The Society for Humanistic Judaism (SHJ) supports the right of all people to decide when their lives should end. This post looks at the SHJ’s position on physician-assisted death.
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In Part 2 of this post about dementia, disability, and advance directives, Lamar Hankins challenges Dresser’s assertion that an advance directive that calls for allowing a person to die in the later stages of dementia should be ignored in favor of her view of what care is appropriate.
Rebecca Dresser is a law professor and recognized expert in biomedical ethics. She argues that “people usually live for many years after a dementia diagnosis, years in which meaningful and satisfying life can continue. People can’t be sure how they will fare as dementia patients . . .” She suggests that because dementia patients can adapt to their new circumstances, they must, therefore, be allowed to accept this new life.. Lamar Hankins analyses her ideas in a two-part post.
In his 2006 book about death with dignity and the right to die (The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia), Neil Gorsuch leveled several criticisms, by implication, against Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act (DWDA), a law that deals not at all with assisted suicide or euthanasia. Under the Oregon law, a person desiring a hastened death in the face of terminal illness may take his own life with a lethal prescription drug or drugs, unassisted by another person. Nevertheless, Gorsuch argues that we can’t determine the value of the DWDA for other jurisdictions without knowing how Oregon’s law is working in practice, and he asserts that we don’t have enough information about that.
Jerry Coyne, Ph.D., an American biologist recently published a post on his blog titled “Thought for the day: On mental illness and assisted suicide,” discussing the topic just after the suicides of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain. In the post, he includes a video of Adam Maier-Clayton, a former frequent contributor to FEN’s Facebook page, where his death in April 2017 was announced with both sadness and understanding.
The idea suggested by some disability rights advocates, that most of us will be disabled in one way or another by the time we reach the end of our lives, has been borne out in my experience. Virtually everyone I have known who has died has met, days or weeks or months before their deaths, the definition of disability under the Americans with Disabilities Act. How can we assure that those who are disabled are not coerced into ending their lives too soon?
Understanding disagreements between DWD advocates and disability rights advocates may be a way to find some common ground between the two groups. This is Part 1 of a multi-part series exploring the issues.
All of the Death With Dignity (DWD) laws now in the US are modeled after the Oregon law that went into effect in 1997. The other jurisdictions that have adopted such a law include Washington, Vermont, Washington, D.C., Colorado, California, and Hawaii. A judicial decision in Montana allows DWD to be practiced with cooperating doctors.
Missing from all of these laws is the right of people who have specific kinds of incurable, debilitating, painful, or extremely distressing medical conditions, but are not necessarily within six months of dying, to use these laws.
On April 16, 2018, the Final Exit Network (FEN) filed a lawsuit in federal district court against the State of Minnesota. The suit asks the court to declare that Minnesota’s law prohibiting speaking to a person about how to hasten her own death is a violation of the free speech clause of the First Amendment of the US Constitution. The suit seeks, also, to void FEN’s conviction under the statute, and to bar the State of Minnesota from again initiating a prosecution of FEN, and its personnel, under the statute based solely on the utterance of “speech” that “enables” a suicide.
It is not unusual for married couples to die within a few days, weeks, or months of one another. It has become more common in recent years for couples, especially those who have been together for many years and are in poor health, to plan their deaths together by taking barbiturates or some other drug that is deadly when taken in sufficient quantity. Recently, through Canada’s assisted-dying law, a Canadian couple, married for almost 73 years, arranged their joint deaths in the same bed, while holding hands.
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