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A follow-up study of euthanasia, physician-assisted suicide and other end-of-life practices in the Netherlands is performed under the Dutch Euthanasia Act. The Dutch Euthanasia Act is followed by a modest decrease in the rates of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide due to increased application of other-end-of-life care interventions, such as palliative sedation.

This study used retrospective interviews with 87 relatives to describe the experiences of patients who died by euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide (EAS) in the Netherlands. Most of the patients suffered from cancer (85%). The relatives were most often a partner (63%) or a child (28%) of the patient. Before explicitly requesting EAS most patients (79%) had spoken about their wishes concerning medical end-of-life decisions to be made at a later date. Hopeless suffering, loss of dignity, and no prospect of recovery were the most prevalent reasons for explicitly requesting EAS. According to the relative, in 92% of patients EAS had contributed favourably to the quality of the end of life, mainly by preventing or ending suffering.

Belgium's policy of not permitting Catholic hospitals to refuse euthanasia services rests on ethical presuppositions concerning the secular justification of political power which reveal the paradoxical character of European liberalism: In endorsing freedom as a value (rather than as a side constraint), liberalism prioritizes first-order intentions, thus discouraging lasting moral commitments and the authority of moral communities in supporting such commitments. The state itself is thus transformed into a moral community of its own. Alternative policies (such as an explicit moral diversification of public healthcare or the greater tolerance for Christian institutions in the Netherlands) are shown to be incompatible with Europe's liberal concern with securing social and material freedom resources, as well as the concern with equality of opportunity, as embodied in the European Union's anti-discrimination labor law. The essay's argument for the preferability of a libertarian solution closes with the challenge that only if the provision of public healthcare can be shown to be rationally indispensable for a morally justified polity, could the exposed incoherence of modern European liberalism be generously discounted. Keywords: discrimination, libertarianism, moral justification of power, public healthcare

Public opinion polls conducted from 1936 to 2002 found that Americans support both euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. Although public opinion regarding end-of-life decisions appears to have been influenced by the [...]

The present study tests the applicability of the consensus versus the conflict model of criminal law in the case of homicide, and euthanasia, in particular. Although most criminal statutes consider euthanasia to be a serious homicide, many studies have revealed increasing public support for it. A survey of a national sample of Israeli respondents, based on a factorial design methodology, was conducted to determine the extent to which the criminal law reflects general or particular public attitudes toward euthanasia. The findings revealed that although social groups varied in their views on the seriousness of euthanasia, the public at large perceived it as significantly less serious than any other type of homicide. These findings are compatible with calls for reassessment of the criminal law with regard to euthanasia.

In this paper I explore just a few of the issues that are raised by what seem to be some rather serious shifts presently occurring in the modern order of death. My main focus is on the particular disturbances caused by the recently renewed demand for the legalisation of assisted suicide and euthanasia in much of the West; disturbances which I attempt to put into some kind of historical perspective. I argue that aspects of a new order of death are emerging around, and through, these debates: aspects that look back to the distant past as much as they look forward. Keywords: suicide; euthanasia; death; medicine; historical perspectives.

Euthanasia is legal only in the Netherlands and Belgium, but it is on occasion performed by physicians elsewhere. We recruited in France two convenience samples of 221 lay people and of 189 professionals (36 physicians, 92 nurses, 48 nurse's aides, and 13 psychologists) and asked them how acceptable it would be for a patient's physician to perform euthanasia in each of 72 scenarios. The scenarios were all combinations of three levels of the patient's life expectancy (3 days, 10 days, or 1 month), four levels of the patient's request for euthanasia (no request, unable to formulate a request because in a coma, some form of request, repeated formal requests), three of the family's attitude (do not uselessly prolong care, no opinion, try to keep the patient alive to the very end), and two of the patient's willingness to undergo organ donation (willing or not willing). We found that most lay people and health care professionals structure the factors in the patient scenarios in the same way: they assign most importance to the extent of requests for euthanasia by the patient and least importance (the lay people) or none (the health professionals) to the patient's willingness to donate organs. They also integrate the information from the different factors in the same way: the factors of patient request, patient life expectancy, and (for the lay people) organ donation are combined additively, and the family's attitude toward prolonging care interacts with patient request (playing a larger role when the patient can make no request). Thus we demonstrate a common cognitive foundation for future discussions, at the levels of both clinical care and public policy, of the conditions under which physician-performed euthanasia might be acceptable. Keywords: Euthanasia: Patient autonomy: Information integration: The Functional Theory of Cognition; France

This article reports the findings of a cross-sectional study that compared the attitudes of 618 respondents of a general household survey and a random sample of l,197 physicians toward different types of euthanasia in Hong Kong. The general public was found to agree with active euthanasia and non-voluntary euthanasia and was neutral about passive euthanasia. On the other hand, physicians agreed with passive euthanasia, were neutral about non-voluntary euthanasia, and disagreed with active euthanasia. Factors affecting the respondents' attitudes were also explored. The article ends with policy and research implications of the findings.