Michael Green   Manuel Vargas   phone, office information Additional information on moral philosophy Additional Reading on Abortion Additional Reading on Rationing Euthanasia   Assisted suicide in general   Oregon guide for physician-assisted suicide   Physician-assisted suicide in Oregon   Physician-assisted suicide survey, NYT, April 1998   Physician-assisted suicide survey, WP, April 1998   Timothy Quill Rationing   Criteria for rationing organs   Prisoners' organs for sale		Medical Ethics: Additional Reading on Euthanasia An Embarassment of riches WNET, a PBS station, has produced an extensive web site called Before I Die that looks astonishingly good. It's chock full of small articles by doctors, patients, and families, as well as offering a useful glossary, summaries of the law, and links to organizations and medical ethics centers. How does physician-assisted suicide work in practice? There are two areas with unusually liberal physician-assisted suicide laws: the Netherlands and Oregon. You can read about some of the guidelines they follow in Oregon in order to avoid some of the obvious pitfalls of the practice in this New York Times story. Everywhere else, assisted suicide occurs, but awkwardly. Here's a story with some fairly compelling anecdotes. In reading cases like these, bear in mind that we don't have the anecdotes on the other side: all the people who would be mistakenly or ruthlessly killed if assisted suicide were legal. No public policy will always yield perfect results all the time and it's a mistake to move from a set of anecdotes to a conclusion about what policy should be without first thinking about how things will really be after the policy is in place. Who does it? You're probably familiar with Dr. Kevorkian. A more sympathetic and thoughtful figure is Dr. Timothy Quill. How prevalent are euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide? No one really knows. Our evidence comes from surveys of doctors and they have every reason to understate the truth. Still, here are some recent surveys. Slow Codes There's troubling evidence that doctors often engage in a kind of involuntary passive euthanasia. Read about the slow code (put "slow code" in the search box). You should find: "The Slow Code -- Should Anyone Rush to Its Defense?" New England Journal of Medicine 338 (Feb. 12, 1998). Is this practice humane or is it barbaric? Think about it again after you read Velleman. physician-assisted suicide Just how often is physician-assisted suicide, that is, voluntary active euthanasia, actually used? According to a recent survey, very rarely: see the Washington Post and New York Times reports on the survey for details. The Times had a similar report in March about the use of physician-assisted suicide in Oregon, the state with the most liberal physician-assisted suicide laws. On the other hand, there's pretty strong evidence that demand is low because it's illegal. See this Times story. Court cases The Supreme Court resoundingly denied a right to physician-assisted suicide in two cases decided in the summer of 1997: Vacco v. Quill and Washington v. Glucksberg. One of our readings is a brief filed in these cases by a cluster of very famous philosophers. It's copied in the course reader, but you can also read it on the web. What's more, you can read some of the letters it generated. The Court's 9-0 decision in Washington v. Glucksberg and Vacco v. Quill is widely viewed as a humiliating defeat for the philosophers' position. Here's the ringleader, Ronald Dworkin, trying to explain why the defeat is not as humiliating as it appears. For an alternative interpretation of the Court's decision, see this piece by Yale Kamisar, one of the leading legal and academic opponents of the so-called 'right to die.' This page was originally posted on 5/4/98; 1:30:09 PM and was last built on 5/4/98; 1:30:14 PM with BBEdit and Frontier 5 on a Macintosh running System 8.0.