. Linville
Keyword(s):  
Assisted Suicide ◽  
Courts Of Appeals ◽  
Physician Assisted Suicide ◽  
Recent Success ◽  
Dying Patients ◽  
Life Sustaining Treatment ◽  
Nutrition And Hydration ◽  
Constitutional Right ◽  
The Right ◽  
Circuit Courts

The legal treatment of physician-assisted suicide (PAS) is in flux. Reform has been impelled by several forces, including the recent success of novel constitutional arguments in the Ninth and Second Circuit Courts of Appeals. I will review and discuss Compassion in Dying v. State of Washington and Quill v. Vacco, addressing the constitutional arguments, and then briefly considering the attractions and difficulties of these new constitutional theories.Before 1990, state criminal laws dealing with assisted suicide had reached a remarkably stable consensus: suicide was not illegal, but assisting suicide was a criminal action with no distinction typically made between physicians and others who assisted. The details of the relevant criminal law varied from state to state. Some states had criminal statutes specifically addressing assisted suicide, while others treated the practice under more general homicide statutes. But in no state was it clearly legal for a physician to prescribe a lethal medication at the request of a dying patient. While remarkable legal developments took place during the 1970s and 1980s regarding other aspects of the rights of dying patients (including the right to refuse resuscitation and other life-sustaining treatments and the right to withdraw from life-sustaining treatment including nutrition and hydration), there was relative quiescence regarding the law of PAS.

Physician-Assisted Suicide, Hospice, and Rituals of Withdrawal

1996 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 233-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
William G. Bartholome
Keyword(s):  
Carbon Monoxide ◽  
Emergency Room ◽  
Assisted Suicide ◽  
Terminally Ill ◽  
Courts Of Appeals ◽  
Physician Assisted Suicide ◽  
Short Acting ◽  
Ninth Circuit ◽  
Medical License ◽  
Circuit Courts

As I write, I hear that Dr. Jack Kevorluan has delivered another victim to the emergency room of his local Michigan hospital. Why do physicians and terminally ill patients feel we need to change the law with respect to assisted suicide when a rogue pathologist, who has been stripped of his medical license, is allowed to pursue his appetite for providing his clients with inhalation treatments of carbon monoxide gas? If no court will convict this outlaw, what makes the physicians and patients who brought Compassion in Dying v. State of Washington and Quill v. Vacco fear that any court would ever convict a licensed physician of assisting in a suicide when he/she writes one of her established patients a prescription for a short-acting barbiturate? Moreover, it is not even clear that laws against assisted suicide in most jurisdictions were ever intended to apply to the actions of licensed physicians. Nonetheless, the plaintiffs in the Second and Ninth Circuit Courts of Appeals were clearly seeking some kind of redress, some kind of protection from potential legal claims they feared might be made against them.

Terminal Sedation: Palliative Care for Intractable Pain, Post Glucksberg and Quill

2003 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-76
Author(s):  
Rob McStay
Keyword(s):  
Palliative Care ◽  
Supreme Court ◽  
Assisted Suicide ◽  
Life Support ◽  
Intractable Pain ◽  
Terminal Sedation ◽  
Physician Assisted Suicide ◽  
The Right ◽  
Artificial Life Support ◽  
Unconscious State

In 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court tacitly endorsed terminal sedation as an alternative to physician-assisted suicide, thus intensifying a debate in the legal and medical communities as to the propriety of terminal sedation and setting the stage for a new battleground in the “right to die” controversy. Terminal sedation is the induction of an unconscious state to relieve otherwise intractable distress, and is frequently accompanied by the withdrawal of any life-sustaining intervention, such as hydration and nutrition. This practice is a clinical option of “last resort” when less aggressive palliative care measures have failed. Terminal sedation has also been described as “the compromise in the furor over physician-assisted suicide.”Medical literature suggests that terminal sedation was a palliative care option long before the Supreme Court considered the constitutional implications of physician-assisted suicide. Terminal sedation has been used for three related but distinct purposes: (1) to relieve physical pain; (2) to produce an unconscious state before the withdrawal of artificial life support; and (3) to relieve non-physical suffering.

scholarly journals Euthanasia and suicide: a medical and social discourse

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-112
Author(s):  
V. N. Ostapenko ◽  
I. V. Lantukh ◽  
A. P. Lantukh
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
Assisted Suicide ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Physician Assisted Suicide ◽  
Adequate Quality ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Strong Explosion ◽  
The Right

Annotation. The problem of suicide and euthanasia has been particularly updated with the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused a strong explosion of suicide, because medicine was not ready for it, and the man was too weak in front of its pressure. The article considers the issue of euthanasia and suicide based on philosophical messages from the position of a doctor, which today goes beyond medicine and medical ethics and becomes one of the important aspects of society. Medicine has achieved success in the continuation of human life, but it is unable to ensure the quality of life of those who are forced to continue it. In these circumstances, the admission of suicide or euthanasia pursues the refusal of the subject to achieve an adequate quality of life; an end to suffering for those who find their lives unacceptable. The reasoning that banned suicide: no one should harm or destroy the basic virtues of human nature; deliberate suicide is an attempt to harm a person or destroy human life; no one should kill himself. The criterion may be that suicide should not take place when it is committed at the request of the subject when he devalues his own life. According to supporters of euthanasia, in the conditions of the progress of modern science, many come to the erroneous opinion that medicine can have total control over human life and death. But people have the right to determine the end of their lives while using the achievements of medicine, as well as the right to demand an extension of life with the help of the same medicine. They believe that in the era of a civilized state, the right to die with medical help should be as natural as the right to receive medical care. At the same time, the patient cannot demand death as a solution to the problem, even if all means of relieving him from suffering have been exhausted. In defense of his claims, he turns to the principle of beneficence. The task of medicine is to alleviate the suffering of the patient. But if physician-assisted suicide and active euthanasia become part of health care, theoretical and practical medicine will be deprived of advances in palliative and supportive therapies. Lack of adequate palliative care is a medical, ethical, psychological, and social problem that needs to be addressed before resorting to such radical methods as legalizing euthanasia.

scholarly journals Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide: A Review from Islamic Point of View

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yousuf RM ◽  
Mohammed Fauzi AR
Keyword(s):  
Assisted Suicide ◽  
Care Delivery ◽  
Health Care Delivery System ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Medical Community ◽  
Physician Assisted Suicide ◽  
Dying Patients ◽  
Practice Of Medicine ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Lay Public

Due to globalizing trend of homogenisation of culture, changes in the health care delivery system and market economics infringing on the practice of medicine, there has been a gradual shift in the attitude of the medical community as well as the lay public towards greater acceptance of euthanasia as an option for terminally ill and dying patients. Physicians in developing countries come across situations where such issues are raised with increasing frequency. As the subject has gained worldwide prominence, we want to review this topic from Islamic perspective due to its significance in medical ethics and clinical practice.

When slippery slope arguments miss the mark: a lesson from one against physician-assisted death

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (10) ◽  
pp. 657-660 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Blackstone ◽  
Stuart J Youngner
Keyword(s):  
Continuous Improvement ◽  
Assisted Suicide ◽  
Slippery Slope ◽  
Regulatory Agencies ◽  
Physician Assisted Suicide ◽  
Assisted Death ◽  
Slippery Slope Arguments ◽  
Life Sustaining Treatment ◽  
American Society ◽  
Susan Wolf

In 1989, Susan Wolf convincingly warned of a troublesome consequence that should discourage any movement in American society towards physician-assisted death—a legal backlash against the gains made for limiting life-sustaining treatment. The authors demonstrate that this dire consequence did not come to pass. As physician-assisted suicide gains a foothold in USA and elsewhere, many other slippery slope arguments are being put forward. Although many of these speculations should be taken seriously, they do not justify halting the new practice. Instead, our courts, regulatory agencies, journalists, professional organisations and researchers should carefully monitor and study it as it unfolds, allowing continuous improvement just as our society has done in implementing the practice of limiting life-sustaining treatment.

Szasz, suicide, and medical ethics

Thomas Szasz ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 55-64
Author(s):  
George J. Annas
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Informed Consent ◽  
Suicide Prevention ◽  
Assisted Suicide ◽  
Physician Assisted Suicide ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Right ◽  
Suicidal Patients ◽  
Commit Suicide

Szasz objected to the medicalization of suicide, the legalization of suicide prevention, and especially the coercive role of psychiatry in this realm. He declared that, by medicalizing suicide, we banish the subject from discussion. What is meant by acceptable and unacceptable “suicide”? Who has a right to commit suicide? How does suicide implicate freedom? Does it reflect abortion jurisprudence? How do psychiatrists become suicide’s gatekeepers? Current phenomena (e.g., new physician-assisted suicide legislation) illuminate these and other issues (e.g., euthanasia, informed consent, informed refusal, the “right to die,”), all suggesting how Szasz would react to each. Suicide is legal, but is almost always considered a result of mental illness. Courts approve psychiatrists who want to commit “suicidal” patients involuntarily. Granting physicians prospective legal immunity for prescribing lethal drugs is, at best, a strange and tangential reaction to our inability to discuss suicide (and dying) rationally. Szasz got it right.

Reformed Theology and Conscientious Refusal of Medical Treatment

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-80 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Groenhout
Keyword(s):  
Healthcare Workers ◽  
Assisted Suicide ◽  
Reformed Theology ◽  
Physician Assisted Suicide ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Traditional Concept ◽  
Same Sex Couples ◽  
Appropriate Care ◽  
Christian Morality ◽  
The Right

Abstract Traditionally, healthcare workers have had the right to refuse to participate in abortions or physician-assisted suicide, but more recently there has been a movement in white Evangelical circles to expand these rights to include the refusal of any treatment at all to same-sex couples or their children, transgender individuals, or others who offend the provider’s moral sensibilities. Religious freedom of conscience exists in an uneasy tension with laws protecting equal rights in a liberal polity, and it is a particularly fraught question in the context of medicine, where providers’ consciences must be balanced against patients’ rights to access appropriate care. This article examines the refusal of care to classes of people, usually classes defined by various sexual issues with which the caregivers disagree. This expands conscientious refusals from the traditional concept of responses to actions and instead directs it at specific types of people. The article draws on Reformed thought to argue that such refusals are not justified and are, in fact, both a profound misreading of Christian morality and a new and dangerously expansive account of the right to conscientious refusal in medicine.

Death with “dignity”: The wedge that divides the disability rights movement from the right to die movement

2011 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan M. Behuniak
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Assisted Suicide ◽  
Personal Autonomy ◽  
Right To Die ◽  
Disability Rights ◽  
Physician Assisted Suicide ◽  
Death With Dignity ◽  
Assisted Death ◽  
A Value ◽  
The Right

Much of the American debate over physician assisted death (PAD) is framed as an ideological split between conservatives and liberals, pro life and pro choice advocates, and those who emphasize morality versus personal autonomy. Less examined, but no less relevant, is a split within the ranks of progressives—one that divides those supporting a right to die in the name of human rights from disability rights activists who invoke human rights to vehemently oppose euthanasia. This paper reviews how “dignity” serves both as a divisive wedge in this debate but also as a value that can span the divide between groups and open the way to productive discourse. Supporters of legalized euthanasia use “dignity” to express their position that some deaths might indeed be accelerated. At the same time, opponents adopt the concept to argue that physician assisted suicide stigmatizes life with a disability. To bridge this divide, the worldviews of two groups, Compassion & Choices and Not Dead Yet, are studied. The analysis concludes that the two organizations are more parallel than contrary—a finding that offers opportunities for dialogue and perhaps even advances in public policy.

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