Physician-Assisted Suicide: What are the Issues?

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-viii

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2. The Contemporary Debate Over Physician-Assisted Suicide

   1. The Contemporary Debate Over Physician-Assisted Suicide

      • Loretta M. Kopelman, Kenneth A. De Ville

      Pages 1-25

3. On the Permissibility of Physician-Assisted Suicide

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 27-27

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   2. Physician-Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia: Another Battle in the Culture Wars

      • H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr.

      Pages 29-41

   3. Refusals/Withdrawals and Physician-Assisted Suicide

      • R. G. Frey

      Pages 43-57

   4. Physician-Assisted Suicide — The Worry About Abuse

      • Dan W. Brock

      Pages 59-74

4. Challenging the Case for Physician-Assisted Suicide

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 75-75

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   2. Is There a Slippery Slope from Suicide, to Assisted Suicide, to Consensual Euthanasia?

      • Robert L. Holmes

      Pages 77-86

   3. Does Physician-Assisted Suicide Promote Liberty and Compassion?

      • Loretta M. Kopelman

      Pages 87-102

   4. Job Openings for Moral Philosophers in Oregon: Physician-Assisted Suicide and the Culture of Romantic Rescue

      • Laurie Zoloth

      Pages 103-116

5. Physician-Assisted Suicide: Views from the Clinic

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 117-117

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   2. Physician-Assisted Suicide: A Clinician’s Perspective

      • Gail J. Povar

      Pages 119-126

   3. Physician-Assisted Suicide: The Culture of Medicine and the Undertreatment of Pain

      • David B. Resnik

      Pages 127-148

   4. Managed Health Care at the End of Life

      • Steven H. Miles

      Pages 149-167

6. Visions of the Future for Physician-Assisted Suicide

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 169-169

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   2. Physician-Assisted Suicide and the States: Short, Medium and Long Term

      • Kenneth A. De Ville

      Pages 171-186

   3. Safe, Legal, Rare? Physician-Assisted Suicide and Cultural Change in the Future

      • Margaret P. Battin

      Pages 187-201

   4. A Proposal for Legalizing Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia in South Africa

      • Willem A. Landman

      Pages 203-225

7. Back Matter

   Pages 227-240

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Physician-Assisted Suicide: What are the Issues? offers a detailed discussion of recent supreme court rulings that have had an impact on the contemporary debate in the United States and elsewhere over physician-assisted suicide. Two rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court have altered the contemporary debate on physician-assisted suicide: Washington v. Glucksberg (1997) and Vacco v. Quill (1997). In these cases, the Supreme Court ruled that state laws could prohibit assisted suicide and, therefore, physician-assisted suicide. These rulings mark the apex of over two decades of unprecedented litigation regarding end-of-life care and signal the beginning of a new clinical, ethical, and legal debate over the extent of an individual's rights to control the timing, manner, and means of his/her death.
The debate over suicide and assisting suicide is ancient and contentious and intertwined with questions about the permissibility of voluntary active euthanasia or mercy killing. Responses to these issues can be divided into those who defend physician-assisted suicide and many of these other activities and those who object. But those who object may do so on principled grounds in that they regard these activities as wrong in all cases, or non-principled, in that they believe there are more prudent, less disruptive or more efficient policies. The authors in this book sort out these responses and look at the assumptions underlying them. Several of these authors give startling new interpretations that a culture gap, deeper and wider than that in the abortion debate, exists.

• death
• health
• morality

• Department of Medical Humanities, The Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University, Greenville, USA

  Loretta M. Kopelman, Kenneth A. Ville

Policies and ethics