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The Morality of Physician-Assisted Suicide

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 April 2021

Robert F. Weir
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Extract

In March, 1989, 12 physicians published an article on the provision of care to hopelessly ill patients. Unfortunately, many of the substantive points in that article received insufficient attention from readers because the authors call for appropriate, continually adjusted care for terminally ill patients was overshadowed by a portion of the document in which ten of the authors agreed that “it is not immoral for a physician to assist in the rational suicide of a terminally ill person.”

In June, 1970, Jack Kevorkian, a retired pathologist in Michigan, gained international media attention by enabling Janet Adkins, a woman in the early stage of Alzheimer's disease, to terminate her life with the help of his “suicide machine.” The features of the case were so unusual that physicians, ethicists, and attorneys in health law who were interviewed by journalists were unanimous in judging this particular act of physician-assisted suicide deplorable.

Type
Article
Information
Law, Medicine and Healthcare , Volume 20 , Issue 1-2 , Spring Summer 1992 , pp. 116 - 126
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 1992

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