In the nine states/jurisdictions in which medical assistance in dying (MAID) is allowed through legislation or referendum, the insistence on extensive safeguards has served less to protect vulnerable individuals than to limit access to MAID.
Most dementia directives call for voluntarily stopping eating and drinking (VSED) at a prescribed point late in the progression of dementia. In most cases, this requires eliminating hand feeding based on the proposition that hand feeding is a medical treatment or medical care.
A 30-year old Florida Supreme Court decision may provide support for the use of a dementia directive that provides for voluntarily stopping eating and drinking (VSED).
This post, Part 3 of a series on dementias directives, discusses the supplemental advance directive for dementia offered by Final Exit Network (FEN) for those people who do NOT want to live into the later stages of dementia. The FEN dementia directive was drafted by FEN’s legal counsel, Robert Rivas.
Part 1 of this multi-part analysis identifies eight Dementia Directives by authorship and discusses overall characteristics of each. This second part analyses the approaches to drafting such directives to help readers think about the elements of each.
This post begins a multi-part series about dementia directives, analyzing their provisions and their purposes.
Jay Niver, newsletter editor for Final Exit Network, shares the film made about his dad’s hastened death to end his suffering from terminal prostate cancer.
Ezekiel J. Emanuel, distinguished oncologist and bioethicist, a vice provost at the University of Pennsylvania, chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy, an author and editor in the health care field, wants to die at age 75. Why would he make such a decision in what many would see as the prime of his life?
Accepting your own mortality during the time of Covid-19.
On April 24, Netflix released the six-episode second season of “After Life,” starring, directed, and written by comedian Ricky Gervais. It continues to take viewers through the grief that Gervais’s character Tony Johnson experiences after the death of his wife, Lisa, from breast cancer.
