RT Article
T1 Active and Passive Physician-Assisted Dying and the Terminal Disease Requirement
JF Bioethics
VO 30
IS 9
SP 663
OP 671
A1 Varelius, Jukka
LA English
PB Wiley-Blackwell
YR 2016
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1727674022
AB The view that voluntary active euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide should be made available for terminal patients only is typically warranted by reference to the risks that the procedures are seen to involve. Though they would appear to involve similar risks, the commonly endorsed end-of-life practices referred to as passive euthanasia are available also for non-terminal patients. In this article, I assess whether there is good reason to believe that the risks in question would be bigger in the case of voluntary active euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide than in that of passive euthanasia. I propose that there is not. On that basis, I suggest that limiting access to voluntary active euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide to terminal patients only is not consistent with accepting the existing practices of passive euthanasia.
K1 Non-terminal patient
K1 non-voluntary passive euthanasia
K1 physician-assisted suicide
K1 Terminal Patient
K1 Voluntary Active Euthanasia
K1 voluntary passive euthanasia
DO 10.1111/bioe.12282