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Many advocates of the right to die want universal health care, noting that physician-aided death is legal in Canada. What might that mean for FEN?
Words matter. Medical aid in dying (MAID or MAiD) is the term now widely accepted in law and medicine to describe the practice of a physician prescribing medication to a terminally ill, mentally competent, adult patient who may choose to ingest it to end suffering they find unbearable, and achieve a peaceful death. It is accurate language which should be used. Other terminology such as physician aid in dying may also be used, but increasingly there is a preference for the term medical aid in dying.
A Washington state man, Aaron McQ, described his illness (a rare form of ALS) as “terrifying . . . like waking up every morning in quicksand.” He agreed to discuss his experience with Kaiser News to help provide more understanding about how users feel after qualifying for PAD. Over 3,000 terminally ill residents in the US have used PAD laws since Oregon’s first took effect twenty years ago. This is one man’s experience.
Disability rights groups that oppose self-determination for people who seek physician-assisted dying (PAD ) argue that such people should not have the right to decide for themselves when their lives are no longer tenable. Nevertheless, the disability rights groups do make points related to PAD that are worth considering; for one, they have helped me realize that over the last ten years I have become disabled.
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.
Developments since 1997 in accepted medical practice regarding voluntarily stopping eating and drinking (VSED) and terminal sedation (TS) warrant fresh claims that state exclusion of lethal assistance to a competent, fatally stricken patient is so arbitrary as to violate equal protection of the laws under state and federal constitutions. While the prevailing jurisprudence for the past 20 years has upheld state bans on lethal poisons as a mode of protecting a vulnerable population (dying patients) against abuse or mistake, there are at least 2 cogent counter arguments in any renewed constitutional debate.
This National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine sponsored a workshop last week that was intended to explore the evidence base and research gaps relating to the implementation of the clinical practice of allowing terminally ill patients to access life-ending medications with the aid of a physician. The workshop examined what is known, and unknown, about how physician-assisted death is practiced and accessed in the United States; it was not to be a focus of the workshop to discuss at length the moral or ethical arguments for or against the practice of physician-assisted death. It was billed as a neutral space to facilitate dialogue in order to help inform ongoing discussions between patients, their providers, and other health care stakeholders. What follows is a report on that workshop.
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