The book strives for as complete and dispassionate a description of the situation as possible and covers in detail: the substantive law applicable to euthanasia, physician-assisted suicide, withholding and withdrawing treatment, use of pain relief in potentially lethal doses, terminal sedation, and termination of life without a request (in particular in the case of newborn babies); the process of legal development that has led to the current state of the law; the system of legal control and its operation in practice; and, the results of empirical research concerning actual medical practice.
Although it comes to us all, most of us would rather not think about death. But in Oregon they have - and for more than 10 years, assisted suicides have been legal there. Katharine Whitehorn visits the US state that believes in death with dignity.
Why should we respect the wishes which individuals may have about how their body is treated after death? Reflecting on how and why the law respects the bodies of the living, we argue that we must also respect the ‘dead’. We contest the relevance of the argument ‘the dead have no interests’, rather we think that the pertinent argument is ‘the living have interests in what happens to their dead bodies’. And, we advance arguments why we should also respect the wishes of the relatives of the deceased regarding what happens to the bodies of their loved ones. In our analysis, we use objections to organ and tissue donation for conscientious reasons (often presented as religious reasons) to show why the living can have interests in their dead bodies, and those of their dead relatives, and why these interests should be respected.
It's the late 1960s, and in the new technology of cryonics, a California TV repairman named Bob sees an opportunity to help people cheat death. But freezing dead people so scientists can reanimate them in the future is a lot harder than it sounds. Harder still was admitting to the family members of people Bob had frozen that he'd screwed up. Badly.
S. Suissa, S. Dell'Aniello, and C. Martinez. Epidemiology (Cambridge, Mass.), 21 (6):
876-83(November 2010)5909<m:linebreak></m:linebreak>GR: Canadian Institutes of Health Research/Canada; JID: 9009644; ppublish;<m:linebreak></m:linebreak>Dissenys híbrids.
