Word: die
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...active help with a suicide, most patients will have to look elsewhere, well outside the realm of patient care. The spread of AIDS, for instance, has prompted some right-to-die activists to offer support and counseling about pills and occasionally lethal injections to people with the virus. Pierre Ludington, 44, executive director of the American Association of Physicians for Human Rights, has tested HIV-positive: he is stockpiling pills to use when he is ready to go. "I get angry that society wants me to suffer in a hospital," he says. "All I'm doing is feeding its coffers...
...historic taboo about mercy killing gradually erodes, the courts and legislatures are struggling to be sure that the vulnerable are protected -- that, in the case of the severely disabled, the right to die not become a duty to die. They fear, for example, that medical care for newborn babies may come to depend on some cost-benefit analysis of their chance of living a "full healthy and active life." In the Baby Doe case in 1982, the Indiana courts allowed a couple to refuse surgery for their baby born with Down's syndrome and an incomplete esophagus; after six days...
...even within the community of faith there is a vast gray area. Though suffering and death underlie Judeo-Christian theology, basic compassion seems to dictate that a patient in terrible pain should be allowed to die. This is a proposition that the Roman Catholic Church appears to endorse. While both suicide and mercy killing are still strictly forbidden, the Vatican in 1980 declared that refusing treatment "is not equivalent to suicide; on the contrary, it should be considered as an acceptance of the human condition . . . or a desire not to impose excessive expenses on the family or community...
...until now the legal debate on the right to die has been wildly confused. If a car crashes on the George Washington Bridge and the driver is left comatose, his fate in court may depend on whether the ambulance takes him to New Jersey or New York. In New Jersey his family would probably be able to tell a hospital committee to stop life support. New York State's law is stricter, and without a living will the family would have to prove in court that the driver had left "clear and convincing evidence" that he would not want...
...careful about withdrawing life support: medicine is an uncertain science. When Cole's wife Jackie suffered a massive brain hemorrhage four years ago, the blood vessels in her brain ruptured, and she fell into a coma. "The vast majority of patients who have this kind of stroke die within a few hours," Dr. Tad Pula, the head of Maryland General Hospital's division of neurology, told Cole. But Jackie did not die right away; after several crises she stabilized into a vegetative state, which doctors said could last indefinitely. After talking with his children, Cole went to court to remove...