Word: euthanasias
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...Ward 402, Glasser's cause is not really euthanasia as such but a fashionable skepticism about progress in general. By focusing on chronic diseases, the book mixes up the anguished, specific personal dilemma of the hopelessly ill and their families with a general social crisis in American medicine. There are hard decisions to be made (TIME, July 16) about when a patient really ceases to live though he is technically still alive, as well as about staggering costs, medical needs and, indeed, the requirements of pure humanity. Such subjects, though, demand either a straightforward, rigorous, get-the-whole-story...
...taking a step toward legalization of euthanasia, we are also progressing toward active genocide. Once life or death is put in the hands of the individual, "misfits" also face elimination by a "humane" society...
...footnote to the Essay on euthanasia? It is easier for Dr. W.F. Anderson of Glasgow than it is for American physicians to take the position that modern drugs can keep a patient sufficiently pain-free to make mercy killing obsolete. Dr. Anderson practices in Britain where it is legal for a doctor to give heroin to a patient (usually a terminal-cancer victim) after morphine has ceased to be effective. In the U.S. it is unlawful for a physician to employ this most potent of all painkilling drugs even for a patient in extremis, for whom there...
...wish not to be kept alive by unnecessary or heroic means. Most agree that just as in the area of abortion, it is clear that it is no longer a matter of continuing without guidelines for doctors to base their decisions on. The ethical and legal considerations surrounding euthanasia are far too serious, and too little exploration of them has taken place to allow them to be placed solely in the not-always-so-knowing hands of individual doctors...
Despite popular support, the issues and questions surrounding euthanasia have become far more acute and complicated for physicians, as a result of the tremendous gains in medical science's ability to significantly prolong the lives of many "terminal" patients...