Doctor-Assisted Suicide - 0 views
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Euthanasia
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To be acceptable to most Americans, any legislation drafted to legalize doctor-assisted suicide will clearly need to balance the desire to end suffering with the need to protect especially vulnerable patients. Timothy Quill puts forward two conditions for the future of this debate. If we legalize euthanasia, he says, we must ensure that absolutely every treatment and pain-management alternative has been tried before we allow a doctor to assist a patient to die.
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if assisted suicide remains illegal, we must give doctors some kind of guidance in dealing with this morally and emotionally wrenching issue that presently rests entirely on their shoulders.
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Many who oppose the legalization of doctor-assisted suicide acknowledge that the practice goes on every day--and feel that society should tolerate it, but not legalize it
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Judge Guido Calabresi reasoned, "It may well be that a society may prefer subterfuge and covert practice to trying to draw lines that are extraordinarily difficult to draw." A similar view against legalization was expressed in a Detroit News editorial (May 18, 1995): "Sometimes families and doctors will quietly try to frustrate a ban, but society must err on the side of life by officially declaring the practice off-limits."
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they must either openly break the law, or explicitly hide what they are doing, neither of which are comfortable options.
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Hogan argued, "With state sanctioned and physician-assisted death at issue, some 'good results' cannot outweigh other lives lost due to unconstitutional errors and abuses."
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The Oregon act would have been first in the U.S. to allow doctors to assist patients in dying. The law would have let doctors prescribe (but not administer) a lethal dose of drugs to terminally ill patients who had formally requested to die.
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The law required that the patient request to die three times, the last time in writing, and that doctors wait 15 days after receiving the final request to prescribe the lethal dose. A minimum of two physicians would have had to determine that the patient had six months or less to live.
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patients' involvement in treatment decisions has been increased debate over doctor-assisted suicide, in which patients seek help in dying from their physician.
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A November 1993 Louis Harris Associates poll found that a majority of Americans (58%) approve of Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a controversial retired Michigan pathologist who has made a mission of assisting terminally ill people to die
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The issue of doctor-assisted suicide has touched off highly publicized dialogue on how to care for the terminally ill, and specifically, how to manage pain.
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Euthanasia is defined as "the bringing about of a gentle and easy death for a person suffering from a painful incurable disease," while suicide is "the intentional killing of oneself.
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active euthanasia, which is at the center of the current controversy. Passive euthanasia is defined as "allowing to die," and is used to describe a decision to withhold treatment, or remove life support, from a patient who may be in a coma or vegetative state.