Word: cruzans
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...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...
Others disagree violently. George Annas, chairman of the Boston University School of Public Health's law department, points out that in the 1990 Cruzan case, the Supreme Court kept a comatose Nancy Cruzan on life support, though her parents protested that she would have opposed it. Annas recommends similar skepticism here: "Even people who are fervently pro-life," he says, "[sometimes] make exceptions for rape and incest." Since the pregnancy was "not her project," says Annas, making the woman give birth--which carries medical risks--constitutes an "abuse." Other experts worry about how such bizarre origins might affect a child...
When the Supreme Court ruled in 1990 that Nancy Cruzan's parents could remove the feeding tube that was keeping their comatose daughter alive, the Justices affirmed the growing belief that there was no virtue in heroically prolonging life against a patient's wishes. Since then, doctors have invented guidelines, ethicists have organized seminars, and Congress has passed the Patient Self-Determination Act, requiring hospitals to tell people about their right to control their treatment through living wills and powers of attorney. And yet every day in hospitals across the country, patients and their families are learning that...
Disposition of the Cruzan case seems to have opened a Pandora's box of right-to-die and right-to-life cases, all putting painful ethical dilemmas before the courts. Three days after Cruzan's death, the state-run Missouri Rehabilitation Center blocked the attempt of St. Louis marketing consultant Pete Busalacchi to move his daughter Christine from Missouri, which severely restricts the disconnecting of feeding tubes from patients judged beyond recovery, to Minnesota, where rules are less strict. In June the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed Missouri's right to require "clear and convincing evidence" of a patient's desire...
ETHICS: Life and death after Nancy Cruzan...