background: in the majority of countries, active direct euthanasia is a forbidden way of the deprivation of the patients’ life, while its passive form is commonly accepted. this distinction between active and passive euthanasia has no justification, viewed through the prism of morality and ethics. therefore, we focused on attention on the moral and ethical implications of the aforementioned med...

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"When a country legalizes active euthanasia, it puts itself on a slippery slope from where it may well go further downward." If true, this is a forceful argument in the battle of those who try to prevent euthanasia from becoming legal. The force of any slippery slope argument, however, is by definition limited by its reference to future developments which cannot empirically be sustained. Experi...

Opponents of physician-assisted suicide (PAS) maintain that physician withdrawal-of-life-sustaining-treatment cannot be morally equated to voluntary active euthanasia. PAS opponents generally distinguish these two kinds of act by positing a possible moral distinction between killing and allowing-to-die, ceteris paribus. While that distinction continues to be widely accepted in the public discou...

BACKGROUND In most European countries the attitudes regarding the acceptability of active euthanasia have clearly changed in the population since World War II. Therefore, it is interesting to know which trends in attitudes prevail among the physicians of the future. METHODS The present study analyses trends in the attitudes towards active euthanasia in medical students at the Medical Universi...

Euthanasia is not a new concept. However, there is a growing trend to legalize voluntary active euthanasia. The purpose of this study was to explore oncology nurses' attitudes toward voluntary active euthanasia. The population consisted of 200 registered nurses who were members of the Oncology Nurses' Society and who resided in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Missouri. I developed a questionnaire ...

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...

OBJECTIVE To learn more about the attitudes of German general practitioners (GPs) concerning euthanasia and the frequency of its performance in Germany. METHODS 500 GPs from all parts of Germany were randomly selected from telephone listings, and were sent a postal questionnaire with anonymous return envelopes. Participants were asked to make decisions based on hypothetical scenarios involvin...