The Case Against Assisted Suicide: For the Right to End-of-Life Care

Couverture
Kathleen M. Foley, Herbert Hendin
JHU Press, 27 févr. 2002 - 371 pages
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"Few issues are as volatile or misunderstood as physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia. In The Case against Assisted Suicide: For the Right to End-of-Life Care, Drs. Foley and Hendin unravel why such principles as patient autonomy, compassion, and rationality, which are often invoked by supporters of legalization, fail to address the actual situations of terminally ill patients. Incisive discussions by leading authorities in the fields of medicine, law, and bioethics from the United States and abroad provide compelling multidisciplinary perspectives and discussions on what is at stake at the end of life. Several chapters present the risks that legalization of assisted suicide poses to some of society's most vulnerable groups, particularly those who are elderly, are depressed, or have physical disabilities. The authors provide in-depth analyses of the actual practice of assisted suicide in places where it is legally sanctioned. The Case against Assisted Suicide spells out what the medical profession needs to do to improve palliative care. It also thoughtfully and persuasively indicates the changes in social policy necessary to develop a more humane response to the complex issues facing terminally ill patients."--Jacket.
 

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Table des matières

VI
17
VII
41
IX
52
X
69
XI
95
XII
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XIII
122
XIV
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XVIII
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XIX
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XX
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XXI
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XXII
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XXIII
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XXV
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XXVI
333

XV
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XVI
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XVII
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XXVII
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Droits d'auteur

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Page 32 - I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody if asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect.
Page 70 - These matters, involving the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime, choices central to personal dignity and autonomy, are central to the liberty protected by the Fourteenth Amendment.
Page 32 - The healer works with and for those who need to be healed, in order to help make them whole. Despite enormous changes in medical technique and institutional practice, despite enormous changes in nosology and therapeutics, the center of medicine has not changed: it is as true today as it was in the days of Hippocrates that the ill desire to be whole; that wholeness means a certain well-working of the enlivened body and its unimpaired powers to sense, think, feel, desire, move, and maintain itself;...
Page 70 - At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.
Page 70 - If the right of privacy means anything, it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.
Page 86 - Every one of us at some point may be affected by our own or a family member's terminal illness. There is no reason to think the democratic process will not strike the proper balance between the interests of terminally ill, mentally competent individuals who would seek to end their suffering and the State's interests in protecting those who might seek to end life mistakenly or under pressure.
Page 22 - ... from weakening the absolute prohibition against taking innocent life. These considerations are, in my view, alone sufficient to rebut any attempt to weaken the taboo against medical killing; their relative importance for determining public policy far exceeds their relative importance in this essay. But here they serve also to point us to more profound reasons why doctors must not kill. There is no question that fortune deals many people a very bad hand, not least at the end of life. All of us,...
Page 22 - ... self-concern - including the demands for truthfulness, patient instruction, and encouragement. And, arguably, we can infer the importance of certain negative duties, formulable as absolute and unexceptionable rules. Among these, I submit, is this rule: Doctors must not kill. The rest of this article attempts to defend this rule and to show its relation to the medical ethic, itself understood as growing out of the inner meaning of the medical vocation. I confine my discussion solely to the question...
Page 22 - More importantly, 1 am not arguing against the cessation of medical treatment when such treatment merely prolongs painful or degraded dying, nor do I oppose the use of certain measures to relieve suffering that have, as an unavoidable consequence, an increased risk of death. Doctors may and must allow to die, even if they must not intentionally kill. Bad consequences Although the bulk of my argument will turn on my understanding of the special meaning of professing the art of healing, I begin with...

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À propos de l'auteur (2002)

Kathleen Foley, M.D., is professor of neurology at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University and director of the Project on Death in America of the Open Society Institute and Soros Foundation.Herbert Hendin, M.D., is professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at New York Medical College and medical director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

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