Her well-publicized death by lethal ingestion in Oregon in 2014 influenced her home state of California to legalize AID in 2015. She was a newlywed facing terminal illness, and her story quickly captured the public imagination. In 2014, a young Californian named Brittany Maynard was diagnosed with an astrocytoma and became a spokesperson for the legalization of AID. Montana decriminalized the practice a year later. More than a decade later, Washington legalized AID in 2008. Oregon became the first to pass its death with dignity law that same year. Glucksberg (1997) that a right to aid in dying was not protected by the Due Process Clause. Quill (1997) that there is no constitutionally-protected right to die. The Supreme Court ruled in response in Vacco v. They argued, in effect, that the right to refuse treatment was effectively the same as the right to end one’s life. Several of Kevorkian’s physician contemporaries filed suit against New York’s Attorney General, arguing that the State of New York’s prohibition against physician-assisted suicide violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Although Kevorkian reignited national debate about dying, his off-putting approach and personal idiosyncrasies prevented his becoming a national leader on the issue. In 1999, after Kevorkian publicly distributed a video of himself directly euthanizing a patient, he was convicted of second-degree murder and sent to prison. He went on to assist with some 130 deaths by suicide over the next eight years. His first patient ended her life in 1990 while lying on a bed inside Kevorkian’s Volkswagen van. He had studied the technique of Dutch physicians in the Netherlands, and created his own device with which patients could self-administer lethal medications. In the 1980s, the pathologist Jacob “Jack” Kevorkian began advertising in Detroit area newspapers as a death counselor. When efforts to legalize euthanasia failed, public discourse on the subject waned for many decades. According to Jacob Appel’s work on this period, the eugenics movement strongly influenced discourse on euthanasia, and opponents of legalization tended to put forth practical rather than religious or moral arguments. In the early 1900s, advocates argued forcefully for legalizing euthanasia, which was already being secretly practiced in the US. ”Ī Brief History of Legalization in the United States It is decriminalized in the Netherlands.Īt risk of compounding terminology further, Canada legalized in June 2016 “medical assistance in dying” (MAiD), which includes both “voluntary euthanasia” and “medically-assisted suicide. Euthanasia is illegal in the United States, but voluntary euthanasia is legal in Belgium, Colombia, Luxembourg, and Canada. It may be voluntary (the patient requests it) or involuntary. Euthanasia, also called mercy killing, refers to the administration of a lethal medication to an incurably suffering patient. In the United States, physician-assisted suicide or aid in dying has always been carefully distinguished from euthanasia. People on both sides of the issue worry whether “aid in dying” or “assisted dying” might be confused with palliative, hospice, or other care of dying patients. Some insist that dissociating “physician-assisted suicide” from other types of suicide demeans those who die by suicide for other reasons, as if only medically-assisted suicides are legitimate. By contrast, opponents maintain that the process of prematurely and deliberately ending one’s life is always suicide, regardless of motivation. Some advocates of AID prefer not to use the term “suicide ” they contend that AID is a medical practice, distinct from the act of suicide for a depressed or hopeless person. Supplanting the word “physician” with “medical,” for example, makes it possible for non-physician clinicians to prescribe the lethal medications. For simplicity’s sake, we use aid in dying (AID), although we recognize that there will be some who object, no matter the label.Ī variety of factors have led to these various neologisms. Perhaps the best recognized is “physician-assisted suicide.” Alternative terms include but are not limited to: death with dignity, doctor-prescribed death, right to die, and physician-assisted death. Physician aid in dying goes by many names.
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