Lamar Hankins discusses how the disabled are devalued and prevented from having the same rights non-disabled people have. What a person considers a fulfilling life should be decided by each person, not by the opinion of any other person, including by someone who is disabled.
Lamar Hankins shares his notes taken from a lecture by Professor Thaddeus Pope, who spoke on the topic “Avoiding Advanced Dementia with a VSED Directive” for the Hemlock Society of San Diego.
Huck DeVenzio, FEN’s Newsletter Editor, explains the role of volunteers within FEN and the need for volunteers.
In this third part of a series analyzing the arguments against medical-assistance-in-dying (MAID) by opponents of physician-assistance in hastening a person’s death in the face of a terminal illness, Lamar Hankins looks at a major reference for most MAID opposition articles – a 2008 Michigan Law Review article, “Physician-Assisted Suicide in Oregon: A Medical Perspective,” by psychiatrist Herbert Hendin and neurologist Kathleen Foley. Both oppose what they term “assisted suicide.”
In Part 1 of this series, I addressed ten criticisms of MAID laws, particularly those in Oregon and Washington, though most such laws are modeled largely on Oregon’s law. In Part 2, I look at criticisms of MAID laws concerning economic pressures, coercion, depression, inadequate resources for MAID clients, doctor shopping, inadequate Medicaid rules, ableism, and the failure of the drugs prescribed to MAID clients. My hope is that we can learn from opponents of MAID laws how to make the laws better.
With this post, I begin a multi-part series about the views of those who oppose medical-assistance-in-dying (MAID) or have written critically about MAID laws. I think there are some good ideas that we can learn from these critics to help us improve MAID laws, though that is not their intent. They will oppose MAID under any law, no matter how carefully written.
Larissa MacFarquhar discusses treatment approaches for people in the late stages of dementia in the October 8, 2018, issue of The New Yorker–The Comforting Fictions of Dementia Care. It is not unusual for late-stage dementia patients to have delusions (the belief in something that is not real) or hallucinations (false sensory perceptions of objects or events). How caregivers might respond to these and related dementia problems is the subject of MacFarquhar’s article.
What resources and services do home funeral guides and end-of-life (EOL) assistants offer or provide?
Those of us in the right to die (RTD) movement want to take charge of our own deaths should we be faced with unwanted suffering, either immediately or in the foreseeable future. Some of us who are supported by our families and friends might also like for those same family members and friends to take care of what happens to our bodies after death–a do-it-yourself (DIY) approach to funerals. Others of us won’t care or we may favor a commercial disposition option.
Since the 1970s there have been debates about whether “patients” have the right to refuse various forms of life-saving or life-sustaining medical treatment, ranging from blood transfusions to ventilators and feeding tubes. More recently the debate has moved into the area of dementia and which, if any, kinds of treatment may be refused under the terms of a directive written in advance of loss of decision-making capacity. The issue of forced feeding is addressed by several articles in the July/August issue (48:4) of the Hastings Center Report, one of the nation’s preeminent bioethics publications.
