OBJECTIVE To determine the characteristics of patients who request euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide and whether these characteristics differ among those whose request is granted, those who die before the procedure, those who die before completion of the approval process, those who withdraw their request, and lastly, those whose request is refused by the physician. DESIGN Questionnaire...

BACKGROUND Legalization of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide has been heavily debated in many countries. To help inform this debate, we describe the practices of euthanasia and assisted suicide, and the use of life-ending drugs without an explicit request from the patient, in Flanders, Belgium, where euthanasia is legal. METHODS We mailed a questionnaire regarding the use of life-endi...

OBJECTIVES We investigated the epidemiology of suicide among adults aged 50 years and older in nursing homes and assisted living facilities and whether anticipating transitioning into long-term care (LTC) is a risk factor for suicide. METHODS Data come from the Virginia Violent Death Reporting System (2003-2011). We matched locations of suicides (n = 3453) against publicly available resource ...

Although assisted dying has been most commonly presented within a medicalised framework, the notion of de-medicalisation is employed in this paper to suggest that there are emerging models of assisted dying in which some medical aspects assumed to be an integral part of the phenomenon are both challenged and diminished. The paper considers cases where relatives have facilitated a loved one's as...

In May of 1994, federal district Judge Barbara Rothstein ruled in Compassion in Dying v. Washington' that certain terminally-ill adults have a constitutional right to commit physician-assisted suicide. Six months later, Oregon voters narrowly approved a ballot initiative allowing certain terminally-ill adults to obtain physicians' prescriptions for lethal drugs.2 These parallel legal actions mo...

In Part I, the author explains that it is the adjudication between the conflicting claims of individual liberty, personal autonomy and self-determination versus the preservation of life as a societal value that is at the core of the issue posed by physician-assisted suicide. In Part II, author makes the case against suicide, noting that liberty is not absolute and the state retains powers of so...