D.C. news media coverage of the district’s Death With Dignity Act

In 2016, the District of Columbia City Council passed the Death With Dignity Act. Afterward, Congress attempted to block its implementation by first invoking Congress’s power to overturn the law and then, when unsuccessful in that effort, withhold money from the District. Previous studies examining local news media coverage of aid-in-dying legislation have identified several recurrent frames. D.C. news publications invoked those frames as well as others more specific to the District. Understanding how aid in dying and related legislation is portrayed in newspaper coverage is important as more jurisdictions consider legalization of the practice.

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DC-Based Religious and Secular Media Coverage of the District’s Death with Dignity Act

Journal of Media and Religion ◽

10.1080/15348423.2019.1678944 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 18 (3) ◽

pp. 75-84

Author(s):

Sean Baker ◽

Kimberly A. Lauffer

Keyword(s):

Media Coverage ◽

Death With Dignity ◽

Death With Dignity Act ◽

Dignity Act

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Author(iz)ing Death: Medical Aid-in-Dying and the Morality of Suicide

Cultural Anthropology ◽

10.14506/ca34.1.08 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 34 (1) ◽

pp. 53-77 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Anita Hannig

Keyword(s):

Public Discourse ◽

Medical Assistance ◽

Death With Dignity ◽

Assisted Death ◽

Medical Aid ◽

Medical Assistance In Dying ◽

Aid In Dying ◽

Death With Dignity Act ◽

Twentieth Anniversary ◽

Dignity Act

In 2017, Oregon marked the twentieth anniversary of enacting the Death with Dignity Act, allowing terminally ill, mentally competent adult patients to end their life by ingesting a lethal medication prescribed by their physician. In U.S. public discourse, medical aid-in-dying is frequently equated with the terminology and morality of suicide, much to the frustration of those who use and administer the law. This article reflects on the stakes of maintaining a distinction between a medically assisted death and the most common cultural category for self-inflicted death—suicide. It uncovers the complicated dialectic between authorship and authorization that characterizes medical assistance in dying and attendant moralities of purposive death, speaking to broader disciplinary concerns in the cultural study of death and medicine. By stressing the primacy of debilitating, life-limiting illness in an aided death and by submitting such a death to the rationale and management of institutionalized medicine, advocates carve out a form of intentional death that occupies a category of its own. The diffusion of agency onto a patient’s fatal illness, medicine, and the state—both discursively and in practice—enhances the moral and social acceptability of an assisted death, which becomes an authorized form of dying that looks very different from the socially deviant act of suicide.

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Oregon v. Ashcroft: The Battle over the Soul of Medicine

Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics ◽

10.1017/s0963180103123158 ◽

2003 ◽

Vol 12 (3) ◽

pp. 310-321 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

BEN A. RICH

Keyword(s):

Assisted Suicide ◽

The United States ◽

Physician Assisted Suicide ◽

Death With Dignity ◽

War Of Attrition ◽

Dying Patients ◽

Medical Disputes ◽

Aid In Dying ◽

Death With Dignity Act ◽

Dignity Act

When one considers the protracted and continuing struggle of the citizens of Oregon to include physician-assisted suicide (also known as “physician aid in dying”) among the panoply of measures available to dying patients and the physicians who care for them, the depth and breadth of the issue becomes inescapable. The potential intractability of the dispute is illustrated by the very fact, noted in the preceding parenthetical phrase, that consensus eludes us on even the most basic of semantic points—how we are to most aptly characterize the conduct in question? The case featured in this issue's The Caduceus in Court must be examined as the latest battle in a long war of attrition waged by opponents of physician-assisted suicide against the Oregon Death with Dignity Act (“the Oregon Act”). After briefly reviewing that history, I will then consider the details of Oregon v. Ashcroft and the implications of the litigation not only for the care of dying patients but also for the regulation of medical practice in the United States and, more broadly still, the search for resolution of serious medical disputes in a democratic society.

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