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A Middle Ground on Physician-Assisted Suicide

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2009

James A. Tulsky ,
Ann Alpers  and
Bernard Lo
James A. Tulsky
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Medicine and Co-Director of the Program in Medical Ethics at Duck University Medical Center.
Ann Alpers
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor of Medicine and member of the Program in Medical Ethics, University of California, San Francisco.
Bernard Lo
Affiliation:
Professor of Medicine, Director of the program in Medical Ethics and the Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program, University of California, San Francisco.
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Extract

“[A] murder prosecution is a poor way to design an ethical and moral code for doctors,” observed the California Court of Appeal in 1983. Yet, physicians who have chosen to help terminally ill patients to commit suicide have trespassed on illegal ground. When skilled medical care fails to relieve the pain of terminally ill patients, some people believe that physicians may assist in these suicides. Others reject any kind of physician involvement. The debate on assisted suiczide and active euthanasia has focused on whether these acts can ever be acceptable. We propose to shift the debate to a less divisive issue: whether a caring physician who provides a suffering and ill patient with a prescription for a lethal dose of medication should be prosecuted as a felon. Even assisted suicide's opponents may object to such criminal prosecution. We propose to modify existing criminal laws to give physicians who assist their terminally ill patients in suicide, under carefully defined circumstances, a legal defense against criminal charges.

Type
Special Section: Physician-Aided Death: The Escalating Debate
Information
Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , Winter 1996 , pp. 33 - 43
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

Notes

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