Issues in Law & Medicine articles from December 1994

Issues in Law & Medicine archives from December 1994

Family decisionmaking and forgoing treatment: a judicial perspective.
December 22, 1994... A judicial system that devises concepts for resolving disputes about forgoing treatment at the end of life is very much a part of the society that it serves. One cannot understand the choices courts and judges make without considering the...

Informed consent: from the ambivalence of Arato to the thunder of Thor. (California)
December 22, 1994... The law of informed consent touches on some of the most fundamental rights and interests of modern society. Ideas of self-preservation, self-determination, and self-fulfillment are jeopardized when consent to a medical procedure is either...

Competency to refuse lifesaving treatment: valuing the nonlogical aspects of a person's decisions.
December 22, 1994... When he was thirty-one years old, Kenneth Bergstedt filed his petition requesting confirmation of his "right to die."(2) Kenneth had been afflicted with quadriplegia as a result of a swimming accident twenty-one years earlier, and for his...

Christian Science healing of minor children: spiritual exemption statutes, First Amendment Rights, and fair notice.
December 22, 1994... In August 1993, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts overturned the manslaughter convictions of David and Ginger Twitchell in the death of their two-year-old son, Robyn.(1) This became the latest in a series of prosecutions and appealed...

When life becomes optional: a comment on Kevin O'Rourke's approach to forgoing life support. (Linacre Quarterly, vol. 58, p. 12, May 1991)
December 22, 1994... This article is my attempt to more clearly understand the euthanasia debate. As a blind person, I have long worried that "quality of life" could be used as a vehicle for invidious discrimination. As a lawyer, I have found much legal commentary...

When Death Is Sought: Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia in the Medical Context.
December 22, 1994... This report is the result of an examination of assisted suicide and euthanasia by the New York State Task Force on Life and the Law. Issued in May 1994, the task force's report unanimously recommended that New York laws prohibiting assisted...

Breaking the Thread of Life: On Rational Suicide.
December 22, 1994... This book marshals philosophical, moral, medical, historical, and theological arguments in support of the Roman Catholic position against suicide. In a comprehensive study of the history of suicide, the author shows that Christian civilization...

The Health Care Ethics Consultant.
December 22, 1994... In this volume a panel of fifteen health care ethicists and scholars in medicine, philosophy, theology, and law hammer out a standard of care governing the now decisively emergent practice of ethics consultation in the health care community....

AIDS: Crisis in Professional Ethics.
December 22, 1994... This collection of original essays carefully examines the difficult moral choices the AIDS pandemic has presented for many professionals--physicians, nurses, dentists, teachers and school administrators, business managers, psychotherapists,...