Last rights? Confronting physician-assisted suicide in law and society: legal liturgies on physician-assisted suicide.

and the Director of the Center for Law and Aging at Stetson. ** Dr. D. Dixon Sutherland is a Professor of Religious Studies at Stetson University and the Director of the Institute for Christian Ethics. 1. The term of art for this has been dubbed by the popular press as physicianassisted suicide (PAS). However, describing the requested act as a suicide has added confusion to the debate over PAS, given traditional views about suicide held in our society. Suicide has traditionally referred to someone who, because of depression or a mental condition, desires to end their life. If this individual is involuntarily committed to a mental facility and receives counseling and drug therapy, the presumption exists that the individual, after receiving help, will come back to his or her “right” mind and will no longer be a “suicide risk.” With PAS, however, the individual has a condition from which there can be no recovery, and therefore seeks the ultimate exercise of autonomy: the timing, method, and moment of death. The individual chooses control over the moment and method of death, dying in a chosen setting and with more dignity than the “normal” dying process. Recently, PAS issues have stimulated renewed consideration of the concept of suicide as a rational choice. See infra note 5. Even the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has noted the questionable apSTETSON LAW REVIEW