Word: euthanasia
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Euthanasia is far more prevalent than assisted suicide (the Dutch make little moral or legal distinction between the two). Most patients were ill from cancer, and the large majority had less than a month to live. While more patients sought euthanasia or help with suicide in 1995 than before, doctors remained hesitant, turning down two-thirds of the requests...
...director of a major independent study published late last year on assisted suicide (in which the doctor gives a patient the means to end life) and euthanasia (in which the doctor terminates life at the patient's request). It concluded that there were about 3,600 cases in 1995 in Holland (pop. 15.5 million), a jump from the 2,700 cases estimated in 1990. Another 900 deaths fell into the troublesome category of "termination of life without the request of the patient...
...euthanasia movement was launched by a celebrated 1973 case of a doctor who helped her mother die and was then acquitted of criminal charges. That year the Dutch Voluntary Euthanasia Society, NVVE, was founded, and today its 88,000 members carry "euthanasia passports" and lobby for more liberalization. The Dutch Royal Society of Medicine endorsed guidelines in 1984, and today's de facto decriminalization represents a compromise between euthanasia foes and advocates of full legalization. Periodic controversies roil the debate. In 1994, for instance, the Dutch TV station IKON's filming of the death by euthanasia of a man with...
Both supporters and critics of assisted suicide and euthanasia point to Holland to bolster their arguments. "It's terrible medicine," says psychiatrist Herbert Hendin, executive director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention in New York City, whose recent book, Seduced by Death, brands Dutch policy a failure. The Dutch establishment, however, was reassured by the latest study. To address the biggest problem it found--more than half the doctors didn't report euthanasia cases to the public prosecutor as required--the government proposes that instead, doctors would report to a panel of legal, medical and ethical experts to make...
...Dutch claim their system has built-in safeguards. For one, most people still rely on a family doctor,which reduces the risk of routinized euthanasia by an impersonal system. For another, Holland's welfare state is alive and well. Nursing care for the chronically ill is good, and everyone's medical expenses are covered, so finances are not a factor...