Physician - Assisted Suicide

"Physician-Assisted Suicide: What are the Issues?" offers adetailed discussion of recent supreme court rulings that have had animpact on the contemporary debate in the United States and elsewhereover physician-assisted suicide. Two rulings by the U.S. Supreme Courthave altered the contemporary debate on physician-assisted suicide: Washington v. Glucksberg (1997) and Vacco v. Quill (1997). In thesecases, the Supreme Court ruled that state laws could prohibit assistedsuicide and, therefore, physician-assisted suicide. These rulings markthe apex of over two decades of unprecedented litigation regardingend-of-life care and signal the beginning of a new clinical, ethical, and legal debate over the extent of an individual's rights to controlthe timing, manner, and means of his/her death.The debate over suicide and assisting suicide is ancient andcontentious and intertwined with questions about the permissibility ofvoluntary active euthanasia or mercy killing. Responses to theseissues can be divided into those who,defend physician-assisted suicideand many of these other activities and those who object. But those whoobject may do so on principled grounds in that they regard theseactivities as wrong in all cases, or non-principled, in that theybelieve there are more prudent, less disruptive or more efficientpolicies. The authors in this book sort out these responses and lookat the assumptions underlying them. Several of these authors givestartling new interpretations that a culture gap, deeper and widerthan that in the abortion debate, exists.Kopelman, Loretta M. is the author of 'Physician - Assisted Suicide' with ISBN 9781402003653 and ISBN 140200365X.