Mortal Responsibilities: Bioethics and Medical-Assisted Dying.

A culture of dying characterized by end-of-life care provided by strangers in institutional settings and diminished personal control of the dying process has been a catalyst for the increasing prevalence of legalized physician-assisted dying in the United States and medically-assisted dying in Canada. The moral logic of the right to die that supports patient refusals of life-extending medical treatments has been expanded by some scholarly arguments to provide ethical legitimation for hastening patient deaths either through physician-prescribed medications or direct physician administration of a lethal medication. The concept of medical-assisted dying increases the role and power of physicians in ending life and allows patients who are not terminally ill, or who have lost decision-making capacity, or who are suffering from a irremediable medical condition to have access to medical procedures to hasten death. This extended moral logic can be countered by ethical objections regarding the integrity of the patient-physician relationship and last resorts in ending life, professional concerns about medicalization and a diminished identity of medicine as a healing profession, and social responsibilities to provide equal access to basic health care and to hospice care.

Imposing Death: Religious Witness on Brain Death.

The bioethical, professional, and policy discourse over brain death criteria has been portrayed by some scholars as illustrative of the minimal influence of religious perspectives in bioethics. Three questions then lie at the core of my inquiry: What interests of secular pluralistic societies and the medical profession are advanced in examining religious understandings of criteria for determining death? Can bioethical and professional engagement with religious interpretations of death present substantive insights for policy discussions on neurological criteria for death? And finally, how extensive should the scope of policy accommodations be for deeply held religiously based dissent from neurological criteria for death? I begin with a short synopsis of a recent case litigated in Ontario, Canada, Ouanounou v. Humber River Hospital, to illuminate this contested moral terrain.

Medical Aid in Dying: Bioethics as Sideshow.

Twenty years ago, the passage of the Oregon Death with Dignity Act prompted vigorous debate in my bioethics classrooms; now, the issue barely generates a ripple. Instead, we focus on an issue my students' generation will confront, as illustrated by an amendment to the ODDA introduced in the last Oregon legislative session that would have effectively rescinded two core procedural safeguards: patient decision-making capacity when requesting life-ending medication and self-administration of the medication. Patient requests for medication could be stipulated on an advance directive that appoints an "expressly identified agent" authorized, in the event of loss of decision-making capacity, "to collect and to administer to the patient the prescribed medication." The amendment heralds a shift from physician-assisted death to medical aid in dying and from prescriptions ingested by patients to life-ending medication administered by a physician or even by the patient's "agent." This prospect generates a bit more angst amongst my students, but their acculturation in the ethics of individual choice prevails. Our discussion about the ethics of medical aid in dying inescapably turns to a deeper issue: is there a professional ethos independent of autonomy?

Dignity, death, and dilemmas: a study of Washington hospices and physician-assisted death.

The legalization of physician-assisted death in states such as Washington and Oregon has presented defining ethical issues for hospice programs because up to 90% of terminally ill patients who use the state-regulated procedure to end their lives are enrolled in hospice care. The authors recently partnered with the Washington State Hospice and Palliative Care Organization to examine the policies developed by individual hospice programs on program and staff participation in the Washington Death with Dignity Act. This article sets a national and local context for the discussion of hospice involvement in physician-assisted death, summarizes the content of hospice policies in Washington State, and presents an analysis of these findings. The study reveals meaningful differences among hospice programs about the integrity and identity of hospice and hospice care, leading to different policies, values, understandings of the medical procedure, and caregiving practices. In particular, the authors found differences 1) in the language used by hospices to refer to the Washington statute that reflect differences among national organizations, 2) the values that hospice programs draw on to support their policies, 3) dilemmas created by requests by patients for hospice staff to be present at a patient's death, and 4) five primary levels of noninvolvement and participation by hospice programs in requests from patients for physician-assisted death. This analysis concludes with a framework of questions for developing a comprehensive hospice policy on involvement in physician-assisted death and to assist national, state, local, and personal reflection.

Hospice-assisted death? A study of Oregon hospices on death with dignity.

Nearly 90% of terminally ill patients who have used Oregon's distinctive death with dignity law to receive a medication to end their lives are enrolled in hospice care programs. In 2009-2010, we conducted a study of the policies developed by Oregon hospices to address patient inquiries and requests for death with dignity. The study examined the stated hospice values and positions and identified the boundaries to participation drawn by the hospice programs to protect personal and programmatic integrity. The boundaries were drawn around 6 key caregiving considerations: (1) language regarding physician-assisted death (PAD); (2) informed decision making by patients; (3) collaboration with physicians; (4) provision of lethal medication; (5) assistance in the patient's act of taking the medication; and (6) staff presence at the time of medication ingestion.

Hospice and physician-assisted death: collaboration, compliance, and complicity.

Although the overwhelming majority of terminally ill patients in Oregon who seek a physician's aid in dying are enrolled in hospice programs, hospices do not take a major role in this practice. An examination of fifty-five Oregon hospices reveals that both legal and moral questions prevent hospices from collaborating fully with physician-assisted death.

What more in the name of god? Theologies and theodicies of faith healing.

The recent deaths of two children from parental decisions to rely on faith healing rather than medical treatment raises fundamental questions about the extent and limits of religious liberty in a liberal democratic society. This essay seeks to identify and critically examine three central issues internal to the ethics of religious communities that engage in faith healing regarding children: (1) the various forms of religious and nonreligious justification for faith healing; (2) the moral, institutional, or metaphysical wrong of medical practice from the perspectives of faith-healing communities; (3) the explanation or "theodicy" articulated by the religious community when faith healing does not occur and a child dies. The essay finds that the holding in Prince v. Massachusetts that parents with religious convictions cannot enforce martyrdom on their children presents a guiding principle for medicine and public policy.

Harvesting the living?: separating "brain death" and organ transplantation.

The chronic shortage of transplantable organs has reached critical proportions. In the wake of this crisis, some bioethicists have argued that there is sufficient public support to expand organ recovery through use of neocortical criteria of death or even pre-mortem organ retrieval. I present a typology of ways in which data gathered from the public can be misread or selectively used by bioethicists in service of an ideological or policy agenda, resulting in bad policy and bad ethics. Such risks should lead us to look at alternatives for increasing organ supplies short of expanding or abandoning the dead donor rule. The chronic problem of organ scarcity should prompt bioethicists to engage in constructive dialogue about the relation of the social sciences and bioethics, to examine the social malleability of the definition of death, and to revisit the question of the priority of organ transplants in the overall package of healthcare benefits provided to most, but not all, citizens.

Religion and the body in medical research.

Religious discussion of human organs and tissues has concentrated largely on donation for therapeutic purposes. The retrieval and use of human tissue samples in diagnostic, research, and education contexts have, by contrast, received very little direct theological attention. Initially undertaken at the behest of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, this essay seeks to explore the theological and religious questions embedded in nontherapeutic use of human tissue. It finds that the "donation paradigm" typically invoked in religious discourse to justify uses of the body for therapeutic reasons is inadequate in the context of nontherapeutic research, while the "resource paradigm" implicit in scientific discourse presumes a reductionist account of the body that runs contrary to important religious values about embodiment. The essay proposes a "contribution paradigm" that provides a religious perspective within which research on human tissue can be both justified and limited.

Life's Dominion: An Argument about Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom, Ronald Dworkin.

As a teacher of biomedical ethics, I have constantly sought a method to motivate my students to engage in meaningful moral debate on the controversial issues of abortion and euthanasia, without risking a shouting match (as happened on one occasion). The moral views are so personalized and polarized that silence often displaces discourse. Ronald Dworkin's masterful Life's Dominion offers an innovative and insightful way through this impasse by identifying moral commitments shared by persons with different conclusions. His argument begins with "conservative" premises and winds up with "liberal" conclusions. It is a philosophical and constitutional analysis of the meaning of life and death that draws on substantive religious values. In so doing, Dworkin suggests an approach that could alter the adversarial and even violent nature of our cultural debate about the ending of life towards a more dialogic and tolerant, but not indifferent, mode....