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Rights Talk And Patient Subjectivity: The Role Of Autonomy, Equality And Participation Norms, Nan D. Hunter
Rights Talk And Patient Subjectivity: The Role Of Autonomy, Equality And Participation Norms, Nan D. Hunter
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Patients themselves have transformed the role of the patient in the health care system, making it far more complex than it ever has been before. As a result, the conceptual root of our contemporary understandings of “patient” is an assumption of autonomous subjectivity, i.e., of an individual aware of and capable of acting on her choices for medical care. The Symposium on Patient-Centered Health Law and Ethics of which this Article is a part considers the most recent stage in this evolution of meanings: the concept of patient-centeredness, with its implication of provider deference to the patient’s perspective. Throughout the …
Caretakers And Collaborators, Maxwell Gregg Bloche
Caretakers And Collaborators, Maxwell Gregg Bloche
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
A chilling subplot in the twentieth-century saga of state-sponsored mass murder, torture, and other atrocities was the widespread incidence of medical complicity. Nazi doctors’ human “experiments” and assistance in genocidal killing are the most oft-cited exemplar, but wartime Japanese physicians’ human vivisection and other grotesque practices rivaled the Nazi medical horrors. Measured by these standards, Soviet psychiatrists’ role in repressing dissent, Latin American and Turkish military doctors’ complicity in torture, and even the South African medical profession’s systematic involvement in apartheid may seem, to some, almost prosaic. Yet these and other reported cases of medical complicity in human rights abuse …
The Constitutional Right To Die: Ethical Considerations, Lawrence O. Gostin
The Constitutional Right To Die: Ethical Considerations, Lawrence O. Gostin
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
In this commentary, the author first looks at some ethical reasoning supporting physician-assisted dying. Second, he examines some of the lines that have been drawn between withdrawing and withholding life-sustaining treatment on the one hand, and physician-assisted dying on the other. Finally, he relates both of these matters to constitutional reasoning, beginning with Cruzan and ending with the cases before the Supreme Court at the time of the article's publication.
Drawing A Line Between Killing And Letting Die: The Law, And Law Reform, On Medically Assisted Dying, Lawrence O. Gostin
Drawing A Line Between Killing And Letting Die: The Law, And Law Reform, On Medically Assisted Dying, Lawrence O. Gostin
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Traditional medical ethics and law draw a sharp distinction between allowing a patient to die and helping her die. Withholding or withdrawing life sustaining treatment, such as by abating technological nutrition, hydration or respiration, will cause death as surely as a lethal injection. The former, however, is a constitutional right for a competent or once-competent patient, while the latter poses a risk of serious criminal or civil liability for the physician, even if the patient requests it.