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Physician-Assisted Suicide, Hospice, and Rituals of Withdrawal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Extract

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.

Type
Article
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 1996

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References

Compassion in Dying v. State of Washington, 79 F.3d 790 (9th Cir. 1996) (en banc).Google Scholar
Quill v. Vacco, 80 F.3d 716 (2d Cir. 1996).Google Scholar
A short list of relevant journals includes: American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Care, American journal of Hospice Care, Clinical Journal of Pain, Death Studies, European Journal of Palliative Care, Hospice, Hospice Journal, Journal of Pain and Symptom Management, Journal of Palliative Care, Pain, and Palliative Medicine.Google Scholar
79 F.3d 790.Google Scholar
Capote, T., In Cold Blood (New York: Random House, 1966).Google Scholar
Callahan, D., The Troubled Dream of Life: Living with Mortality (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993): Esp. ch. 6.Google Scholar