PubMed · 14949427
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L VILLA. 1952. [Euthanasia].. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14949427/
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Tremendous debate surrounds the acceptability of physician-assisted suicide in the United States. Progress requires carefully mapping the relationship of this practice to termination of life-sustaining treatment, appropriate pain relief and palliative care, and euthanasia. Arguments that have been offered in favor of permitting physicians to aid suicide include the importance of patient autonomy, the claim that patients need this option to cope with symptoms at the end of life, and the assertion that practices already accepted involve intentionally ending life. Arguments that have been offered against include the potential for abuse, the claim that forbidding intentional killing is essential to the ethics of medicine, and the assertion that patients can be provided good and humane care at the end of life without assisting suicide. Addressing the demand for physician-assisted suicide requires improvement in end-of-life care and continued discussion attentive to emerging empirical data.
As jurists, doctors, and ethicists are increasingly engaged in the debate as to whether and how to legalize euthanasia as a matter of public policy, less debate takes place on what it is submitted ought naturally to come before, i.e. the affirmation of a legal right to palliative care. In Israel, the draft law The Terminally Ill Patient (2001) includes a palliative care provision. It is submitted that such provision, laudable as it is, appears within a euthanasia-oriented framework and is given too limited a scope. Hence the suggestion that palliative care be given an autonomous role, and be recognized as a positive legal right.