There has been renewed interest in the moral arguments surrounding euthanasia. Some patients are now apprehensive of advanced medical technology which they fear may result in a prolonged and undignified death. In the current situation of scarce resources for health care, both patients and doctors could be coerced into considering active euthanasia if it was legally available. In this paper it i...

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...

Euthanasia is a term that often sparks heated debate, regardless of whether people are “for” or “against”. It is one of the most-debated ethical issues in recent decades as revealed by the considerable number of scientific publications, media coverage of specific cases, but also proposed bills in many countries. Despite it's popularity and the fact that public opinion polls indicate increasing ...

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...

Abroad, but also in The Netherlands, there are many misunderstandings concerning end of life decisions and euthanasia. In general, euthanasia does not play any role in the intensive care units, simply because it does not fulfill the conditions to carry it out. However, there is still confusion, merely due to the assumption that the Dutch situation is different because of their legislation on eu...

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...

PURPOSE Mice are commonly used in biomedical research, and euthanasia is an important part of mouse husbandry. Approved, humane methods of euthanasia are designed to minimize the potential for pain or discomfort, but may also influence the measurement of experimental variables. METHODS We compared the effects of two approved methods of mouse euthanasia on the levels of retinal dopamine. We ex...