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Setting Limits on Death: A View From the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2009

Sandra H. Johnson
Sandra H. Johnson
Affiliation:
Professor of Law at the Center for Health Law Studies of the Saint Louis University School of Law with joint appointments at the University's Schools of Medicine and Public Health, St. Louis, Missouri, and President-Elect of the American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics.
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Extract

Assisted suicide is a tragic issue, one of those for which the tools of mere logic are inadequate and in which the power of the individual case is compelling and seductive but not necessarily clarifying. Meaningful dialogue is difficult. Persuasion is limited because the resolution of the issue, on a moral level, must be founded upon fundamental notions of what it means to be human, especially in the midst of suffering or disability or at the point of death.

Type
Special Section: Physician-Aided Death: The Escalating Debate
Information
Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , Winter 1996 , pp. 24 - 32
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

Notes

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2. Aid in Dying Act, Initiative Measure 199. Washington, 1991.Google Scholar

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5. Compassion in Dying v. Washington, 49 F.3d 586 (9th Cir. 1995); Quill v. Koppell, 870 F. Supp. 78 (S.D.N.Y. 1994); People v. Kevorkian, 527 N. W. 2d 714 (Mich. 1994); Lee v. Oregon, 1995 WL 471,792 (D. Or. 1995).

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