BACKGROUND The Netherlands was the first country in the world to implement a Euthanasia Act in 2002. It is unknown whether legalizing euthanasia under strict conditions influences the number and nature of euthanasia requests. AIM To investigate changes in the number of, and reasons for, requests for euthanasia in Dutch general practice after implementation of the Euthanasia Act. DESIGN OF S...

BACKGROUND We wanted to examine how the acceptance of euthanasia among the general public in Western Europe has changed in the last decades, and we wanted to look for possible explanations. METHODS We analysed data from the European Values Surveys, held in 1981, 1990, and 1999-2000 in 12 West European countries. In each country, representative samples of the general public were interviewed us...

Issues pertaining to euthanasia, assisted suicide, and cessation of life support continue to be a subject of worldwide interest. Euthanasia- particularly "active" euthanasia- is not considered legally or socially acceptable in most countries. In Japan, the first judgment of a case involving euthanasia took place in 1949. Since then there have been another five cases that reached the point of se...

This study explores expressed wishes and requests for euthanasia (i.e. administration of lethal drugs at the explicit request of the patient), and incidence of end-of-life decisions with possible life-shortening effects (ELDs) in advanced lung cancer patients in Flanders, Belgium. We performed a prospective, longitudinal, observational study of a consecutive sample of advanced lung cancer patie...

BACKGROUND The question whether euthanasia should be legalised has led to substantial public debate in France. The objective of this study in a sample of French physicians was to establish the potential determinants of a favourable opinion about euthanasia in general and when faced with a specific situation as embodied in the Humbert affair. METHODS The study was a cross-sectional survey inve...

CONTEXT Euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide (PAS) are highly controversial issues. While there are studies of seriously ill patients' interest in euthanasia and PAS, there are no data on the attitudes and desires of terminally ill patients regarding these issues. OBJECTIVE To determine the attitudes of terminally ill patients toward euthanasia and PAS, whether they seriously were consid...

This work has the objective of discussing human self-determination among handicapped people with unaffected cognitive functions. The background for the article is the history of 22 year-old Vincent Humbert, who became tetraplegic, blind and speech-impaired after a car accident. The young man intense suffering lasted for several months and resulted in an insistent request for euthanasia to his m...

Background and Objectives: Euthanasia is one of the major challenges in philosophical, medical, ethical, legal, and religious circles that has fueled many debates. The aim of this study was to investigate prediction of students' attitudes toward euthanasia using their religious orientation, self-esteem, and death anxiety. Methods: The samples of this descriptive-correlational study were 247 st...

Through theories of agenda setting and innovation, the origin, development, and enactment of right-to-die policy in four Western nations—the United States, the Netherlands, Germany, and Great Britain—are examined. Different social and government structures produced varied right-to-die politics in each of these countries, although similar issues received more emphasis in Europe. However, it is d...

This review is about the discussion that followed my presentation at the UNESCO Bioethics Forum, Manipal. To contextualise, I begin with a brief account of the legal status of euthanasia in India, and then summarize the main argument of my presentation if the moral objective of euthanasia is to end a patient's suffering by ending his or her life in the best possible way, then the form of euthan...