Word: cruzan
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...issue--whether doctors, forsaking the Hippocratic oath, should be allowed to prescribe lethal doses of medication or actively help mortally ill patients end their lives--has been moving toward center stage at least since 1990, when the court, in Cruzan v. Missouri Department of Health, established a patient's right to be taken off life support. In 1991, Quill, a New York physician, wrote in a medical journal about assisting a suicide. Meanwhile, retired Michigan pathologist Jack Kevorkian began a string of assisted or supervised deaths that now stands at 46. Three times Michigan authorities charged Kevorkian with murder...
...Nancy Cruzan, now 32, has done nothing for the past seven years. She has not hugged her mother or gazed out the window or played with her nieces. She has neither laughed nor wept, her parents say, nor spoken a word. Since her car crashed on an icy night, she has lain so still for so long that her hands have curled into claws; nurses wedge napkins under her fingers to prevent the nails from piercing her wrists. "She would hate being like this," says her mother Joyce. "It took a long time to accept she wasn't getting better...
...recovery are daily events in hospitals. They are seen as a matter of established law, backed by such famous precedents as the 1976 Karen Ann Quinlan decision, in which parents were given permission to withdraw a respirator from their vegetative 21-year-old daughter, and the 1990 Nancy Cruzan case, in which the parents of an unconscious 33-year-old were allowed to remove her feeding tube...
Doctors, lawyers and ethicists witnessing the malignity of the Schiavo case believe there is a lesson in it for everyone. "We all have an obligation to tell our loved ones what we would want done," says Fins. Schiavo was only 26 when disaster struck; Cruzan was a year younger. Quinlan was just 21. Says Fins: "You can be sure that one wish Terri Schiavo would have had is that her family wouldn't have fallen into this dispute at a time when she can't speak for herself...
...decision, the first by a federal appeals court on assisted suicide, dramatically extends the right to die. "It advances it not by steps but by leaps," observes law professor Alan Meisel of the University of Pittsburgh. While previous decisions, most notably the Supreme Court's in the 1990 Cruzan case, have held that terminally ill patients can refuse medical treatment, the new ruling declares that they also have a right to seek assistance in dying from doctors--and pharmacists and family members...