Word: illing
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...free state prompted by the addition of Missouri as a slave state in the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Although it is unlikely that our current factional strife will plunge us into the bloody maelstrom that put to rest the question of free states versus slave states, it speaks ill of our democracy that we are now seeing our two parties resorting to the peacekeeping shenanigans employed by their Democratic and Whig forebearers...
...crackdown on Final Exit Network, a group based in Marietta, Ga., that is accused of assisted suicide, has revived the right-to-die debate that was fueled in the 1990s by Jack Kevorkian, the Michigan doctor who assisted in the deaths of 130 terminally ill people. But Final Exit claims that its volunteers do not perform assisted suicides à la Kevorkian, who was convicted of second-degree murder and went to prison for giving a lethal injection to a man suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease. Rather, the group argues that it merely provides a "compassionate presence" for terminally ill...
...infamous doctor was soon overshadowed by a national back-and-forth over whether terminally ill people should be allowed to die with dignity or whether they would benefit from having more resources, like home-care aides, at their disposal. The debate is an emotional one, says Paul Wolpe, director of the Atlanta-based Emory Center for Ethics, mainly because Americans are still uneasy with the idea of assisted suicide. Yet Jerry Dincin, Final Exit's vice president, believes the sentiment could be changing and that the right to die could become "the human right of the 21st century...
...could liken it to women's suffrage in 1910," says Dincin, of Highland Park, Ill. "Women had to fight for that and be arrested for that, but now they have that right, and I don't mind fighting for this right in the same way. When a terminally ill person's quality of life is so miserable that they think life is not worth living, I think it is their right to decide whether they want to take their own life...
Medical advances may also play into legal arguments. Wolpe says progress has allowed the terminally ill to live longer, but it has transformed dying from something that occurs relatively quickly and painlessly to something more drawn out and potentially agonizing. "So," he says, "some people have decided that if we are going to intervene in the natural act of dying and allow people to live even though disease is rampant in their body, we can't make someone's decision to die the one exception to our meddling." And if assisted suicide remains illegal, Satz says it could force more...